Almon Brown Strowger is the man credited with inventing this system in the late 19th century. As with so many 'inventions', the development work was not his entirely unaided work, but his was the first fully automatic switch to achieve commercial success and he certainly made the system what it is today.

How do you pronounce STROWGER?

The 'ow' is as in lower, not as in power. The G is pronounced as a J.

A maintenance engineer recalls:-

You could compare Strowger with the appeal for steam trains- added dimensions of smell and sound ! I remember well, being in an exchange late at night and hearing a single call progress its way through the exchange, selector by selector.   The smell of a stuck and overheating rotary magnet on a 2000 selector  as  you  walked  past the rack, then using your nose to locate it!

How about the racket that Registers made in a busy GSC (Group Switching Centre) and the pile of brass  filings under the over-worked 'send' uniselector ? Or the sound of a group selector bending it's wipers as it tries to go rotary and ends up clacking away because the wipers have gone out of adjustment and it can't enter the bank.

All these type of things made the job more than just plain routine. The whole exchange seemed to have a life of it's own, and as you got more experienced, you used all of your senses to look after the place. Marvellous really !

Strowger Net - An archive of trailing-edge communications, originally compiled by Andrew Emmerson.

Strowger at the Amberley Museum

Within the grounds of Amberley Museum, the Telephone Exchange is a working UAX13 complete with a rack of batteries, test rack & MDF with a full 50 lines of Strowger equipment.


Mobile Exchanges

Over the years, a variety of mobile exchanges were built to provide extra exchange capacity where it was most needed and to give emergency cover in the event of a disaster. Typical equipments fitted ranged from special UAX variants, Non-Director to TXE2 as well as containerised Digital and customer switch replacement modules.

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