THE FIRST AUTOMATIC TELEPHONE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 83, 6 January 1928, Page 9

THE FIRST AUTOMATIC TELEPHONE

o— — • INVENTION FORTY YEARS OLD It comes as something of a surprise when automatic telephones aro being introduced in London, to realise that t he. invention is forty years old (writes "J L ” in the "Westminster Gazette ). Alexander Graham Bell had exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. It has been described as being at that time a "crude invention. So it was, indeed, and in twelve years’ time there were fewer than 269.000 telephones in the iJniteii States. But it was in ISSB that Almon B. Strowger produced tire automatic telephone. He suffered from some telephone mishap, aud set out with sheer determination to prevent the possibility of such a mishap occurring again. He was an undertaker, and ho had no adventitious advantages. He reached a fundamental principle that the basic act of connecting one line to another, could be doue by machine. Somewhere in tho world is the round collar box and the pencil and the paper of pins whieli went up to make the first model of an automatic telephone. In Berlin they keep these things carefully iu a museum. There is reason to hope, that souiewhcie in Kansas City these simple things aio still treasured as sacred industrial relics. The world laughed except. Mr. Josep 1 Harris of Chicago, who proved his fait.i in Strowger in the best way faith ean be proved. Headway whs. bound io bo slow, but in time here a company and (hero a company tremblingly adopted it. Men of brilliant parts and of groat failu joined the central organisation. J hey made their contribution to the simplification and to the exploitation of the apparatu achievement to be able to apply what has been described as this uncanny* machine” to the telephone conditions‘of London’with all them ouuplexity. Who -would have thought that the paper collar-box, forgotten by most, of us to-day, would take so prominent a part tn the development of communication ?