Peter Amstein, a volunteer who serves as chairman of the Museum of Connectivity’s board, says early phone technology shaped his IT career.
L. Tremaine
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L. Tremaine
Peter Amstein, a volunteer who serves as chairman of the Museum of Connectivity’s board, says early phone technology shaped his IT career.
L. Tremaine
As Peter Amstein wriggled his way through a row of appliance racks strewn with wires and buzzing with machines, he issued a cheerful warning.
“There are electrical terminals exposed, probably nothing can kill you,” he said. “But there are definitely some things that will make you feel quite uncomfortable, so be a little cautious with what you touch.”
Amstein works in Seattle’s tech industry, but in his spare time he’s the lead volunteer, tour guide, and executive team chairman. connection museum.
This is where self-proclaimed tech geeks like Amstein are preserving and rehabilitating machines running America’s first landline network.
It was Willy Wonka’s factory for clanking gizmos, many of which were invented by steam age geeks and tinkerers who sought to connect an entire world.
“It’s a high-tech startup story, only it’s 120 years old,” Amstein said.
In the era before computers and plastic, America communicated using steam age technology and networks created by tinkerers.
L. Tremaine
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L. Tremaine
In the era before computers and plastic, America communicated using steam age technology and networks created by tinkerers.
L. Tremaine
Today, Americans often connect with others through machines and computers, everything from messaging to dating apps to Zoom.
It’s easy to forget how we got here, how the phone system shaped our first social network, and how its design still shapes the way we talk today. .
“A lot of things that I’ve built a whole lot [tech] That career started with the phone system, from the very beginning,” says Amstein.
One voice on wire, one network connecting one world
A visitor at the Museum of Connectivity operates the first type of PBX system that connects telephone users in the United States.
Brian Mann/NPR
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A visitor at the Museum of Connectivity operates the first type of PBX system that connects telephone users in the United States.
Brian Mann/NPR
Starting in the 1870s, a group of inventors including Alexander Graham Bell figured out how to translate human voices into electrical signals and fire them through wires.
Turns out that was the easy part. Once you figure out how to help people talk remotely, you have to devise a network that can link a world of chat boxes.
The first step is the operators, usually women, who act as the first software to run the system.
“Should I cast your gender stereotype and ask you to be the phone operator?” Amstein said, inviting a female visitor to sit in the museum’s antique electrical cabinet.
When she’s ready, he’ll show her how to connect the cables one by one. “Ask for a number?” she asked, plugged in the cable and got the phone to ring immediately.
Pay phones operate on a ring tone system that lets the operator know if you’ve paid enough to make the call.
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Pay phones operate on a ring tone system that lets the operator know if you’ve paid enough to make the call.
L. Tremaine
At first, the technology that allowed women to run networks was inspired by things inventors found around, often as simple as bells or ringtones.
For example, for the first generation of public telephones, the female operators listened to the musical notes played by coins of different sizes as they were dropped into the slot.
“She can hear it,” Amstein said. “Microphone is here [in the phone box]and she can hear the bell.”
Smart but super slow. Not practical if you want to connect thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people.
Tinkerer seeks to automate a growing system
Later, inventors started making steam age machines that could also listen and make connections much faster.
Amstein demonstrates one of the oldest, oldest devices, known as the Strowger switch, invented in the late 1800s by a funeral home worker in Kansas City, Mo. “When I pick up the phone here, one of these machines will work,” he said.
The device works so vividly, it sounds like a drummer is tapping a cymbal. As Amstein dials a rotating telephone, the Strowger switch records tiny sounds, counts them, and makes a connection with incredible precision.
This restored version of the Strowger switch in the Museum of Connections collection was produced by Western Electric. The device relies on pulses from a dial-up phone to figure out what connections to make.
L. Tremaine
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This restored version of the Strowger switch in the Museum of Connections collection was produced by Western Electric. The device relies on pulses from a dial-up phone to figure out what connections to make.
L. Tremaine
Designs for automatic switches become faster and more reliable, connecting America for more than a century. Then, in the late 1990s, computers were born, and machines like this were almost abandoned overnight.
“It’s a beautiful machine”
Amstein shows off one of the museum’s accolades, a panel switch system that fills the entire hallway of the appliance rack.
“This is the last switch of its kind anywhere, the only operating panel switch anywhere on the planet,” he said.
Imagine a giant loom with cables running up and down connecting telephone lines.
They found the device abandoned and abandoned in the storage room of a telephone company. One of the volunteers, Sarah Autumn, spent months putting it together.
Sarah Autumn, a volunteer at the Museum of Connectivity, helped restore the complex switchboard telephone system, the last of its kind in the world. It took her more than a year to complete the job.
L. Tremaine
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Sarah Autumn, a volunteer at the Museum of Connectivity, helped restore the complex switchboard telephone system, the last of its kind in the world. It took her more than a year to complete the job.
L. Tremaine
“It wasn’t easy,” she said. “It took me about a year just to poke around at it before I could begin to understand it to any real depth.”
Like Amstein, Autumn works in Seattle’s tech industry.
When asked why she spends hundreds of hours of her free time getting this device working again, she talks about it not like a broken device but more like a work of art.
“I love it because it’s a beautiful machine,” says Autumn. “The people working on these systems are highly skilled and trained to understand this complex web of relationships.”
The people who work here say that so many graceful techniques have woven these machines, important ideas have been virtually lost.
Technology feels antiquated. But in the rumble and clack of these old machines, you can get a glimpse of how America got to where we are today – the age of smartphones, TikTok, and AI.
The dial-up telephone, invented by a funeral parlor in Kansas City, Mo., in the late 1800s, was standard technology in the United States for more than a century.
L. Tremaine
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The dial-up telephone, invented by a funeral parlor in Kansas City, Mo., in the late 1800s, was standard technology in the United States for more than a century.
L. Tremaine
