Antique fire alarm system? Look at this strange one and tell me how it worked?

Well, i am not a home inspector, but a fire alarm guy. I was doing a search for antique fire alarm systems and found this. Notifier has been around for along time, in fact the company name use to be notefire. Although i have never seen this exactly, i have seen similar types of things. It is possible that the buttons would set off an alrm, but most likely silence an alarm. This type of device is called an annuciator and is used to locate a fire to a particular area in a building. The main control is usually located in a mechanical or electrical room, and usually took up alot of room. These little panels were much more attractive to look at than a huge box on the wall. These are used in commercial applications, so why it is in a house is odd. Might have been that the person that built was a dealer, or this was an attempt to get into the home market.

The buttons have me puzzled though. i have never seen one with buttons. Of coarse  someone could of modified it to work for their own purposes. At any rate, hope i have given you a little insight to it's purpose. Thanks for the pic.

what u have there is known as an annunciator panel, It is designed to tell you which floor the fire is on. My guess is that it was mounted somewhere in the front foyer of the house so that the fire dept. would know where the fire is. There must be another alarm control somewhere in the house which is wired to this annunciator. and possibly some old heat detectors located on the two floors and in the attic.

Thank you for this post and the replies. There was one of these in our home in Bensalem, PA when we moved in, in 1973.

My folks had it removed ~1976 or so and I now only have vague memories of it. I've always been at a loss when trying to describe it. Lately in particular it's been driving me crazy because I was trying to describe it to a couple of friends, one in the fire suppression industry and another a firefighter.

The panel of ours was located on the first floor bedroom of our cape cod home. There well bells in each of the upstairs bedrooms and one in the basement & possibly attic? I don't recall heat sensors but that doesn't mean there weren't any since I was just a child at the time.

You could activate the bells individually by pressing the corresponding button & this would also light the corresponding light. The bells sounded like old school phones and were very loud. I assume the buttons also served as a test feature but my mom just used it as a way to wake us up or get our attention when we were little.

Thanks again for posting the picture.
Jeff