larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman) (04/23/91)
In article <telecom11.226.1@eecs.nwu.edu> 0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) writes: > North provided at least two notable innovations to the > telephone industry. First, North made the first Private Automatic > Exchange for the Galion, Ohio High School in 1920. The first all-relay central office installation by the North Electric Company was made in Lima, Ohio in 1914. This apparatus design was largely based upon patents issued to Edward E. Clement beginning in 1906. > Its name, PAX, is the source of this term in the non-Bell > telephone industry. I always understood the term "PAX" to have been coined by the Automatic Electric Company. They certainly used it enough in their literature and technical manuals! My 1932 edition of "Telephone Theory and Practice" by Kempster Miller explicitly gives credit to Automatic Electric for the term "PAX". > From that point, in 1906, Kellogg grew to be one of the major > names supplying telephone equipment to non-Bell companies. Kellogg, > in fact, had many innovations to its credit before Bell did, among > these the "Grabaphone," a hand-held transmitter-receiver some years > before Western Electric's first one in 1926 ... and the Kellogg phone > was truly superior by 1933. My late-1920's vintage Kellog catalog describes their handset with the tradename "MasterphonE" (that's really a trailing uppercase E), "being the product of twenty years of development" - which is consistent with the 1906 date above. They also describe the handset as being constructed from "Kellite", which I suspect is either bakelite or hard rubber. It is also amusing to note that while this catalog gives an address for Kellog at 1066 West Adams St. in Chicago, they give no telephone number! In my opinion, not all Kellog products were winners, though. Kellog produced a bizarre dial intercom system during the 1930's and 1940's which used a single selector that was a cross between a rotary stepping switch and an X-Y switch (the mechanism is difficult to describe without a drawing). This was a dial intercom which had a basic capacity of 19 stations. The station numbering went 1, 2, ... 8, 9, 01, 02, ... 09, and 00. The stepping switch was positioned at the *total* of the dialed pulses. If you dialed rapidly (the inter-digit timing control was crude), you could reach station "8" by dialing 5 followed by 3, or station "09" by dialing 5 followed by 6 followed by 8, etc.! This intercom was really a piece of junk, though, and while the stations resembled standard dial telephones, they did not even have sidetone reduction networks. Somewhere in my collection I have one of these Kellog dial intercoms, plus other pre-ITT Kellog artifacts. I bought most of them about twenty years ago at a liquidation auction of the Larkin Sound Company in Buffalo, NY. Larkin Sound was a major distributor of Kellog products from the 1920's through 1950's. Larkin Sound was rather well known at one time, having been founded by a descendant of the family who operated the Larkin Products Company, which ran a mail order operation whose size rivaled that of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward in the early 1900's. But I digress... > Kellogg remained a power in the non-Bell industry until ITT bought > it in 1952, ITT cleaned house at Kellog, with one of the first products to get the ax being the above dial intercom system! > GTE began buying companies and feeding business to > its own manufacturing subsidiary, Automatic Electric. GTE simply > decided in the 1950's to copy things that Bell had so successfully > clamped controls on a half-century earlier. In my opinion, GTE/AECo copied little from the Bell System. GTE did many things the AECo way. The GTE telephones were primarily descendents of the AECo "Monophone". The handsets, transmitters, receivers, network, dial and ringer were *pure* AECo, and had no design based upon WECo. As an example, the GTE/AECo "Styleline" telephone, which externally was similar to the WECo "Trimline", was totally different in internal design; even the handset cord connector design was different. Offhand, the only significant item of similarity was that the GTE/AECo 1A2 key telephone system used a clone of the WECo 584 panel. However, all KTU's and key telephone sets were of totally different design than that of WECo. An interesting GTE/AECo "innovation" was a synthesized music-on-hold generator card; whether its synthesized "music" (really!) was better than silence is debatable. :-) GTE/AECo relied heavily upon the Suttle Apparatus Company for connecting blocks, jacks, etc. GTE/AECo also provided modular jacks long before they became the norm in the Bell System. I first saw modular jacks from GTE/AECo around 1970 - before I ever saw them in the Bell System. I said to myself at the time that "these dinky plugs (as opposed to a 505A plug) will never work". Boy, was I wrong! :-) > Among things that > Stromberg and Carlson contributed to the industry was the first real > telephone set that was complete on a desktop on its own, including > magneto and ringer, instead of mounting on the wall. But, one of their > best clients, Rochester Home Telephone Company purchased control and > moved Stromberg-Carlson to Rochester, NY to protect their source of > supply from Bell predators. Stromberg-Carlson has led a checkered existence in the past twenty years. They were a division of General Dynamics that was largely based in Rochester, NY; however, General Dynamics closed most of the Rochester operation around 1970 and moved the corporate headquarters and much of the operation to Tampa, FL. Stromberg- Carlson did a significant amount of military business; I believe that General Dynamics may have absorbed that business into another division, while leaving Stromberg-Carlson as a provider of solely domestic telephone apparatus. I am not certain of the subsequent changes, though. The remains of Stromberg-Carlson changed their name to Comdial during the early 1980's, but may have now changed it back. I believe they may have also been acquired by Plessey. I have been out of the telephone industry mainstream for too many years to keep track of these things; perhaps another reader knows of their present fate. Interestingly enough, while Rochester Telephone may have once depended upon Stromberg-Carlson for switching apparatus, this changed significantly during the 1950's. For major central office installations, Stromberg-Carlson became one of the largest non-Bell customers of Western Electric, and installed No. 5 XBAR like it was going out of style. As soon as they could get it, Rochester Telephone installed No. 1 ESS, followed by TSPS and newer generation WECo ESS products. Rochester Telephone even had one of the first WECo No. 1 SPC's that was running an electronic tandem network (for Kodak?). They even had one of the first TSPS installations with an RTA, which I always thought was unusual considering how central the city of Rochester was to their operations. Their outlying CDO's may still have some X-Y, but most should have already been replaced by WECo (actually AT&T Network Systems) and Northern Telecom DMS-series apparatus. > The obvious Scandinavian bias of Stromberg's founders led them > to license manufacture of L.M. Ericsson mechanical telephone switching > technology known in the U.S. as the "Stromberg X-Y" switching machine. > X-Y was enormously popular in the non-Bell telephone companies just > after World War II. X-Y is a progressive control system, not unlike that of SxS. I have worked with X-Y apparatus and never liked it. In my opinion it was some of the most inferior CO apparatus ever built. The X-Y bank multiple wires are extremely fragile and prone to dirt and grease contamination that cannot be easily cleaned (as opposed to SxS rotary banks which are easy to clean). If the wires get bent for some reason (like by an improperly adjusted or inserted switch, or through careless cleaning), no amount of adjustment and cajoling will ever get them straight enough for continued, reliable operation. X-Y PABX's were common, especially the Stromberg-Carlson F40 (40-line) and F80 (80-line). > One more historic name one might run across is the Leich > Electric Company at Genoa, Illinois [close to Chicago!], based upon > buying the rights of North Electric's manual telephone equipment in > one of North's low points while North was getting into automatic > switches. Curiously, what made Leich famous was its development of its > own form of automatic switch, designed by a German who had worked at > North Electric, went to Germany to fight for the Kaiser, and came back > to the U.S. after the war. Leich's relay-switch most closely resembled > a crossbar switch for some decades before the term was coined, and its > unique style was quite suited to PBXs and very small telephone > exchanges. Leich enjoyed considerable popularity in this arena, and > supplied telephone sets that bore the Leich name. Leich was acquired by Automatic Electric before it in turn was acquired by GTE. The Leich switch mechanism is called "cross-point", and would be difficult to describe without illustrations. The Leich system is common control, but uses a very simple concept with the common control function being primarily a "link allotter" circuit. This type of common control is far simpler than say, a marker in a crossbar system. The Leich switch was used for small CO's up to a few hundred lines. The Leich switch was far more popular as a PABX, with the two most common models being the Leich 40 and the Leich 80. For many years these Leich products competed with the Stromberg-Carlson F40 and F80 for the lion's share of the independent operating telephone company small PABX market. In my opinion, the Leich PABX's were far more reliable than the X-Y PABX's since the Leich apparatus had no mechanical stepping and timing mechanisms. The crosspoint switch had hold and select magnets not unlike that of a crossbar switch; everything else were relays. The Leich relays were flat spring in nature; they were fairly reliable but once out of adjustment were a real bear requiring a special type of finesse. I have learned The Hard Way that the more one adjusts a Leich relay, the worse it gets! :-) The Leich PABX was also interesting in that it was a single stage switch that was non-blocking; i.e., all stations had access to all trunks. During the early 1970's GTE/AECo made a considerable effort to upgrade the Leich PABX line into the 40B and 80B models. They replaced a rather clunky looking console with one that was truly state of the art. They provided a touch-tone feature, and made numerous improvements in electrical and mechanical design. I suspect there are AECo/Leich PABX's still in service. GTE, in what may be viewed as an unusual move for the time, formed their own interconnect installation organization in the early 1970's. They not only sold the GTE/AECo apparatus to other interconnect companies, but in certain major cities installed it themselves. The GTE interconnect organization was headquartered in Stamford, CT. They had various major nationwide accounts during the 1970's, one of which was the Mariott hotel chain. Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp. "Have you hugged your cat today?" VOICE: 716/688-1231 {boulder, rutgers, watmath}!ub!kitty!larry FAX: 716/741-9635 [note: ub=acsu.buffalo.edu] uunet!/ \aerion!larry
"Donald E. Kimberlin" <0004133373@mcimail.com> (04/25/91)
In Digest v11,Iss300, Larry Lippman added to the discussion about roots of telephone manufacturing in the U.S., suggesting that Stromberg- Carlson had evolved into Comdial, thus: > Stromberg-Carlson has led a checkered existence in the past twenty > years ... General Dynamics ... moved the corporate headquarters and > much of the operation to Tampa, FL. Minor correction (about 85 miles), Larry. The place Stromberg-Carlson wound up is Lake Mary, FL, a northerly suburb of Orlando, just off I-4 on the way to Daytona from Orlando. Continuing: > Stromberg-Carlson did a significant amount of military business; I > believe that General Dynamics may have absorbed that business into > another division, while leaving Stromberg-Carlson as a provider of solely > domestic telephone apparatus. I am not certain of the subsequent > changes, though. Pretty close to what I heard last year when doing some field debugging of their DCO Series exchanges in rural Mississippi (John Higdon, stay tuned for a special message about what PacBell will inflict upon you shortly!) In fact, G-D bought Stromberg in an attempt to learn about telephony to merge it into military electronic telephone exchanges. After getting an electronic exchange developed, they found they couldn't market the DCO to Telcos. It was just TOO different from military sales, so after getting the technology G-D wanted, they sold the Stromber Florida operation to English General Electric (NO relation to the American General Electric), which very shortly after the purchase, merged with Plessey of England, and the merged name soon changed to GPT/Stromberg-Carlson. It was probably thought to be a technology prize by the British, but read on at the end of this story! Then, in 1990, Siemens of Germany bought 40% of GPT back in England, so what is in Lake Mary today is owned by GPT, in turn largely owned by Siemens. Today's name runs something like GPT-Siemens/Stromberg- Carlson. (no kidding!) Larry continues: > The remains of Stromberg-Carlson changed their name to Comdial during > the early 1980's, but may have now changed it back. I believe they may > have also been acquired by Plessey. In fact, G-D spun off Stromberg's telephone-set manufacturing (which had, like ITT, licensed manufacture of WECo-pattern telephone sets) to the public, forming ComDial, which struggles to survive to this day in Charlottesville, VA. Michael Dorrian reported about this part of the Stromberg evolution in Digest v11, Iss302: > As far as I know, Comdial remains the only US manufacturer of > telephones (local content - AT&T's phones are assembled in the US from > Asian manufactured components). This offers quite a niche on sales to > the US government. In fact, Dear Readers, ComDial remains the place you can still buy a 500 or 2500 set with a STEEL baseplate, in my opinion even better than the plastic one AT&T now sells via Sears and such. They are small enough that I expect you can probably buy just one from the Charlottesville factory ... but I can't guarantee that. ComDial's president, who just died recently was on a personal campaign to make a quality, durable telephone set in the USA, much like the campaign of Zenith's president to keep one US television set factory going. Michael continues: > Recent {Washington Post} Virginia 30 had them at $80M in sales with 1K > employees. That report must have piqued the trade press, for the April 22 <CommunicationsWEEK> reported that ComDial reported it had a 1990 profit for the first time in six years, but analysts said it might be short-lived due to the recession and the Gulf War. The report said ComDial had just laid off 33 more workers to cut its staff to 940, down from 1,200 in 1987. It further reported ComDial had almost been buried by foreign imnports in station sets, so it had expanded to making key systems in 1985, which business had, at a loss, largely sustained it. The report said ComDial's sales were predominantly (65%) through distributors, so I'm sure Macy Hallock knows plenty about them lately. One diversion from Stromberg here, to respond to Larry about a remark concerning GTE and Automatic Electric. Larry quoted: >> GTE began buying companies and feeding business to >> its own manufacturing subsidiary, Automatic Electric. GTE simply >> decided in the 1950's to copy things that Bell had so successfully >> clamped controls on a half-century earlier. Then Larry commented: > In my opinion, GTE/AECo copied little from the Bell System. GTE did many > things the AECo way. My remark was not meant to say GTE/AECo emulated Bell designs. Rather, it was an allusion to GTE copying Bell's business and vertical market structure by acquiring and feeding its own design and manufacture with its captive operating companies. Just like the local Bell companies were BOCs, the GTE ones were GTOCs. They had a great way of fending off aspiring suppliers by telling them they could buy only against approved Materials Requests, which came from Stamford HQ. When one wasted a ticket to Stamford, one was told they could only approve Materials Requests orginating from some unknown place in the Operating Companies. Just like dealing with Bell, smart suppliers knew the cycle starting with lots of multipoint schmoozing, after which a Materials Request would "materialize," specifying one supplier's product, purchased through Automatic Electic. (Can you say, "KS Spec?") But, back to GPT-Plessey-Siemens/Stromberg-Carlson or whatever their name is these days, and that special alert for John Higdon: The General Dynamics legacy left there is what became the thing called the Century Digital Central Office, or DCO. They've managed a market postion of going into RBOCs and getting the "spoiler" slot of Number Two Supplier, just to be a bargaining chip against Northern Telecom. South Central Bell did that, so lots of DCOs are in KY, TN, AL, MS and LA. The DCO has a T-1 (23B+D) connected Remote Line Switch, or RLS. PHaving lost its General Dynamics product control mentors, this combination HAS to be one of the most beknightedly out-of-control pieces of hardware and software junk ever foisted on the telephone industry. The RLS is but a couple of years old and is running through Software Release 17 already! I personally have stood in front of one that had all green lights and no local or remote alarms ... but would offer no dial tone to any subscribers. Telephone people on here will recognize this as perhaps one of the most irresponsible things any public telephone exchange could ever do. And finally, the message for John Higdon: Pacific Telephone has bought these beasts and should be starting installationa about now. (Just thought you'd like the warning so you can convert to all GTE FX's, John!)
John Higdon <john@zygot.ati.com> (04/27/91)
"Donald E. Kimberlin" <0004133373@mcimail.com> writes: > In fact, Dear Readers, ComDial remains the place you can still > buy a 500 or 2500 set with a STEEL baseplate, The recently-purchased 2500 set sitting next to me made by Cortelco in Corinth, MS, has a steel baseplate. It also has a standard mechanical ringer with TWO gongs. > And finally, the message for John Higdon: Pacific Telephone has > bought these beasts and should be starting installationa about now. > (Just thought you'd like the warning so you can convert to all GTE > FX's, John!) I had heard about these things, but had not for one moment considered that any real telco would buy or install them. But then, Pac*Bell is hardly a real telco so what else could be expected? My contacts at Pac*Bell have SWORN that the replacement for my 5XB will be a 5ESS, and that it will appear in time for the CLASS startup in October, and that CLASS WILL be offered. Too bad it is Friday night; there will be some phone calls made about this nightmare. Woe be unto any who have told me what I want to hear just to get this monkey of his back. As far as converting to GTE FX is concerned, I will have the phone removed first. Better to sit in isolation, listening to Beethoven and reading trade journals than to fight with GTE and what it passes off as "service". Near as I can tell, the GTD-5 is the GTE equivalent of the DCO, right? Just ask the Police/Fire departments in Los Gatos! John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !