Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: desnoyer@apple.com (Peter Desnoyers) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: In Defense of GTE and their Apparatus Message-ID: Date: 12 Sep 89 17:12:25 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Organization: Apple Computer, Inc. Lines: 48 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 369, message 2 of 6 In article our humble moderator writes: > [Moderator's Note: Well Larry, your history is right on the mark. Many > people are amazed to find out that Automatic Electric -- and not Bell > -- 'invented' the dial phone system. And an old story has it that the > inventor did so because he was paranoid about the operators diverting > profitable business calls from him to one of his competitors. Any > truth to that? PT] I have heard (and read) this story in enough places that I believe it to be true: Charles Strowger, back in 1891 (I think) was an undertaker somewhere in the depths of small-town America, in a town with two undertakers. His competitor's wife was an operator, and by virtue of her job was able to provide her husband information on practically every death in town (or at least anyone wealthy enough to have a phone). It is also alleged that she would route all calls to an undertaker to her husband. In his determination to eliminate the job of telephone operator, and thus remedy this injustice, Mr. Strowger went out and invented the Strowger switch, otherwise known as the step-by-step. Each switch has ten tiers, each tier a semi-circle of ten contacts. One solenoid hits the contact arm (or whatever the proper term is) once for each dial pulse in the first digit, and it ratchets up. The second solenoid handles the next digit, and turns the contact arm over to the proper contact. And now you know the origin of pulse dialing. As a side note, I must say that the MIT dormline system is one of my most favorable memories of MIT. The service was sh*tty, and the lines were rotting, but it was worth it to be able to go down to the basement of Walker or Ashdown and watch the calls come in at 11 pm. You could track the wave of calls coming in from the trunks on one side of the room, through the various (meticulously soldered) racks, and out to the dorms. It was a mechanical system that was beautiful in its simplicity - for instance, the power supply in Walker used two relays that would trip on high or low voltage, turning the knob on a variac to compensate. With a few part-time students to burnish contacts and replace them when they wore out, and modern insulation on the underground wiring to the dorms, it could have lasted well into the next century. Not bad, when you consider that (I think) it was built a bit before WWII and installed soon after the war, and was in continuous operation since then. So much for nostalgia. I have to admit that the phone service provided by this antique was lousy. Peter Desnoyers Apple ATG (408) 974-4469