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Almon Brown Strowger | |
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| Born | (1839-02-11)February 11, 1839 Penfield, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 26, 1902(1902-05-26) (aged 63) St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Inventor |
| Spouse | Susan Strowger |
Almon Brown Strowger (/ˈstroʊdʒər/; February 11, 1839 – May 26, 1902) was an American inventor for whom theStrowger switch, an electromechanicaltelephone exchange technology, is named.
Strowger was born inPenfield, New York, nearRochester, the grandson of the second settler and firstmiller in Penfield. Little is known about his early life. It is said that if his mother gave her children a task, Strowger and his brothers would often try to devise a machine to do the task for them. He taught school in Penfield for a time.
In October 1861, he enlisted as a Musician in Company A,8th New York Cavalry Regiment, to fight in theAmerican Civil War. He was promoted to Sergeant and Chief Trumpeter of the regiment in February 1864, and ended the war as a Second Lieutenant. He was wounded in action at theThird Battle of Winchester in 1864, and discharged later that year.
After the Civil War, it appears he first became a country school teacher before he became anundertaker. He is variously attributed as living inEl Dorado, Kansas, orTopeka, Kansas, and finallyKansas City, Missouri. It is not clear where his idea of an automatic telephone exchange was originally conceived, but his patent application identifies him as being a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 10, 1891.
A commonly told story holds that Strowger believed that hisundertaking business was losing clients to a competitor whose wife was a local telephone operator and was preventing telephone calls from being routed to Strowger's business and re-routing them to her husband's business instead, following his discovery in the newspaper that a friend's funeral was being handled elsewhere.[1] Motivated to remove the intermediary operator, he invented the firstautomatic telephone exchange in 1889; he received its patent in 1891.[2] It is reported that he initially constructed a model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.[3]
While Strowger may have come up with the idea, he was not alone in his endeavors and sought the assistance of his nephew William and others with a knowledge of electricity and money to realise his concepts. With this help theStrowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company was formed and it installed and opened the first commercial exchange in (his then home town of)La Porte, Indiana, on November 3, 1892, with about 75 subscribers and capacity for 99. He married Susan A. (1846–1921) fromMassachusetts in 1897 as his second wife. Strowger sold his patents to his associates in 1896 for $1,800 (about $59,000 in 2021)[4] and sold his share in theAutomatic Electric Company for $10,000 (about $330,000 in 2021)[5] in 1898. His patents were subsequently sold to Bell Systems for $2.5 million in 1916 (about $63,000,000 in 2021).[6]
The company's engineers continued development of Strowger's designs and submitted several patents in the names of its employees. It also underwent several name changes. Strowger himself seems to have not taken part in this further development. He subsequently moved toSt. Petersburg, Florida. Strowger was a man of some wealth at his death and was reported as owning at least a city block of property.
Strowger died, aged 63, of ananeurysm after suffering fromanemia, atSt. Petersburg,Pinellas County, Florida; he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery the next day. His grave is marked with the traditional whiteheadstone with an inscription that reads: "Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav."
He was survived by his widow Susan A. Strowger (1846–1921). After her death inTampa, Florida, on April 14, 1921, her obituary appeared in theSt. Petersburg Times, claiming she had additional "revolutionary" Strowger designs, but she had refused to make them public while she was alive because only others would profit from her husband's designs. She had claimed that her husband had only received $10,000 for his invention, when he should have received $1,000,000.
A bronze plaque, to commemorate his invention, was placed on his grave in 1945 by telephone company officials. Strowger was admitted to the hall of fame of the U.S. Independent Telephone Association (later theUSTA) in 1965. Apart from his invention, his name has also been given to alocomotive and a company business award.
In 2003, the Verizon Foundation awarded $4500 to Pinellas Heritage, Inc. and the Pinellas Genealogy Society in Strowger's memory. The funds were used to develop a website to impart the history of the cemetery where Strowger is buried, and to restore two Civil War memorials. The Greenwood Cemetery project won an organization achievement award from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation.
