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Somebody has a phonograph for sale not too far from my area made by the well-known Pooley Furniture Co. of Philadelphia bearing the Pooley brand. I am guessing these would have been made in the 20s after Victor's patents expired with off the shelf mechanical parts installed in a Pooley made cabinet?????

Clay

FloridaClay wrote:Somebody has a phonograph for sale not too far from my area made by the well-known Pooley Furniture Co. of Philadelphia bearing the Pooley brand. I am guessing these would have been made in the 20s after Victor's patents expired with off the shelf mechanical parts installed in a Pooley made cabinet?????

Clay

better ask this in the Yankee trader section.

In addition to building cabinets for Victor, Pooley was also known throughout the 1920s for building radio cabinets. In those days, radio chassis were often sold separate from cabinets. When a customer purchased a radio, he or she had dozens of choices of cabinets to install the radio chassis in.

I've owned two Pooley phonos over the years and they aren't bad machines. Both of the ones I had contained a Saal motor. One was in a cabinet that was virtually identical to a VV-XI cabinet except there was a grille over the horn instead of doors. I'm not sure exactly when they started building phonos, but the two I had dated to around 1920. Without seeing a pic, it's tough to say, but the one you are speaking of probably dates from about 1918 through about 1923.

Pooley was also one of the cabinet suppliers for Sears Silvertone machines.

estott wrote:Pooley was also one of the cabinet suppliers for Sears Silvertone machines.

Not to mention supplying pre-1915 cabinets for Edison and Keen-O-Phone. Plus their own well-made record cabinets.

George P.

Pooley made machines at all price points save the very lowest and the very highest. They were early producers of consoles, which were generally very well built, nicely designed and offered excellent eye value. I had a Chinese Chippendale console covered with the usual Pooley fret-work which was really a thing of beauty. Pooley was, as has been noted, a pioneer manufacturer of console radio cabinets for a number of firms. Their big hit, was of course the cabinets that they built which made the Atwater Kent breadboard sets acceptable to the housewife. These early cabinets, introduced in late 1923 were very well designed and beautifully built.



The low end of their 1923 phonograph line was attractively priced, and offered a 55% discount to their dealers:

Pooley also offered their own radio chassis in their price-leader radio-phonograph combination for the 1924 season:

but for 1925 they offered a combinations fitted from the factory with Atwater Kent chassis:

Now we see where Victor got their idea for that odd-ball VV 7-11.

Thanks all for the great information!

Clay

Atwater-Kent was also, like Pooley, a Philadelphia firm, so the pairing was at least a geographical fit for both.