The telephone on display dates back to the end of the 19th century, the time when Ericsson began to mass-produce telephones. Lars Magnus Ericsson was the founder of a large telephone company.

He was born into a big family of farmers that lived not far from the Swedish village of Vegerbol. Lars did not go to school; when the boy was twelve, his father died and Lars had to seek a job to support his family.

At the age of 15, he moved to Norway, where he worked as a blacksmith. Six years later, he returned to Sweden where he worked in electromechanical workshops (repairing telegraph equipment) and in the evening he self-studied mathematics, foreign languages, and technical drawing. In 1867, Ericsson joined the first Swedish electrical engineering company. Several years later, he again left home and stayed in Berlin, where he worked at Siemens & Halske; then he went to Bern to work at Hasler & Escher. In 1875, the same year that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Lars Magnus Ericsson together with his friend and companion Karl Andersson, set up their own workshop LM Ericsson & Co.

Ericsson sold his first two duplex telephones in 1878 for 55 kronor. They turned out to be cheaper and better, so Ericsson beat his main competitor, Alexander Bell and before long the first foreign orders began to come from the UK, Denmark and even Australia.

Soon Ericsson phones appeared in Russia. In 1897, the company opened its first plant in St. Petersburg. Later the plant was renamed as Krasnaya Zarya. In 1900, an agreement was signed to establish the Swedish-Danish-Russian Telephone Joint-Stock Company, with Ericson at the head of the company.

If the telephone broke down, the user had to pay both for the device and its repairs as telephones were government property.