More Telephone Tech

 Frank Horn tells us more about early telephones:

     Our first rotary dial phone in Johnstown, PA, included a three minute time limit, after which one had to redial.  Before that, we had the party line system you described.

     At Stanford, I worked one summer for the phone company, updating some of the old manual exchanges that had rows of lady phone operators,  and replacing them with gadgets called Strowgers.  These were rooms full of clanking gadgets that responded to the dialing.  (Little towns back then, with space between them, now called Silicon Valley.) The Strowgers started to be replaced in big cities like SFO with a newer system (crossbar).

     It turned out that CAA used these Strowger relay systems to control the remote navaids, like VOR's and ILS's.  The operator on duty could dial up the standby system when the monitor sounded an alarm or a pilot complained about the signal he was getting.  The phone company training and experience  I got turned out to be very useful, as I ended up instructing new technicians, and some of the older ones, about how to adjust the Strowgers.

     I might add that the Strowger switch was invented by an undertaker in the late 1890s. He did it to foil the local telephone operator, who was sending calls for "The Undertaker" not to Strowger, but to the competition, who happened to be her husband. He sold his patent for what seems like a pittance in today's dollars, $10,000, and returned to undertaking; but he died a wealthy man neverthe less. Death and taxes, you know.