Phone Company Timescale
You will only see upgrades to the phone system about once in a generation and only when the phone companies are faced with government regulation or possible extinction from competition if they do not upgrade.
| 1876 | Alexander Graham Bell's Patent for telephone granted |
| 1877 | Bell Telephone company formed (local phone service) |
| 1879 | January - First telephone exchange; Telephone wires are being strung on telephone poles |
| 1880 | Coin operated pay phones deployed by what would become AT&T |
| 1885 | AT&T incorporated (long distance service) |
| 1886 | AT&T Privage Line service created - Point to point phone lines dedicted to the use of a single subscriber |
| 1887 | AT&T begins charging higher rates for daytime service. |
| 1890 | AT&T/Bell Telephone company upgrades from single wire to two-wire pairs. Upgrade takes 10 years |
| 1891 | Almon B. Strowger (an undertaker) receives patent for an automated call switching device he developed. Strowger developed the device because of 2 frustrations he experienced in dealing with the phone company: a) the exchange operator was a gossip and b) she kept connecting people to the wrong undertaker. From Bell Telephone's own documents: "[Almon Strowger] had some good reasons for being disgruntled with his telephone service. As the telephone business grew faster and faster in America’s larger cities, telephone central offices grew more and more complex. The switchboards were something to behold, with many, many operators sitting in long rows plugging countless plugs into countless jacks. The cost of adding new subscribers had risen to the point foreseen in the earlier days, and that cost was continuing to rise, not in a direct, but in a geometric ratio. One large city general manager wrote that he could see the day coming soon when he would go broke merely by adding a few more subscribers." From "A Capsule History of the Bell System" Compiled and edited from previously published material by Kenneth P. Todd, Jr.; Copyrighted (c) by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) It would take nearly three decades before Bell and AT&T started fixing the problems that were clearly affecting their subscribers and ONLY because independant phone companies were using the Strowger (Stowager) switches made by Automatic Electric and putting the squeeze on AT&T and Bell. |
| 1892 | First commercial version of Strowger machine built (15 years before deployment in AT&T begins) |
| 1896 | Dial Telepnones invented. Will take 40+ years for phone companies to deploy fully. |
| 1893 | A.G. Bell telephone patent expires |
| 1900 | AT&T has 855,900 telephones installed nationwide, all calls manually switched |
| 1902 | AT&T orders a 'study' of a Strowger based device to look for 'problems' before buying/installing them
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| 1908 | Original Strowger patent expires. |
| 1918 | Phone system now regulated by office of US Postmaster by Presidential Executive Order. |
| 1919 | Bell company finally starts deploying Strowger-type switches in its exchanges
and dial telephones in subscribers homes. AT&T obtains a 20% increase in rates (which are now regulated because they were charging too much) |
| 1920 | First central office switching device built by Western Electric (what became Bell Laboratories) installed.
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| 1931 | TeletypeWriter eXchange (TWX) service deployed by AT&T. This allows switched teletypwriter calls between AT&T customers with teletypewriter systems. Teletypewriters were the replacement to telegraphs. |
| 1934 | Roosevelt signs Communications Act placing interstate phone service (AT&T) under regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. |
| 1938 | First crossbar phone switch installed (two decades after the Strowger step-by-step) |
| 1943 | First toll-call capable crossbar switch installed |
| 1948 | 30,000,000 phones in AT&T/Bell system |
| 1949 | U.S. Government begins first anti-trust suit against AT&T/Bell Telephone |
| 1950 | Delaware first state with phone system that is completely dial-operated |
| 1956 | Consent Decree - Judgement by Fed. Govt. restricting Bell Telephone to common carrier communications. This splits Bell local carrier services from AT&T long distance and the manufacturing divisions of AT&T (Western Electric and Bell Labs). |
| 1958 | Government orders AT&T to cut rates by 15% |
| 1959 | Direct Distance Dialing (AT&T Call Director service). Other long distance carriers required to dial absurd 10- sequence digits when using AT&T circuits to sell long distance service. |
The bigger the phone companies got, the more sluggish and unresponsive they became to their customer's demands. Ultimately, the United States Government had to step in and break up the monopoly held by AT&T.