The Futuristic Phone In This Twilight Zone Episode Was Real, But Never Took Off

Whenever The Twilight Zone needed a science fiction visual, it usually opted for a classic flying saucer or that leftover automaton from Forbidden Planet: Robby the Robot.

MGM Studios (where a bulk of the series was filmed) had a wide range of existing props and footage, culled from 1950s sci-fi projects, ready to be repurposed by Rod Serling's classic anthology, whose episodes were always made on relatively tight budgets and schedules. Using what was already available helped the production save both time and money.

While most gadgets featured in The Twilight Zone's varied visions of the future and high-tech societies were often fanciful, one in particular was not. That would be the odd-looking telephone used by Will Sturka (Fritz Weaver) in season one's "Third from the Sun," which contained a number of off-kilter flourishes in service of setting up the twist ending.

The Twilight Zone's futuristic phone was decades ahead of its time

The model was called an Ericofo, a sleek Space Age design with a rotary dial contained in its base. Invented by Swedish company Ericsson in the late 1940s, the phone hit the general market in the mid-1950s with 18 different colors to choose from. According to the National Communication Museum in Australia, the device—sometimes called the “Cobra”—became an early ancestor of the mobile technology we use today by being "the first commercial telephone to combine a receiver, dial and microphone into a single unit."

Engineer Gösta Thames, who led development on the project, wanted a phone that was "easy to hold," he remarked in a 2000 interview for the Ericsson website. "It should be light and feel comfortable in the hand. You had to be able to feel how to hold it even in the dark."

Ericofos were mainly used on the institutional level (think hospitals and offices), but never really caught on as a staple in private American homes because of Bell Telephone. The company,which enjoyed a monopoly at the time, did not want third-party technology using their network. Anyone looking to have one in their home needed to go through independent companies like Ohio-based North Electric. Bell eventually allowed the model to be used in a limited capacity, but apparently started development on a competing product that became the more well-known Trimline design.

According to  Martin Grams Jr.'s The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic, the device was chosen for The Twilight Zone "because it could pass for a telephone on both Earth and an alien planet."

Cast member Denise Alexander, who played Jody Sturka, recalled how "Third from the Sun" director Richard L. Bare drew her attention to the phone before shooting began. "He said, 'I have to talk to you about what we're doing here,'" she revealed in Steven Jay Rubin's The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia. "I felt marvelous because I was being taken into the privilege of the production side."

"So he said, 'If you look around, you're going to see that everything looks a little unusual,'" Alexander continued. "And I remember him pointing specifically to the telephone—that telephone that stood upright, which is in a couple of shots—it had not even been on the market yet, as he explained it to me. They had been given a prototype to use because it didn't look like any telephone that had been produced. It had a very modern, futuristic look to it. And he said, 'We're going to do a lot of things that are just a little different.'"

Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!