If you've ever visited our museum or taken our guided tour, then you know we love talking about operators! Switchboard operators were essential to the success of the telephone industry, but as modern technology progressed, operators became obsolete. 

One man who played a major role in this obsolescence was Almon B. Strowger, the inventor of the the automatic dialing device.

​Pictured below is the Stowger 11-Digit Dial Wall Telephone from about 1905. The dial has eleven digits, numbered 0 through 9 as well as an additional dial position for “long distance,” which would connect the person dialing to an operator when they wanted to place calls outside of the local exchange.

Strowger was born on February 11, 1830, in Penfield, New York.

Growing up, he was notorious for inventing things, especially if it got him and his siblings out of doing their daily chores.

After spending time in both the military and as a teacher, Strowger bought an undertaking business in Kansas in June of 1882, and it was with this career change that he was able to focus more on his inventions.

Though we don’t know for certain what prompted Stowger to design the automatic dialer, we do know of a story his relative Ronald Stowger told that shows a connection between experiences in his life and the desire for technology that bypassed operators.

​According to Ronald, Almon was losing business due to the interference of a telephone operator who was romantically involved with a rival undertaker. Stowger believed this woman to be diverting calls for his business to this competitor, and he was fueled by this to invent a device that would allow folks to directly call other people, without the need for an operator to connect them. Thus, he began to experiment and create, and the first automatic telephone exchange was installed successfully in La Porte, Indiana on November 3, 1892. ​

Field telephones are telephones used for military communications. They can draw power from their own battery, from a telephone exchange via a central battery known as CB, or from an external power source. Some field phones need no battery, being sound-powered telephones.

​Field telephones replaced flag signals and the telegraph as an efficient means of communication. The first field telephones had a wind-up generator used to power the telephone's ringer & batteries to send the call, and call the manually operated telephone central. This technology was used from the 1910s to the 1960s. Later the ring signal was made either electronically by operating a push button, or automatically as on domestic telephones.
 
Shortly after the invention of the telephone, attempts were made to adapt the technology for military use. Telephones were already being used to support military campaigns in British India and in British colonies in Africa in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In the United States, telephone lines connected fortresses with each other and with army headquarters. They were also used for fire control at fixed coastal defense installations. The first telephone for use in the field was developed in the United States in 1889 but it was too expensive for mass production. Subsequent developments in several countries made the field telephone more practicable. Field telephones operate over wire lines, sometimes commandeering civilian circuits when available, but often using wires strung in combat conditions. The wire material was changed from iron to copper. Devices for laying wire in the field were developed and systems with both battery-operated sets for command posts and hand generator sets for use in the field were developed.
 
By the First World War the use of field telephones had become widespread.

During our guided tours [pre-COVID days], we would very often surprise guests when we told them that credit of the telephone should be given to more than just one person, namely Bell. The decision to not give Alexander Graham Bell sole credit is more historically correct. Well, that's our opinion.

Lewis Howard Latimer, who was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1848, was an African-American inventor, electrical pioneer, and a son of fugitive slaves. Latimer taught himself mechanical drawing while in the Union Navy, and eventually became a chief draftsman, patent expert, and inventor.

Latimer worked with three of the greatest scientific inventors in American history, Hiram S. Maxim, Thomas A. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was Latimer's work with Bell, in 1876, that would eventually earn Bell his patent for his invention called the harmonic telegraph.

Latimer designed a number of his own inventions, including an improved railroad car bathroom and an early air conditioning unit.

Some of Latimer's work can be seen at the Lewis Latimer Museum located in Queens, New York. 

​Around the world, the telegraph pole has been all but replaced by the telephone pole. Although its primary purpose was not that of a billboard, the telephone pole has and continues to be used to communicate with residents of a neighborhood, provide information, incite action, sell a used sofa or help locate a missing dog.

Posting signs to any telephone pole [or any utility pole] is illegal, yet the practice of nailing or stapling a yard sale sign  [another very common announcement]  to a telephone pole continues.

The first pole was erected in the mid 1800s. The United States Congress granted Samuel Morse $30,000 to build a 40-mile telegraph line between Baltimore, Maryland and Washington D.C. Morse, whose first attempt at laying underground cable between the two destinations failed, later moved the cables above ground, giving rise to the need for utility poles. Once the telegraph was replaced by phones, poles became more commonly referred to as telephone poles.

For something so commonplace as a telephone pole, little is actually known about them, much like the telephone. Below are just a few interesting fun-facts to wow your friends.

Back In the day, many tools and test equipment were developed to be able to maintain telephone service throughout the exchange.  One such piece of test equipment was  called The Woodpecker.

This test unit was used to locate “faults” in telephone cables, such as the most common “case of troubles”; short circuits.

Officially called a Cableman’s Test Set, The Woodpecker  comprised electrical relays and other components, mounted inside a hinged wooden box that also had space for dry cell batteries to power the unit. 

Another piece that was used with The Woodpecker was a headset and pickup coil. The pickup coil was also constructed and installed in a smaller wooden box. Both boxes had leather straps so that a lineman or cableman could sling them over their shoulder, making it easy to transport.

The technician would simply clip the test leads onto the telephone circuit (a cable pair) and switch The Woodpecker to “on”.  The Woodpecker would be connected to a cable pair, usually at the Central Office and would generate a tone or series of tones onto the circuit. The technician would take the headset and pickup coil outside along the telephone cables and listen for the tone(s).  When the tone could not be heard, the technician would retrace steps back toward the Central Office until the tone was heard again. It was determined that at the exact point where the tone stopped was the fault location.

So, the tone produced by the Cableman’s Test Set, sounded a lot like a woodpecker tapping its beak on a tree, pole or log and that is how it got its name.

Back in the late 1990s, a young engineer at the Japanese phone company NTT Docomo, named Shigetaku Kurita, was working on what he thought was just another project — a series of icons that subscribers could use to quickly read information on the first mobile web services and to communicate with each other.

Kurita created a set of 176 icons called emoji, a combination of the Japanese words for picture — e — and character — moji.
 
The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the Kurita’s set for its permanent collection and consider it a modern language.
 
Originally, the screens on cellphones were cheaply made. They were just black and white and displayed only 50 symbols. Using words alone made it difficult to display information on weather, news, the movies, and all sorts of stuff.

Icons had been used throughout the Japan's history. Pictures serving as words, emoji, was nothing new to the Japanese culture. 

DID YOU KNOW...'Emoji' Was Added as a Word to Oxford Dictionaries in 2013
The emoji craze was so popular in 2012 and 2013 that it was added as a real word in August 2013.
 
New Emojis Are Announced Regularly
New emojis are being added all the time. In 2017 the Unicode Consortium finalized 69 new ones including a vampire, a genie and a mermaid.
This year, 157 new emojis were added including a ball of yarn, a badger and bagels.
 
The "Face With Tears of Joy" Is Among The Most-used Emojis
According to Emoji Tracker it's the most popular emoji used on Twitter.
The red heart, the heart eyes face, and the pink hearts emojis fall in second, third, and fourth place, respectively, suggesting that people also really enjoy expressing their love for someone or something online.
 
There Are Now 2,666 Official Emoji.
The Unicode Consortium, the governing body that manages the official emoji keyboard, expanded its offerings dramatically in the last few years. New emoji take into consideration skin tone, gender selection, and professions.
 
The Museum of Modern Art owns the original emoji collection.

​Before emojis, there were emoticons, facial expressions made with punctuation marks. The first emoticons appeared in an issue of Puck magazine, all the way back in 1881. The magazine published four “faces”—conveying joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment—and called them “typographical art.”
They were first used as a way of communicating emotions online in 1982. When it became difficult for people to tell the difference between jokes and serious posts on a Carnegie Mellon University digital message board, faculty member Scott Fahlman came up with a solution: Add the symbol :-) to denote humorous posts, and add the symbol :-( for serious ones.
In his announcement about this proposal, he even specified readers to “read it sideways.”