WHO THE HELL WAS ALMON STROWGER, ANYWAY? ---------------------------------------- by Almon Strowger Jr. (No, not the real one) It could be fairly stated that Almon Strowger was the first phreak ever to exist. It seems he had this thing for operators... Strowger, to begin at the beginning, was an undertaker who lived in Kansas City toward the close of the century. Accounts of his life are rather sketchy, but it does seem rather fair that he may have had something of a problem with authority. He became convinced that the Kansas City Telephone Company operators had conspired to force him out of business. They were, he thought, switching calls intended for him to his competition. When he tried to place calls himself, the operators always seemed to report nothing but busy signals and wrong numbers. Registered complaints got him nothing and nowhere. It drove Strowger to such a pitch of exasperation and inspiration that in 1889 he invented what he called the first "girl-less, cussless telephone", or more neutrally, the Automatic Switch. The dialed call was the ultimate result. Strowger first pared the definition of phone service to a single function: connecting Party A with Party B. In the old days operators did much more than this. They would forward calls to someone's likely location, took messages, and advised callers whom best to call for a solution to a plumbing or medical problem. To Strowger these extra services reflected power that invited abuse. (He was not necessarily being paranoid. In the early years of phone service, there were many complaints of back-talk, biased service, and eavesdropping. Lily Tomlin's routines speak to a half-forgotten memory of those experiences.) The more things change... Then , by substituting an automatic switching machine for the operator, Strowger gave subscribers the power to place their own calls. In oversimplified terms, his system worked like this: A subscriber who wished to call Mr. Strowger, say, would punch a button on the phone a specific number of times. The number that would be assigned to Strowger -- 3 perhaps. Each punch would send an electrical pulse to a central office, where Strowger's switch was installed. A motor would drive the arm of the switch a number of steps around a circle corresponding to the number of times the button had been pushed. In the example here, the arm would stop at Mr. Strowger's number, the third step. The arm would stay there for the duration of the call, with the voice Signals passing back and forth throughout the switch arm. When the parties hung up, the switch would reset. No matter which subscriber wished to call Mr. Strowger, the same number of pulses would make the same connection in every case. In effect, the dial pulses replaced the operator. The pulses worked like electrical trail breakers. They built the path to the destination phone by commanding switches to move to the proper point and freezing them in that position, thus reserving those connections for the voice signals to follow along. When the called party answered, his "Hello?" retraced the path the digits had built, back to the original caller. You now know what a step-by-step, or crossbar, office is, and although they are very rare, anyone who's ever been in one can tell you the noise from all those cross-bars moving and "ker-plunking" into position is extremely loud.