Almon B. Strowger is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame as the creator of telephone switch and dialing systems in 1889 that revolutionized the telephone industry.
His automatic telephone switching system, patented in 1891, including a rotary dial. It became standard equipment in telephone systems worldwide…until replaced by the advent of touch-tone calling in the late 1970s.
Strowger, who was born in
Penfield, N.Y., in 1839, was a teacher before volunteering to join the Union
army during the Civil War. After the war, he moved west and was a country
school teacher in Kansas. He later became an undertaker in Kansas City, Mo.
The communications officer at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham, Wash., offers a colorful account:
“Imagine you’re an undertaker working in Kansas City in the late 19th century. You’re one of just two undertakers serving a city of more than 50,000 people, so business must be booming, right? Not if your competitor is stealing all of your clients.”
The museum spokesperson said that in 1888 or thereabouts, “the wife of the other undertaker in town worked at the local telephone exchange, and whenever a caller would ask for Strowger’s services, she’d put the call through to her husband, instead. This left Strowger’s business in grave straits.”
“His complaints to the
telephone company management proved unfruitful, so Strowger took matters into
his own hands – by cobbling together hat pins and electromagnets to invent the
first automated telephone exchange.”
Essentially, Strowger’s switch eliminated the need for a caller to go through the switchboard operator to place a local telephone call. He boasted that his system made using the telephone “cuss-less, out-of-order-less and wait-less.”
He immediately began to regain market share in the funeral business.
Strowger also invented
the 11-digit Strowger Potbelly Dial Candlestick, the first dial telephone. It
had numerals 1 through 0, and an 11th space for “long distance” calling.
He and his nephew, Walter Strowger, formed the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company in 1891 and moved operations to Chicago.
Their first system was installed in La Porte, Ind., in 1892, with 75 subscribers.
At the time, Strowger anticipated a negative reaction from female operators whose jobs were likely to be eliminated eventually, due to his invention.
“In reply, I would say that all things will adjust themselves to the new order. Water will find its level,” Strowger said. “As the telephone replaced the messenger boy, the new switch will displace the telephone operator over time.”
Writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (Va.), David Price said the new telephone technology spread first through rural areas, not the urban hubs. Alexander Graham Bell’s companies maintained its operator-driven network.
The “new telephony frontier,” as it was, belonged to small, independent companies that were dedicated to serving small markets and grew like wildfire.
Yet, by 1910, only about 300,000 U.S. telephone subscribers had automated calling service. Another 10.7 million subscribers did not; they were still connecting through their “number please” local operators.
The Bell officials said “manual switching” was so much easier. The customer just needed to “pick up the phone and tell the operator” to place the call, rather than do the work himself or herself.
“In some ways, it’s an upside-down story of technology adoption,” Price noted.
As a result, phone operator jobs actually increased in the United States each decade into the 1950s.
You’re old if you
remember “party lines”…and even older if your family had one.
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