Trunk dialling

In 1897 the concept of 'transfer trunking' was introduced whereby calls were directed through a series of switches. This meant that the size of the exchange was no longer limited to the size of the individual switch, which previously had provided contact to every telephone on the exchange. Strowger's love affair with automatic telephony was short but very sweet. This major invention had been made by a man in his 48th year. (Who says you are past it at 40?) By the late 1890s his health was beginning to fail and he retired from the company which had been founded on his invention. The company, however, went from strength to strength and by the turn of the century it had opened operations abroad. In 1901, in effect, it became a new company: Automatic Electric. In 1955 Automatic Electric became part of General Telephones and Electronics and it is now part of GTE Communication Systems.

There was still life in Strowger himself however: for on his retirement he married his nurse, Susan Bellanger, and they moved to the healthier climate of St Petersburg in Florida. No-one now seems quite sure whether Susan was his fourth or fifth wife. It was in St Petersburg that he died on 26 May, 1902, aged 62. He was buried beneath a tombstone which read simply, "Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 N.Y. Cav.". Forty-seven years later, 110 years after his birth, representatives of the telephone industry placed a bronze plaque on his grave commemorating his pioneering work on automatic telephony.

An ardent booster

Life began for Almon Brown Strowger at Penfield in the state of New York on 19 October, 1839, one of a family of six boys and six girls. On his 22nd birthday, at the start of the American Civil War, he enlisted in the 8th New York Cavalry and served until the end of 1864. By this time he had been commissioned as second lieutenant. Shortly after, he married his first wife, who bore him two girls.

Strowger's career then moved from Civil War soldier to peace-time schoolteacher. He became principal of the school he had attended as a boy in Penfield. He taught in other schools in Illinois, Michigan and Kansas before buying an undertaking business in North Topeka, some 60 miles west of Kansas City. There he lived at the shop with his second wife, his first wife having died. What happened to this second wife is not certain. Whether widowed again or divorced, Strowger married again in 1886, this time to Alice Marie Hill who bore him his only son. They moved house and business to Kansas City where he continued his work as an undertaker. It was there, as we have seen, that he conceived the idea of an automatic telephone. He was not actually the first to have the idea, but he was the first to produce a working model which could be developed into a commercially successful product. Strowger's retirement in St Petersburg, Florida, lasted four or five years to his death.

When his eyesight failed, a young man, R.H. Sumner, used to read to him. Sumner, who died in 1949, left this description of A.B. Strowger in his final years. "He was an ardent booster for the city and was very active in all political and civic affairs. He was not known locally as an inventor but rather as an investor. He gave generously of his time and money when the occasion demanded. Strowger became a familiar figure on the unpaved streets of St Petersburg as he drove a pure white horse and a shiny black buggy, and he was always on the move. He was a very outspoken, high tempered man and if he didn't like the way the city was doing certain things he did not mind telling somebody how it should be done and oftimes would take over and do it himself.