"One day there will be a telephone In every major town in America."
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor
The invention of the telephone was a gigantic leap forward. However, early models were connected by a wire in pairs, meaning that you could only connect to one other telephone. This was not useful for keeping in contact with lots of different people. Early phones did not even use a ringing bell—you had to whistle into the speaker to get the other person's attention.
The telephone had a long way to go, and it was Almon Strowger (1839-1902), a Missouri undertaker in the United States who devised a big improvement— the automatic telephone exchange. His local exchange operator was the wife of a rival undertaker and would divert calls away from Strowger's business.
This motivated Strowger to invent an automated exchange that recognized the number dialed in by the caller. The earliest model was a hollow cylinder with a shaft in the middle capable of moving up and down and also rotating. A connector in the shaft could make contact with many different contacts on the inside of the cylinder and so send this down the line as a pulse, hence pulse dialing and rotary dial telephones. This system ended the need for manually connected calls until it too was superseded by digital systems.
