Home > Almon Strowger

He was born in Penfield, near Rochester, New York. Little information is available about his early life. He is understood to be an American 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, Virginia.

After the Civil War, it appears he first became a country school teacher before he became an undertaker. He is variously attributed as living in El Dorado, Kansas or Topeka, Kansas, and finally Kansas City, MissouriKansas City is a city in Clay, Cass, Jackson, and Platte counties in Missouri. Often abbreviated KCMO, Kansas City is the center of the Kansas City metropolitan area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. As of the 2000 census, the city had a. 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 10March 10 is the 69th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (70th in Leap years). There are 296 days remaining. Events 241 BC First Punic War: Battle of the Aegates Islands The Romans sinks the Carthaginian fleet; end of First Punic War. 1496 Christoph, 1891Events January 1 ? Paying of old age pensions begins in Germany January 20 James Hogg becomes the first native Texan to be governor of that state. January 29 Liliuokalani proclaimed Queen of Hawaii March 9 ? 12 ? Powerful storm off England?s south coast;.

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 arose 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 subscriberSubscriber In a public switched telecommunications network such as the common telephone system, the ultimate user, i. customer, of a communications service. Subscribers use end instruments, such as telephones, modems, facsimile machines, computers, and res should choose who was called, rather than the operator, he first conceived his invention in 18881888 is a leap year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). In Germany, 1888 is known as the 1888 Year of Three Emperors. Events January 3 91cm telescope first used at Lick Observatory January 12 ? Blizzards in Dakota and Montana, Minnesota, Nebr, and patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891Events January 1 ? Paying of old age pensions begins in Germany January 20 James Hogg becomes the first native Texan to be governor of that state. January 29 Liliuokalani proclaimed Queen of Hawaii March 9 ? 12 ? Powerful storm off England?s south coast;. 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 pulsesIn signal processing, the term pulse has the following meanings: #A rapid, transient change in the amplitude of a signal from a baseline value to a higher or lower value, followed by a rapid return to the baseline value. A rapid change in some characteris corresponding to the digits 0-9 (this evolved into the rotary dialThe rotary dial is a device mounted on or in a telephone or switchboard that is designed to send interrupted electrical pulses, known as pulse dialing, corresponding to the number dialed. It was invented in 1888 by Almon Strowger. The dial is circular, ab telephone)
2. A 2 motion stepping 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 its step-by-step (hence the alternative name) selection process and an almost unlimited potential for expansion that gives the Strowger system its 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, Florida, 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 to 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, at St. Petersburg, Pinellas County, Florida and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery the next day.