A.B. Strowger - a neglected figure
A pioneer of telephone history, whose name is illustrious to every telecommunication expert,
Almon B. Strowger nevertheless seems to be somewhat negelected by historians of telecommunications.As far as the author is aware, no book exist describing Strowger's life and work.
There is no portrait of Strowger in the famous collection of great telecommunication personalities which the ITU published faithfully until 1968. This is a most regrettable omission. Is it due to lack initiative on the part of his compatriots or to some hesitation because Strowger's name is still being used for the marketing of automatic equipments? The answer matters little. At least the presence of these few lines and Strowger's portrait will do something to fill gap in this series of engraved portraits.
Almon Brown Strowger
(pronounced STRO-jer) was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, a close suburb of Rochester. Like Bell, Strowger was not a professional inventor, but a man with a keen interest in things mechanical. He went to an excellent New York State university, served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 (ending as a lieutenant), taught school in Kansas and Ohio afterwards, and wound up first in Topeka and then Kansas City, MO as an undertaker in 1886.This unlikely profession of an inventor so inspired seems odd indeed, but the stories surrounding his motivation to invent the automatic switch are odder still.
The manner in which he conceived the idea of a telephone without operators, i.e. automatic device, has become a classical story history of inventions.One day he heard that one of his friends had died, and was very put out by the family's failure to turn him to make the funeral arrangements. He conceived a strong animosity to telephone operators suspecting them of having diverted the calls of the bereaved family to one of his competitors, and decided on a drastic remedy, to do away with tell operators altogether. According to the legend, after much thought and investigation at the local manual exchange, A.B. Strowger devised a model of his famous switching equipment, assembling it in his home out of makeshift materials, namely: two pencils, same pins, and, above all, stiff collars, the genuine stiff collars of the time, high, hard and starched, such as all respectable men in those days used to wear.
The collars were stacked one on top of the other. The pins were inserted at regular intervals on the semicylinder of each collar. A first pencil was used as the vertical axis of rotation. A second, at right angles to the first, swept the circular row of pins at the level which it had reached. Thus the
STROWGER switching equipment was born.This story of how the model was made seems too good to be entirely true and is no doubt merely an apocryphal legend. The first patent applied for by Strowger did in fact include the principle of the two-motion selector which made his name, but it was only one of the features which he claimed as innovations.
The first patent dated from 1889 and A.B Strowger then had great difficulty in making a model of his mechanism and in marketing his invention. He knocked unsuccessfully on dozens of doors (including that of Western Electric). With the help of an enterprising nephew, W.S. Strowger, he finally decided to launch his own company in Chicago in 1891. But he then had no less difficulty in getting an order for an exchange.
These difficulties, however, were overcome by Strowger's tenacity and energy.
Apart from these qualities and his innovator ideas, yet another of the merits of Strowger was his excellent choice of collaborators. Among these, there are many whose names deserve to be remembered in the history of switching: in particular, A.E. Keith, the brothers J. and C.J. Erickson and Frank A. Lundquist.
In 1896, A.B. Strowger ceased to take an active part in his company's business. He retired to Florida and died there in May 1902.
His collaborators carried on with his work and en sured the success of the system which bears his name.
Sources:
A.B.Strowger's memorabilia (from eBay):
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Strowger's telephones:
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Strowger exchange's sounds:
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)