Top 25 "It" products of all time: #17 -- The Princess Phone

If you were a baby boomer - or the parents of one - then you remember the old-time telephones. You remember the 1930's classic -form follows function - desk phone, clunky, black and squat. You remember when colors arrived and the appearance of the wall phone. If you were a girl, what you remember best and with the most emotion was the princess phone. You really had to have one.

The princess had a great advertising slogan, "It's little...It's lovely...It lights." Introduced by AT&T in 1959, the little phone was the first phone designed with a focus on marketing. It was an immediate commercial success. Originally a rotary phone (for those of you born later, until 1963 phones were operated by a dial instead of a keypad), the sweet, aptly-named princess was designed to fit on your night table. Although ads advised that "Any room is the room for your princess phone," with its light-up-dial that also served as a night light, the princess was first and foremost a boudoir phone.