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From: kitty!larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Comments on History of Telephone Apparatus Manufacturing
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Date: 23 Apr 91 04:09:46 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 300, Message 1 of 4

In article <telecom11.226.1@eecs.nwu.edu> 0004133373@mcimail.com
(Donald E. Kimberlin) writes:

>         North provided at least two notable innovations to the
> telephone industry.  First, North made the first Private Automatic
> Exchange for the Galion, Ohio High School in 1920.

	The first all-relay central office installation by the North
Electric Company was made in Lima, Ohio in 1914.  This apparatus
design was largely based upon patents issued to Edward E. Clement
beginning in 1906.

> Its name, PAX, is the source of this term in the non-Bell
> telephone industry.

	I always understood the term "PAX" to have been coined by the
Automatic Electric Company.  They certainly used it enough in their
literature and technical manuals!  My 1932 edition of "Telephone
Theory and Practice" by Kempster Miller explicitly gives credit to
Automatic Electric for the term "PAX".

>         From that point, in 1906, Kellogg grew to be one of the major
> names supplying telephone equipment to non-Bell companies.  Kellogg,
> in fact, had many innovations to its credit before Bell did, among
> these the "Grabaphone," a hand-held transmitter-receiver some years
> before Western Electric's first one in 1926 ... and the Kellogg phone
> was truly superior by 1933.

	My late-1920's vintage Kellog catalog describes their handset
with the tradename "MasterphonE" (that's really a trailing uppercase
E), "being the product of twenty years of development" - which is
consistent with the 1906 date above.  They also describe the handset
as being constructed from "Kellite", which I suspect is either
bakelite or hard rubber.

	It is also amusing to note that while this catalog gives an
address for Kellog at 1066 West Adams St. in Chicago, they give no
telephone number!

	In my opinion, not all Kellog products were winners, though.

	Kellog produced a bizarre dial intercom system during the
1930's and 1940's which used a single selector that was a cross
between a rotary stepping switch and an X-Y switch (the mechanism is
difficult to describe without a drawing).  This was a dial intercom
which had a basic capacity of 19 stations.  The station numbering went
1, 2, ... 8, 9, 01, 02, ... 09, and 00.  The stepping switch was
positioned at the *total* of the dialed pulses.  If you dialed rapidly
(the inter-digit timing control was crude), you could reach station
"8" by dialing 5 followed by 3, or station "09" by dialing 5 followed
by 6 followed by 8, etc.!  This intercom was really a piece of junk,
though, and while the stations resembled standard dial telephones,
they did not even have sidetone reduction networks.

	Somewhere in my collection I have one of these Kellog dial
intercoms, plus other pre-ITT Kellog artifacts.  I bought most of them
about twenty years ago at a liquidation auction of the Larkin Sound
Company in Buffalo, NY.  Larkin Sound was a major distributor of
Kellog products from the 1920's through 1950's.  Larkin Sound was
rather well known at one time, having been founded by a descendant of
the family who operated the Larkin Products Company, which ran a mail
order operation whose size rivaled that of Sears Roebuck and
Montgomery Ward in the early 1900's.  But I digress...

> Kellogg remained a power in the non-Bell industry until ITT bought
> it in 1952,

	ITT cleaned house at Kellog, with one of the first products to
get the ax being the above dial intercom system!

> GTE began buying companies and feeding business to
> its own manufacturing subsidiary, Automatic Electric.  GTE simply
> decided in the 1950's to copy things that Bell had so successfully
> clamped controls on a half-century earlier.

	In my opinion, GTE/AECo copied little from the Bell System.
GTE did many things the AECo way.  The GTE telephones were primarily
descendents of the AECo "Monophone".  The handsets, transmitters,
receivers, network, dial and ringer were *pure* AECo, and had no
design based upon WECo.  As an example, the GTE/AECo "Styleline"
telephone, which externally was similar to the WECo "Trimline", was
totally different in internal design; even the handset cord connector
design was different.

	Offhand, the only significant item of similarity was that the
GTE/AECo 1A2 key telephone system used a clone of the WECo 584 panel.
However, all KTU's and key telephone sets were of totally different
design than that of WECo.  An interesting GTE/AECo "innovation" was a
synthesized music-on-hold generator card; whether its synthesized
"music" (really!) was better than silence is debatable. :-)

	GTE/AECo relied heavily upon the Suttle Apparatus Company for
connecting blocks, jacks, etc.  GTE/AECo also provided modular jacks
long before they became the norm in the Bell System.  I first saw
modular jacks from GTE/AECo around 1970 - before I ever saw them in
the Bell System.  I said to myself at the time that "these dinky plugs
(as opposed to a 505A plug) will never work".  Boy, was I wrong! :-)

> Among things that
> Stromberg and Carlson contributed to the industry was the first real
> telephone set that was complete on a desktop on its own, including
> magneto and ringer, instead of mounting on the wall. But, one of their
> best clients, Rochester Home Telephone Company purchased control and
> moved Stromberg-Carlson to Rochester, NY to protect their source of
> supply from Bell predators.

	Stromberg-Carlson has led a checkered existence in the past
twenty years.  They were a division of General Dynamics that was
largely based in Rochester, NY; however, General Dynamics closed most
of the Rochester operation around 1970 and moved the corporate
headquarters and much of the operation to Tampa, FL.  Stromberg-
Carlson did a significant amount of military business; I believe that
General Dynamics may have absorbed that business into another
division, while leaving Stromberg-Carlson as a provider of solely
domestic telephone apparatus.  I am not certain of the subsequent
changes, though.  The remains of Stromberg-Carlson changed their name
to Comdial during the early 1980's, but may have now changed it back.
I believe they may have also been acquired by Plessey.  I have been
out of the telephone industry mainstream for too many years to keep
track of these things; perhaps another reader knows of their present
fate.

	Interestingly enough, while Rochester Telephone may have once
depended upon Stromberg-Carlson for switching apparatus, this changed
significantly during the 1950's.  For major central office
installations, Stromberg-Carlson became one of the largest non-Bell
customers of Western Electric, and installed No. 5 XBAR like it was
going out of style.  As soon as they could get it, Rochester Telephone
installed No. 1 ESS, followed by TSPS and newer generation WECo ESS
products.  Rochester Telephone even had one of the first WECo No. 1
SPC's that was running an electronic tandem network (for Kodak?).
They even had one of the first TSPS installations with an RTA, which I
always thought was unusual considering how central the city of
Rochester was to their operations.  Their outlying CDO's may still
have some X-Y, but most should have already been replaced by WECo
(actually AT&T Network Systems) and Northern Telecom DMS-series
apparatus.

>         The obvious Scandinavian bias of Stromberg's founders led them
> to license manufacture of L.M. Ericsson mechanical telephone switching
> technology known in the U.S. as the "Stromberg X-Y" switching machine.
> X-Y was enormously popular in the non-Bell telephone companies just
> after World War II.

	X-Y is a progressive control system, not unlike that of SxS.

	I have worked with X-Y apparatus and never liked it.  In my
opinion it was some of the most inferior CO apparatus ever built.  The
X-Y bank multiple wires are extremely fragile and prone to dirt and
grease contamination that cannot be easily cleaned (as opposed to SxS
rotary banks which are easy to clean).  If the wires get bent for some
reason (like by an improperly adjusted or inserted switch, or through
careless cleaning), no amount of adjustment and cajoling will ever get
them straight enough for continued, reliable operation.

	X-Y PABX's were common, especially the Stromberg-Carlson F40
(40-line) and F80 (80-line).

>         One more historic name one might run across is the Leich
> Electric Company at Genoa, Illinois [close to Chicago!], based upon
> buying the rights of North Electric's manual telephone equipment in
> one of North's low points while North was getting into automatic
> switches.  Curiously, what made Leich famous was its development of its
> own form of automatic switch, designed by a German who had worked at
> North Electric, went to Germany to fight for the Kaiser, and came back
> to the U.S. after the war. Leich's relay-switch most closely resembled
> a crossbar switch for some decades before the term was coined, and its
> unique style was quite suited to PBXs and very small telephone
> exchanges. Leich enjoyed considerable popularity in this arena, and
> supplied telephone sets that bore the Leich name.

	Leich was acquired by Automatic Electric before it in turn was
acquired by GTE.  The Leich switch mechanism is called "cross-point",
and would be difficult to describe without illustrations.  The Leich
system is common control, but uses a very simple concept with the
common control function being primarily a "link allotter" circuit.
This type of common control is far simpler than say, a marker in a
crossbar system.

	The Leich switch was used for small CO's up to a few hundred
lines.  The Leich switch was far more popular as a PABX, with the two
most common models being the Leich 40 and the Leich 80.  For many
years these Leich products competed with the Stromberg-Carlson F40 and
F80 for the lion's share of the independent operating telephone
company small PABX market.

	In my opinion, the Leich PABX's were far more reliable than
the X-Y PABX's since the Leich apparatus had no mechanical stepping
and timing mechanisms.  The crosspoint switch had hold and select
magnets not unlike that of a crossbar switch; everything else were
relays.  The Leich relays were flat spring in nature; they were fairly
reliable but once out of adjustment were a real bear requiring a
special type of finesse.  I have learned The Hard Way that the more
one adjusts a Leich relay, the worse it gets! :-)

	The Leich PABX was also interesting in that it was a single
stage switch that was non-blocking; i.e., all stations had access to
all trunks.

	During the early 1970's GTE/AECo made a considerable effort to
upgrade the Leich PABX line into the 40B and 80B models.  They
replaced a rather clunky looking console with one that was truly state
of the art.  They provided a touch-tone feature, and made numerous
improvements in electrical and mechanical design.

	I suspect there are AECo/Leich PABX's still in service.  GTE,
in what may be viewed as an unusual move for the time, formed their
own interconnect installation organization in the early 1970's.  They
not only sold the GTE/AECo apparatus to other interconnect companies,
but in certain major cities installed it themselves.  The GTE
interconnect organization was headquartered in Stamford, CT.  They had
various major nationwide accounts during the 1970's, one of which was
the Mariott hotel chain.


Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp.  "Have you hugged your cat today?"
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