Almon Brown Strowger was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, and he had a bit of a local pedigree: grandson of the town’s second settler and first miller.
He also had a penchant for invention. As a boy, whenever his mother assigned chores, young Almon and his brothers would spend their time devising machines to do the work for them.
(This is what is known as “foreshadowing.”)
Years went by: the 1840s, the 1850s. He taught school for a while. Then came the war.
In October 1861, Strowger enlisted in Company A of the 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry as a trumpeter, riding with the Union cavalry through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns: Bull Run. Fredericksburg. Chancellorsville. Gettysburg.
He rose through the ranks to Sergeant, then Second Lieutenant. But by September 1864, his war was over.
Strowger was wounded in action at the Third Battle of Winchester in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While Union forces routed the Confederates that day, Strowger was discharged.
He came home to a country hurtling into the future. The war had industrialized America. Railroads crisscrossed the continent, then telegraph lines followed, and then came Bell’s telephone.
As for Strowger, he was left behind for a bit. He taught school again, but then drifted west through Kansas before settling in Missouri, where he became an undertaker—the second-oldest profession, I guess.
This is where Strowger’s life experience and the technological revolution converged.
Patent No. 447,918
Bell’s telephone had arrived in Kansas City, but it was rudimentary, and every call had to go through a human operator who manually connected the lines.
You picked up the receiver, told the operator who you wanted to reach, and she plugged you in.
And if the operator happened to be, for example, the wife of a competing funeral home in your town—and if every time someone called needing an undertaker, even if they mentioned you by name, she routed them to her husband—well, that was a problem.
Strowger might have been in the dying business, but now his business was dying and he did not appreciate the irony. Armed with a theory about the rerouted calls, he did the legwork, tracing obituaries to figure out if the families of the various deceased should have been his customers.
He was not pleased with what he found. But, Strowger didn’t just complain; he decided the problem wasn’t the operator—the problem was that there was an operator at all. Why should a telephone company employee decide who got connected to whom? Subscribers should choose for themselves.
And so, back to his childhood penchant, he started tinkering, trying to build an automatic telephone operator.
His first model was built from a collar box and straight pins. He added magnets, then electromagnets. He worked out a system of rotary stepping switches that could automatically route calls based on electrical pulses.
Finally, Eureka! On March 10, 1891, 135 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued him Patent No. 447,918 for an “Automatic Telephone Exchange.”
(Although Strowger preferred to call it the “girl-less, cuss-less” telephone system.)
Lieut. A.B. Strowger
Patent in hand, Strowger brought in his nephew William and others who understood electricity and had money. They formed a company and went looking for customers, finding one with the local phone system in La Porte, Indiana.
In November 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange opened with 75 subscribers. It worked, and Strowger kept refining the technology.
Unfortunately — and double-unfortunately, because I really do try to emphasize optimism in these features — Strowger only had a little more than a decade to enjoy his success.
His health started to fail in the mid 1890s, and he sold his patents and his share of the company for a modest sum—enough to retire comfortably—and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida with his second wife, Susan.
He died in 1902 at age 63, and his grave is marked with a simple white military headstone: “Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav.”
Like so many others, however, Strowger cashed out just a bit too soon; his patents eventually sold to Bell Systems for $2.5 million, and his stepping switch became the backbone of telephone systems worldwide, remaining in use well into the 1970s.
He was largely forgotten, although in 2003, the Verizon Foundation—the charitable arm of the ultimate corporate successor to Bell, which really ought to celebrate him a bit—made an award to restore the cemetery where he’s buried along with two nearby Civil War memorials.
Funeral directors should probably remember him. Oh, and Ray Parker Jr., who wrote and performed the theme song to the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters.
Why? “Who you gonna call?”
If it weren’t for Almon Brown Strowger, generations of people might not have been able to decide for themselves.
7 optimistic moments from history this week
March 8: “We appear before you this morning to ask ... [to] prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.” — Susan B. Anthony, addressing the House Judiciary Committee on this day in 1884.
March 9: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.” — Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, who debuted the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York on this day in 1959.
March 10: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” — Ulysses S. Grant. On this day in 1864, President Lincoln signed Grant’s commission as Lieutenant General, making him commander of all Union armies.
March 11: “Lithuania is free! Latvia will be free! Estonia will be free!” — Members of Lithuania’s Supreme Council, chanting in the chamber at 10:44 p.m. on this day in 1990 after voting 124-0 (with 6 abstentions) to declare independence from the Soviet Union.
March 12: “I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.” — Mahatma Gandhi, near the end of the Salt March, which began on this day in 1930. Gandhi and 78 followers walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea, where on April 6 he picked up salt from the beach, breaking British law. More than 60,000 Indians were jailed in the ensuing civil disobedience campaign.
March 13: “Before the bishop blesses his people, I ask you to pray to the Lord that he will bless me: the prayer of the people asking the blessing for their Bishop.” — Pope Francis, from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on this day in 2013, moments after his election.
March 14: “She was just incurable. It was like somebody today with COVID-19 who is going down the tubes.” — Historian Eric Lax, describing 33-year-old Anne Miller’s condition before she became the first American treated with penicillin on this day in 1942 at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Doctors gave her a tablespoon of the experimental drug—half the entire U.S. supply. Her fever broke within hours.
Great story today Bill. I have a question though. If this invention of his was supposed to be automatic, how come operators and switchboards were in use for so long? Or did I miss something here?
I miss human operators. Our local operator was also the postmaster and a huge gossip. She knew everything that was going on in town.
I also remember party lines. If you were really careful, you could listen I. On your neighbour’s conversations. Oh, I miss land lines.