The Statesman, visually similar to the Ambassador, was among the first range of BT phones to be available for outright sale in 1982. The Statesman was designed to be a basic inexpensive telephone and was thus known at the design stage as the IXT. It was developed by GEC, Plessey and TMC. It featured push button loop pulsing and the novel feature of this phone was that both the dialling circuit and the transmission circuit were on a single microchip. There was no need for the traditional 3 way inductor. These phones started the trend for the handset to be positioned down the phone body rather than across it, a feature that meant that a special wall-mounting version did not need to be produced.