Telephone Switching and Mr Strowger
Created | Updated Apr 14, 2002
Now heres an interesting thing when Mr Alexander Bell invented the telephone the only person he could call was his lab assistant, of course soon a handful of people had the new shiny telephones and therfore a system of connecting these handful of people to each other had to be found hence the telephone operator was born. Unfortunately people being people the operators would listen in to calls, interject and when it came to business connections would act in a partisan manner putting potential customers through to the business who had given them the biggest bribe or incentive. This is where our hero comes in a certain Mr Strowger who was by profession an undertaker, he was losing business to his main rival who had the local operator in his pocket so to speak, our Mr Strowger reasoned that he would have to invent an alternative means of routing calls without any manual intervention and so using hat pins inserted into a bit of silk (Probable spread over the nearest coffin) he created a method of switching that became known as Strowger Step by Step Switching and when this was later refined by the use of electromechanical switches became the standard for a great number of years for telephone exchanges worldwide. Of course technology has now passed this wonderful system by and these days telephone exchanges are mainly computer driven with few if any electromechanical switches but if it was'nt for the genius of an undertaker the telephone may have remained a novelty item.....
