8/18/2023 0 Comments Telephone exchange![]() ![]() Horizontal stone banding on the main floor, wraparound cornices, belt courses, and stone sills add further detail. The features of the buildings include red brick construction stone-capped, raised and segmented gabled parapets symmetrical fenestration of six-over-one windows on both storeys and muti-panel semi-circular attic windows with keystones and articulated brick headers. Identical in their design, the exchange buildings housed telephone equipment, facilities for switch and line construction crews, and the local pay station office. By 1919, Edmonton’s exchanges were working to capacity with one telephone for every five citizens. Each exchange was built with the Strowager three-wire telephone system and contained enough equipment to serve 2000 subscribers. Over 1,000 new subscribers signed on to the City of Edmonton telephone system in the following years and, with the addition of the purchased Strathcona telephone lines, the Pine Street (North Edmonton) Exchange and West Edmonton Exchange were built in 1912 to meet the needs of the growing city. Strowger’s brilliant rotary telephone is just one of hundreds of intriguing inventions you’ll find on display at SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham.Edmonton pioneered the installation of the first automatic telephones in North America in 1908. And if you want to learn more about this phone, check out John Jenkins’ book “Where Discovery Sparks Imagination.” You can find it on SPARK’s website or in the gift shop near the main lobby of the Museum. You can find one of Strowger’s early 11-digit dial phones, a potbelly candlestick model from circa 1905, in the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham. When Strowger’s new system made its debut, he bragged that his exchanges were “girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, and wait-less.” Bingo: no more cheating from the competition. Each number pulsed a certain number of times, instructing the stepping exchange mechanism to walk over to the right contact. To facilitate this process, Strowger also invented the rotary dial, allowing customers to easily select a phone number by spinning the dial a certain distance. For example, phone number 36 would drop the mechanism to row three, and then the contact arm would swing to column six. Contact was made at that point, and the connection could be completed. Pulses from the first number would move the mechanism to a certain row, and the second pulse would swing a dial along that row to the proper column. The basic design of the system - 10 rows each containing 10 different contacts - meant that it could serve up to 99 customers automatically.Įssentially, the mechanism of the exchange would move based on pulses from two-part phone signals. Strowger patented his stepping exchange system in 1891 and installed it in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892. His complaints to the telephone company proved unfruitful, so Strowger took matters into his own hands - by cobbling together hat pins and electromagnets into the first automated telephone exchange. ![]() This left Strowger’s business in grave straits. 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. Legend has it that Almon Brown Strowger found himself in this exact position in the 1870s and 1880s. Not if your competitor is stealing all of your clients. You’re one of just two undertakers serving a city of more than 50,000 people, so business must be booming, right? ![]() Imagine you’re an undertaker working in Kansas City in the late 19th century. Truly, necessity is the mother of invention. ![]()
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