The Strowger switch is the first commercially successful electromechanical

stepping switch In electrical control engineering, a stepping switch or stepping relay, also known as a uniselector, is an electromechanical device that switches an input signal path to one of several possible output paths, directed by a train of electrical puls ...

telephone exchange telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syste ...

system. It was developed by the

Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company Automatic Electric Company (A.E. Co.) was an American telephone equipment supplier primarily for independent telephone companies in North America, but also had a worldwide presence. With its line of automatic telephone exchanges, it was also a lon ...

founded in 1891 by

Almon Brown Strowger Almon Brown Strowger (February 11, 1839 – May 26, 1902) was an American inventor who gave his name to the Strowger switch, an electromechanical telephone exchange technology that his invention and patent inspired. Early years Strowger was bo ...

. Because of its operational characteristics, it is also known as a step-by-step (SXS) switch.

History

Strowger, an

undertaker A funeral director, also known as an undertaker ( British English) or mortician ( American English), is a professional involved in the business of funeral rites. These tasks often entail the embalming and burial or cremation of the dead ...

, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with his telephone service. He became convinced that the manual telephone exchange operators were deliberately interfering with his calls, leading to loss of business. According to the local

Bell Telephone Company The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 9, 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who also helped organize a sister company – the New Engl ...

manager Herman Ritterhoff, Strowger swore to "get even" with the telephone operators and "put every last one of them out of a job." Ritterhoff claimed that the real cause of Strowger's difficulties was a metal sign hung on his wall over his telephone, causing an intermittent short circuit when blown by the wind. Strowger conceived his invention in 1888, and was awarded a patent for an

automatic telephone exchange telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital sys ...

in 1891. The initial model was made from a round collar box and some straight pins. While Almon Strowger devised the initial concept, he was not alone in his endeavors and sought the assistance of his brother Arnold, nephew William, and others with a knowledge of electricity and financing to realize the concept. The

was founded in 1891. In the original design patent, four keys were added near the telephone, one each for thousands, hundreds, tens and units, with each key having an additional wire connection to the central exchange. Each key had to be tapped the correct number of times to step the switch and make the desired connection. To connect to number 1256, the user would press the first key once, the second key twice, the third key five times and the final key six times. The company installed and opened the first commercial exchange in his then-home town of

La Porte, Indiana La Porte (French for "The Door") is a city in LaPorte County, Indiana, United States, of which it is the county seat. Its population was estimated to be 21,341 in 2022. It is one of the two principal cities of the Michigan City-La Porte, India ...

on November 3, 1892. The exchange had around 75 subscribers. The installation followed the original patented design, with four keys and four additional line wires connected to the exchange, but not all of the keys were used. Early advertising called the new invention the "girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, wait-less telephone". In 1896 the company patented the finger-wheel dial as an improvement to the existing four-key design. The Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company became the

Automatic Electric Company Automatic Electric Company (A.E. Co.) was an American telephone equipment supplier primarily for independent telephone companies in North America, but also had a worldwide presence. With its line of automatic telephone exchanges, it was also a lon ...

, which Strowger was involved in founding, although Strowger himself seems not to have been involved in further developments. The Strowger patents were exclusively licensed to the Automatic Electric Company. Strowger sold his patents in 1896 for US$1,800 and sold his share in Automatic Electric in 1898 for US$10,000. His patents subsequently sold for US$2.5 million in 1916. Company engineers continued development of the Strowger designs and submitted several patents in the names of its employees. The Strowger system was widely used until the development of the more reliable

crossbar switch In electronics and telecommunications, a crossbar switch (cross-point switch, matrix switch) is a collection of switches arranged in a matrix configuration. A crossbar switch has multiple input and output lines that form a crossed pattern of int ...

, an electromechanical switch with a matrix of vertical and horizontal bars and simpler motions.

Patent details

Strowger's patent specifies dialing equipment at the customer location and the switching equipment at the central office. The telegraph keys or telephone dial creates trains of on-off current

pulses In medicine, a pulse represents the tactile arterial palpation of the cardiac cycle (heartbeat) by trained fingertips. The pulse may be palpated in any place that allows an artery to be compressed near the surface of the body, such as at the nec ...

corresponding to the digits 1-9, and 0 (which sends 10 pulses). This equipment originally consisted of two telegraph keys engaged by knife switches, and evolved into the

rotary dial A rotary dial is a component of a telephone or a telephone switchboard that implements a signaling technology in telecommunications known as pulse dialing. It is used when initiating a telephone call to transmit the destination telephone nu ...

telephone. The central office switching equipment has a two-motion

. A contact arm is moved up to select one of ten rows of contacts, and then rotated clockwise to select one of ten contacts in that row, a total of 100 choices. The stepping motion is controlled by the current pulses coming from the originating customer's telegraph keys, and later from the rotary dial.

Two-motion mechanism

The Strowger switch has three banks of contacts. Toward the upper end of each shaft are two ratchets. The upper one has ten grooves, and raises the shaft. The lower one has long vertical teeth (on the other side, hidden). The Strowger switch uses two telegraph-type keys on a telephone set for dialing. Each key requires a separate wire to the exchange. The keys are tapped to step the switch in two stages. The first set of incoming pulses raises the armature of an electromagnet to move a shaft which selects the desired level of contacts, by engaging a pawl with the upper ratchet. Another pawl, pivoting on the frame, holds the shaft at that height as it rotates. The second set of pulses, from the second key, operates another electromagnet. Its pawl engages the (hidden) vertical teeth in the lower ratchet to rotate the shaft to the required position. It is kept there against spring tension by a pawl pivoted on the frame. When the switch returns to its home position, typically when a call is complete, a release magnet disengages the pawls that hold the shaft in position. An interlock ensures that the spring on the shaft rotates it to angular home position before it drops to its home position by gravity.

Development

The commercial version of the Strowger switch, as developed by the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company, used a

for signalling to the exchange. The original final selector (connector) switch which connected to 100 customers was supplemented by preceding group selector stages, as the "cascading" enabled connection to many more customers, and to customers at other exchanges. Another requirement for commercial systems was a circuit to detect a busy connection (line) and return a busy signal to the calling subscriber. Instead of dedicating an expensive first-stage selector switch to each customer as in the first exchange, the customer was given access to the first-stage switch of a telephone network, often by a line-finder which searches "backward" for the calling line; so requiring only a few relays (in most cases two, a Line, and a Cut-off relay), for the equipment required for each customer line. Later Strowger (SXS) exchanges often use a subscriber uniselector as part of the line equipment individual to each line, which searches "forward" for a first selector. This is more economical for higher calling-rate domestic or business customers, and has the advantage that access to additional switches can readily be added if the traffic increases (the number of linefinders serving a group is limited by the wiring multiple installed). Hence exchanges with subscriber uniselectors were usually used at British exchanges with a high proportion of business customers, e.g. director exchanges, or in New Zealand where the provision of local free calling meant that residential customers had a relatively high calling rate. 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 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 quadratically more complex as each new customer was added, as each new customer needed a switch to connect to every other customer. In modern terminology, the previous systems were not "

scalable Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

British deployment

From 1912, the British

General Post Office The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. ...

, which also operated the British telephone system, installed several automatic telephone exchanges from several vendors in trials at Darlington on 10 October 1914 and Dudley on 9 September 1916 ( rotary system), Fleetwood (relay exchange from Sweden), Grimsby (Siemens), Hereford (Lorimer) and Leeds (Strowger).Events in Telecommunications History - 1927
BT Archives The GPO selected the Strowger switches for small and medium-sized cities and towns. The selection of switching systems for

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and other large cities was not decided until the 1920s, when the

Director telephone system The director telephone system was a development of the Strowger or step-by-step (SXS) switching system used in London and five other large cities in the UK from the 1920s to the 1980s. A large proportion (c. 70% to 80%) of telephone traffic in ...

was adopted. The Director systems used SXS switches for destination routing and number translation facilities similar to the register used in common-control exchanges. Using similar equipment as in the rest of the network was deemed beneficial and the equipment could be manufactured in Britain.

References

External links

AT&T Archives: 1951 Training Video Regarding the Step-by-Step Switch

Prof Mark Csele, Niagara College, Ontario
Telephone Systems Training Course: Central Office Equipment
1954, Western Electric Hawthorne Works {{Telecommunications Telephone exchange equipment