Story

In 1891 an engineering decision removed the human being from the middle of a telephone call. The rotary dial as it is known today was designed to drive that exchange. Its author was Almon Brown Strowger.

In the telephone's early years no call connected directly. You gave the number to the exchange and an operator took a cord and pushed it into the other party's jack. There was a person in the middle of the line — and that person's preferences were in the middle of it too.

In Kansas City a tradesman's business had been poor for some time. For a long while he could not work out why. Eventually he found out: the operator at the town's exchange was married to his competitor. Every call asking for his trade was put through to the other man.

Strowger did not go to the exchange and argue. He sat down and drew an exchange that needed no human operator. He patented it in 1891. From then on the caller dialled the number themselves and the line built itself.

Driving that system needed an interface. That is where the dial came from. The perforated disc that sat in every house for a century was there to step Strowger's exchange along.

Today the line builds itself. But someone still has to sit at the end of it. That person takes holidays, gets ill, cannot answer two calls at once, and goes home at eight. A share of the calls is never answered at all.

The problem Strowger solved was the connection. The problem left is the conversation itself. That is the part we are automating — the same idea, one layer up.

We took our name from him because the work is a continuation of his. We are not borrowing an inventor's story; we are solving the same problem at the next layer.

Strowger's design was not built to put the operator out of work — it was built to take the bias out of the middle. Nor is ours built to put your team out of work. Almon takes the volume and the out-of-hours; your people are left for the high-value work and the real relationships.