No need for girls

The world's first automatic telephone ser­vice was opened in the autumn of 1892 at LaPortein Indiana.

In 1890 the Bell Telephone Company had won a suit against the telephone system in LaPorte for infringement of the Bell patents. The judge ordered that all the telephones be burned! Presumably for the next two years LaPorte had no telephone service, enabling Strowger to obtain a franchise there in 1892. For $25 a month the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange rented premises above a shop, sub-letting spare space for $15 a month. It was a reasonable start to business. By September wiring work had begun, and in mid-October the first telephones and automatic switches were installed. The service was up and running, serving a mere 52 subscribers.

On 3 November, 1892, was held a grand public demonstration. Formal invitations were sent out and a special train was laid on to bring guests from Chicago. About 50 or 60 were' met by the mayor and the city band. At the telephone exchange they saw shelves carrying 80 of the new Strowger switches together with batteries. There were no "hello girls" (operators). The reporter from the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean could not get over the fact that the solitary employee present had "nothing, absolutely nothing, to do". Even if he had nothing to do, the poor subscribers certainly had. From 12.30 to 4p.m. they were busy answering their telephones "very promptly" as the invited guests tried out the system. For Strowger and his companions the day was hugely successful and the Chicago newspapers duly reported the invention. "No need for girls" was a typical headline.

The dial telephone was an invention made by Strowger's engineers and it stood the test of time, until eased aside recently by pushbutton telephones. It is an historical curiosity that Strowger's original telephones also had push buttons. With less than a hundred subscribers the Strowger team simply provided two buttons. To call, say, number 37 the caller pressed the 'tens' button three times and then the 'units' button seven times. Although it worked well it was prone (o errors as callers lost count! Even as the LaPorte system was being publicly demonstrated, a second installation was under construction at Fort Sheridan in Illinois. By the end of 1896 Strowger exchanges had been installed in other towns in Indiana, and in Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, New York State and Wisconsin.

In those early years almost every installation was a field trial, but by 1895 Strowger engineers (for Strowger himself played relatively little further part) had settled on the basic step-by-step 'up and round' motion. This came to characterize the Strowger switch which, of course, underwent many improvements. At LaPorte five wires were used: three for signalling, one for releasing and one for the conversation.

The dial was introduced in 1896 to reduce the number of mistakes made by callers, and the first dials used flanges instead of the later finger holes. Even dials gave problems. German settlers in Wisconsin pronounced '21' for example, as "one and twenty". So they dialled 1, then 2 and then possibly zero. An education programme on how to count in English solved the problem.