Almon Strowger

Born in Penfield, New York near Rochester, New York.

Little information is available about his early life. He is understood to be a Civil War veteran as his grave is marked with the traditional white headstone with an inscription that reads:

• Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav.

It is believed that he fought in the second Battle of Bull Run[?] near Manassas[?], Va.

After the Civil War, it appears he first became a country school teacher before he became an undertaker. He is variously attributied to living in El Dorado[?], Kansas or Topeka, Kansas, and finally Kansas City, Missouri. It is not clear where his idea of an automatic telephone exchange was originally conceived, but his patent application identifies him as being a resident of Kansas City, Missouri on March 10, 1891

He is commonly identified as a Kansas City Undertaker, (or occasionally as either a Funeral Parlor[?] Director or a Mortician[?]), who invented the automatic telephone exchange and has been described as the father of the automatic telephone exchange. Strowger himself would more likely have characterised his invention as the "girl-less, cuss-less" telephone system.

He was apparently motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with the local telephone operators. He was convinced that the local manual telephone exchange operators were sending calls to his competitor rather than his business. He also suspected that the telephone operators were influencing the choice of undertaker when his business was requested. The origin of this suspicion reportedly arise from an incident in Topeka when a friend died and the family contacted a rival undertaker. Other stories claim that the wife or, possibly, the cousin of a rival was a telephone operator and Strowger suspected that the operators were telling callers that his line was busy or connecting his callers to the competition. The full story is now clouded by the passage of time, though historians report that those who knew him have described him as "eccentric, irascible and even mad".

Convinced that subscribers[?] should choose who was called, rather than the operator, he first concieved his invention in 1888, and patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891. It is reported that he initially constructed a model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.

So what was so revolutionary about his invention that so many others had failed to devise previously? The patent consists of:

1. A device for use by customer - this creates trains of on-off current pulses corresponding to the digits 0-9 (this evolved into the rotary dial telephone)
2. A 2 motion switch at telephone exchange. Rotating arm steps over, in a semi-circular fashion, 10 possible contact points. The stepping motion was controlled by the current pulses coming from the originating customer's dialing device.
3. Cascading enabled connection among more than 10 customers. Switching devices can also be positioned in the vertical direction as well as horizontal direction, also increasing the switching capacity.

• The addition of a line finder selector to reduce the number of switches needed, and circuits to detect busy connections were made in later designs. But these were minor enhancements to the fundamental concept.

It is the fundamental modularity of the system combined with it's step by step (hence the alternative name) selection process and an almost unlimited expandability potential that gives the Strowger system it's technical advantage.

• Previous systems had all been designed for a fixed number of subscribers to be switched directly to each other in a mesh arrangement. This became orders of magnitude more complex as each new customer was added, as each new customer needed a switch to connect to every other customer.

While he may have come up with the idea, he was not alone in his endeavours and sought the assistance of his nephew William and others with a knowledge of electricity and money to realise his concepts. With this help the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company was formed and it installed and opened the first commercial exchange in (his then home town of) La Porte, Indiana on November 3, 1892, with about 75 subscribers and capacity for 99.

The company's engineers continued development of Strowger's designs and submitted several patents in the names of its employees. It also underwent several name changes. Strowger himself seems to have not taken part in this further development. He subsequently moved to St. Petersburg, Pinellas County, Florida and appears to have returned to being an undertaker, as H.P. Bussey Funeral Home records report an unidentified body being moved "for Mr. Strowger" in December 1899. The same funeral home subsequently buried Strowger himself. Strowger was a man of some wealth at his death and was reported as owning at least a city block of property.

He was survived by his widow Susan A. Strowger - 1846 - 1921. After her death in Tampa on April 14, 1921 her obituary appeared in the St Petersburg Times, claiming she had additional "revolutionary" Strowger designs, but she had refused to make them public while she was alive because only others would profit from her husband's designs. She had claimed that her husband had only received $10,000 for his invention, when he should have received a million.

Strowger sold his patents in 1896 for $1,800 and sold his share in the Automatic Electric Company for $10,000 in 1898. His patents subsequently sold for $2,5 Million in 1916.

A bronze plaque, to commemorate his invention, was placed on his grave in 1945 by telephone company officials. Strowger was admitted the hall of fame of the U.S. Independent Telephone Association in 1965. Apart from his invention, his name has also been given to a locomotive and a company business award.

He died, aged 62, of an aneurism[?] after suffering from anemia, St. Petersburg, Pinellas County[?], Florida and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery[?] the next day.

Quote Strowger was quoted as saying: "No longer will my competitor steal all my business just because his wife is a BELL operator" (c) 1890:

• See also: Telephone exchange, Dial, Rotary dial, Things named after Strowger

References

1. R.B.Hill, "Early Work on Dial Telephone Systems" January, 1953 Bell Laboratories Record. (Volume XXXI No. 1, January, 1953. P. 22 et. seq.)
2. R.B.Hill, "The Early Years of the Strowger System" March, 1953 Bell Laboratories Record. (Volume XXXI No. 3, March, 1953. P. 95 et. seq.)

• See also: Bell Labs, Bell Laboratories Website (http://www.bell-labs.com/)

External links

• Reproduction with permission of the article Early Work on Dial Telephone Systems by R.B.Hill (http://www.privateline.com/Switching/EarlyWork)
• Reproduction with permission of the article The Early Years of the Strowger System by R.B.Hill (http://www.privateline.com/Switching/EarlyYears)
• Strowger's Automatic Telephone Exchange Patent Application (http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=cache:qmP3gMN8aXcC:www.sc-server1.bt.com/bttj/yesterday/bottom/1891.pdf+Almon+Strowger&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) (HTML archive of a PDF File)
• Newfound fame good news for cemetery - published September 11, 2002 St. Petersburg Times FL (http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/11/SouthPinellas/Newfound_fame_good_ne.shtml)
• Local Hustory Room, Town of Penfield, New York (http://www.penfield.org/community/th/lhr.php)
• Pinellas Genealogy Society - H.P. Bussey Funeral Home Records - with 2 entries for STROWGER, one identified as A.B. Strowger (http://www.rootsweb.com/~flpgs/PGS-BusseyFHR-p2#20)
• Master Cemetery Index - Page 746 (http://www.rootsweb.com/~fljackso/mindexes/cemeteries/index746.htm)
• Grave of A.B. Strowger and News paper report about Susan A. Strowger's death. (http://www.roserpark.net/greenwood/strowger)
• International Telecommunications Union - Historical Figures (http://www.itu.int/aboutitu/HistoricalFigures)
• What is a Strowger? (http://www.strowger.com/history)
• Auto-Electric Company and 1891 Strowger Telephone (http://www.chicagohs.org/AOTM/mar99/mar99fact1)
• No Operator, Please (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/trailing0100.asp)
• "Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you.": Bell and the Invention of the Telephone (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS39C.S97/telephone/telephone)
• BRT Locomotives - Almon B. Strowger (http://www.samhallas.co.uk/railway/brt_locos.htm)
• Strowger Award (http://www.agcs.com/aboutv2/pressrel/corp/strowger2000.htm)
• Google Search - Almon Strowger (http://www.google.com/search?q=Almon+Strowger&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search)
• Quote (http://www.mlug.net/mlug-list/1997-98/msg00112)