What is this thing?

guts of a doorbell?

Does the doorbell work now?

An old set of doorbell chimes

Looks like a doorbell to me. lol

That has all the markings of an old phone company device, but I don't know what it does. Could be an external ringer, or buzzer.

It just looks phone company. Is there a cover with a screw in the middle?

I'm with Robert. It just oozes Western Electric vibes.

Back in the 50's or early 60's, lots of electrical devices had that look. If it's a piece of telephone equipment, which I doubt, it is one of the remote annuciators used in factories or outdoors so you could hear that the phone was ringing in the office.

That's not something that would normally be used in a home. I really think this is simply a doorbell chime.

BTW - it has three terminals so that it can deliver two different sounds. One sound means someone is at the front door, and the other means back door.

It's a solid-state phase rectification modulator. Back in the old days, they put one in every house. It regulated the electrical current so that the space-time continuum would stay constant. Then they found out it was supposed to be warped, so they quit using them.

-T.E. Stosterone

They look like capacitors. If the house dates back to the 50's or older they may have been part of an external telephone bell. They may have been installed as a radio canceling device to filter out radio broadcasts on telephone line.

It could also be a crackpot customer device. These were various pieces of telephone equipment installed to do absolutely nothing but satisfy a chronic complainer. It would be a special/secret device that nobody was supposed to have. Believe it or not those devices actually worked. :)

LdB

It's a phase modulator for a warp drive conduit on a starship, I think.

I'd cast my vote for it being a phone line surge arrestor.

Jeff

What has stopped working since it was removed?

After being discarded from this former use, an avid green recycling nut found an alternative use for domestic door bells!

And they were everafter known as the "Bose-Einstein Ding-Dongs".

-T.E.S.

I wish I could find the Trademark character at this time of the night/ early morning here. Didn't Dolby revise the tone?

Dolby made it sound good. Doplar had a huge effect too.

-T.E.S,

ECHo, echo.....

I'm getting a bit strung up by this; I guess there's a theory there somewhere or have I been watching too many butterflies in a Brazilian rain forest!

Bradbury had insight as well.