WHO THE HELL WAS ALMON STROWGER, ANYWAY?
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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.