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Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
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Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
The fact you don’t have to dial 0 for operator when you call your mom? You have a Kansas City undertaker, Almon Strowger, to thank for that.
“He felt like a lot of his business was being diverted to his competitor, because his competitor’s wife ran the switchboard,” says Carol Johannes, Executive Director of the new Telephone Museum at Jefferson Barracks. “He complained to the Bell System for several years. They basically said, ‘Sorry, Charlie,’ so he invented this candlestick phone, which allowed direct dialing from his customers, and bypassed the switchboard altogether. That was back in the 1800s.”
Strowger went on to form the Automatic Electric Company, which supplied telephone equipment to Bell and thousands of independent phone companies, including St. Louis’ own Kinloch Telephone Exchange. Across the room from that jury-rigged candlestick phone, you can see the “step switch” system that evolved from it. Pick up the receiver of one of two old black Bakelite phones and dial the number; cylinders encased in a metal frame churn and tick, triggering the other phone to ring. Johannes says this system was in use through the 1970s (and, astonishingly, may still be in use in some very remote rural communities).
A former Bell employee assembled this cool little display. Johannes and the museum’s assistant director, Ken Schaper, are retired telephone workers, too. In fact, the whole project is under the umbrella of Telecom Pioneers, a nonprofit made up of retired phone workers. The group has been working on opening this museum for the past 13 years, and volunteers have spent 70,000 hours fixing up the building, an old former officers’ quarters built in 1896. Artifacts came from Pioneers’ basements, attics, and personal collections. That includes original hand-crank phones that ran on giant dry-cell batteries and a portable telegraph that was worn on the leg. The user sent Morse code out straight across the line while clinging to a phone pole. “We tell the kids who come in here, this was the very first form of texting,” Schaper says. Johannes says the museum has mainly attracted nostalgic older folks and curious young people.
“The majority of them walk in, and they have never seen a rotary-dial phone,” Johannes says. “They have no idea how to work them. For them, it’s kind of just amazement: ‘You guys really had phones like this?” Well, yeah,” she laughs. “From the historical standpoint, we feel it’s important to save this stuff. People are getting rid of landlines—they’re throwing phones away—and once this stuff is gone, it’s gone forever.”
FYI Jefferson Barracks Telephone Museum, 12 Hancock, 314-416-8004, facebook.com/jbtelmuseum.
And Don't Miss
The Telephone Museum, part of Jefferson Barracks’ expanding museum district, covers almost every aspect of the history of the telephone up until the current era. Here are some of the highlights:
A life-sized sculpture of Alexander Graham Bell, made by local artist Jan Brander-Kinnison
A 1940s wooden pay phone booth, equipped with a 1950s St. Louis telephone directory
A phone pole and climbing equipment (cue “Witchita Lineman”)
A very early local telephone directory—and a photocopy of it in a binder so you can look up your great-grandparents’ phone number if your St. Louis roots go that deep
Candy-colored Western Electric Princess rotary-dial phones (so Audrey Hepburn!) and crystal-topped phone-dialing tools dubbed “nail savers” because they saved ladies from chipping their manicures while dialing
Novelty phones shaped like Pac-Man, racecars, and cartoon characters
A special portable switchboard set up at the Mayfair Hotel when U.S. presidents—including Carter, Ford, Nixon, and Johnson—were visiting St. Louis.
One of the last pay phones from the old Busch Stadium, standing near Gate 8 that was salvaged before Busch’s 2005 demolition
