As a former employee of The Bell System for 30 years, and I confess, a "fone foamer" from years before that, and even up to today, I would like to weigh in on this discussion. I was originally drawn to telephones because of their cool designs (we're talking the ones from the 1940's and '50s) that were designed by the same industrial designers who were re-designing practically everything that consumers touched during those decades. My (ahem) parallel interest in electricity brought me first to things I could wire myself with little fingers, (choo-choos) and then on to working on telephone equipment, all the time admiring the technique along with the aesthetics.
One can see the Loewy- and Dreyfuss-like industrial designs, usually made of Bakelite, in the Lionel train transformers, especially the 1033, KW and ZW, the controllers (the uncoupling track buttons, for example) the O27 switch controllers, the early O gauge switch-track motor covers, and even the simple things like the type 364 switch pushbuttons. There is lots of design cross-over in a continuum that includes Lionel items, through household appliances, the various Western Electric telephones like the 500, the 2500, the Princess and the Trimline, up to and including the GG1 locomotive and the streamlined NYC Hudsons.
It may not have been at the top of Mr. Cowen's list of priorities to create toys for boys that featured grown-up aesthetics, but I'll bet that there was some guy near the top who understood industrial design concepts, and how to integrate them into practical devices, and who had some influence on the final designs.
This is an interesting topic that is a refreshing relief from the usual what-type-of-track/how-to-phase/what-to-use-for-ballast threads, and I thank us all for having this discussion.
I would also like to start a more technical discussion which will probably bore some to death, concerning the weirdness of the electrical arrangements, voltages, and the choice of terminal designations of the various transformers that Lionel issued over all the decades. But that's for another evening.
