The Connections Museum (formerly the Herbert H. Warrick Jr. Museum of Communications, originally the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum) is located in Centurylink's Duwamish Central Office at East Marginal Way S. and Corson Avenue S. in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. It "reveals the history of the

telephone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into e ...

and the equipment that makes it all work." The museum was originally sponsored by the Washington Telephone Pioneers, and is now a part of the Telecommunications History Group, based in Denver. It features vintage equipment from

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

, Western Electric, Pacific Northwest Bell, USWest, and other organizations.

History

The museum was founded by Don Ostrand and Herb Warrick, both employees of Pacific Northwest Bell. As a result of the Modification of Final Judgement in 1984, the AT&T monopoly was broken up, and an organizational mandate required Pacific Northwest Bell to modernize their aging telephone switching equipment. Realizing that this was perhaps the last opportunity to save examples of vintage electromechanical switches, Warrick requested that Pacific Northwest Bell (PNB) make arrangements to transfer ownership of selected equipment to the Telephone Pioneers and allow them to set up a museum somewhere in Seattle. Originally envisioned to be one of three telephone museums in the Pacific Northwest, this was the only one that materialized. Work started in 1985, and the museum opened to the public in Fall of 1989. Frames of electromechanical switching equipment were brought in from existing central offices, and lifted to the third floor by cranes. From there, volunteers rewired the equipment to make it functional once again. In 2016 the museum was featured on a popular YouTube channel run by Tom Scott, as part of the "Things You Might Not Know" series.

Collection

The museum has the following notable items in its collection: * 1923

Panel Switch The Panel Machine Switching System is a type of automatic telephone exchange for urban service that was used in the Bell System in the United States for seven decades. The first semi-mechanical types of this design were installed in 1915 in Newark, ...

from Seattle's Rainier/Parkway exchange * 1942 No. 1 Crossbar from Seattle's Lakeview exchange * 1958 No. 5 Crossbar from the Adams exchange on

Mercer Island Mercer Island is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located on an island of the same name in the southern portion of Lake Washington. Mercer Island is in the Seattle metropolitan area, with Seattle to its west and Bellevue to it ...

* 1976 3ESS electronic switching system from Crosby, WA * North Electric CX 100, from

Lester, Washington Lester is a ghost town near Stampede Pass, just south of Snoqualmie Pass in King County, founded in 1892 by the Northern Pacific Railway (now the BNSF Railway). Lester is located along what is currently National Forest Development Road 54, on l ...

, originally installed in the U.S.S. California * Step-By-Step (SXS) equipment * 750, 755 and 756 dial PBXs *

Teletype A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...

equipment from the 1920s through the 1980s * A red K6 GPO

telephone box A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box, telephone box or public call box is a tiny structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience; usually the user steps into the booth and closes the booth ...

, flown to Seattle from the UK Most of the artifacts in the museum's collection are functional, and are maintained regularly by volunteers. The electro-mechanical switching systems, particularly the No. 1 Crossbar and Panel offices, are the only remaining switches of their type in the world that are still functioning. The No.5 crossbar office is one of two that operate in a museum setting in the U.S. (the other is at The Telephone Museum in

Ellsworth, Maine Ellsworth is a city in and the county seat of Hancock County, Maine, United States. The 2020 Census determined it had a population of 8,399. Named after United States Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth, it contains historic buildings a ...

). Although they are no longer connected to the

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local teleph ...

, visitors can make calls between the switches in the museum. A computer program has been set up to continually simulate calls and keep the equipment exercised.

References

External links

* *
Museum of Communications - Virtual tour

2005 Visit to the Museum of Communication
- Telephone World Museums in Seattle Museums established in 1985 Industry museums in Washington (state) Media museums in Washington (state) Telecommunications museums in the United States Georgetown, Seattle 1985 establishments in Washington (state) {{Washington-museum-stub