8/20/2019 Heritage Commission Summer 2015 Newsletter, Special Edition http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/heritage-commission-summer-2015-newsletter-special-edition 1/6 he early telephone system was a modern version of the tele- graph in which the "keys" and "sounders" at telegraph station points were replaced by microphones and earphones. A telegraph connection was just a long wire connecting two telegraph stations, and these stations could only send messages between their two points, since that's where the wire was.If you wanted to con- nect to a multitude of stations, as in having a telephone in every house, you needed a multitude of wires. Of course, it's impractical to have a wire connecting every house to every other house.If you had a thousand houses in a city, each house would need a wire connected to every one of the other 999 houses to ensure that a call could be placed to those houses. Not only that, but the home- owner himself would need to connect his telephone to the appropriate wire to reach the desired party.The tele- phone system is wired in a more practical way in which the wire from each home connects to a central office.In that central office of yester- year, a telephone operator would connect the caller's wire to the wire of the desired call recipient. A telephone operator might be able to handle connections between sev- eral hundred houses, but things get out of hand when thousands are involved. When a call had to connect from one group of a few hundred to someone outside the group, the op- erator would instead connect the call to the operator in charge of a differ- ent group of which the intended re- cipient was a part.In this way, a city with several thousand homes could VOL. 37, NO. 2 Special Edition, Summer 2015 Telephone History in Morris County The No. 1 ESS Central Office Switch in Succasunna by Dev Gualtieri (Ledgewood, NJ) T Almost un- noticed, Roxbury is celebrating a fiftieth anni- versary of an important moment in telephone history, marked by the plaque on the Verizon Building at 144 Route 10 West, in Succasunna: "The nation's first commercial Elec- tronic Switching System was placed in service here on May 30, 1965. Devel- oped, designed, manufactured and in- stalled through the combined efforts of Bell Laboratories, Western Electric and New Jersey Bell, it ushered in a new era of telephone communications.Elec- tronic switching represents a major milestone in the Bell System's efforts to produce better, faster, more flexible communications service to meet the needs of a growing and ever-changing country." The following article traces the devel- opment of telephone communication.It is based on an article by the author in theDrakesville Times No.10 pub- lishedin May. Yesterday and today. The building at 144 Route 10 West, housing the No. 1 ESS as it appeared in 1965 (left), and as it appears today as a Verizon facility (right). (Left photograph courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories; right photograph by Dev Gualtieri, Ledgewood, NJ) (see No. 1 ESS on page 3)
Transcript
8/20/2019 Heritage Commission Summer 2015 Newsletter, Special Edition
he early telephone system wasa modern version of the tele-graph in which the "keys" and
"sounders" at telegraph station pointswere replaced by microphones andearphones. A telegraph connectionwas just a long wire connecting twotelegraph stations, and these stationscould only send messages betweentheir two points, since that's wherethe wire was. If you wanted to con-nect to a multitude of stations, as inhaving a telephone in every house,you needed a multitude of wires.
Of course, it's impractical to have awire connecting every house to everyother house. If you had a thousandhouses in a city, each house wouldneed a wire connected to every oneof the other 999 houses to ensure thata call could be placed to thosehouses. Not only that, but the home-owner himself would need to connect
his telephone to the appropriate wireto reach the desired party. The tele-phone system is wired in a more
practical way in which the wire fromeach home connects to a centraloffice. In that central office of yester-year, a telephone operator wouldconnect the caller's wire to the wire ofthe desired call recipient.
A telephone operator might be ableto handle connections between sev-eral hundred houses, but things getout of hand when thousands areinvolved. When a call had to connect
from one group of a few hundred tosomeone outside the group, the op-erator would instead connect the callto the operator in charge of a differ-ent group of which the intended re-cipient was a part. In this way, a citywith several thousand homes could
VOL. 37, NO. 2 Special Edition, Summer 2015
Telephone History in Morris CountyThe No. 1 ESS Central Office Switch in Succasunna
by Dev Gualtieri (Ledgewood, NJ)
T
Almost un-noticed,Roxbury iscelebrating afiftieth anni-versary of animportant
moment in telephone history,marked by the plaque on the VerizonBuilding at 144 Route 10 West, inSuccasunna:
"The nation's first commercial Elec-tronic Switching System was placed inservice here on May 30, 1965. Devel-oped, designed, manufactured and in-stalled through the combined efforts ofBell Laboratories, Western Electric andNew Jersey Bell, it ushered in a new eraof telephone communications.
Elec-tronic switching represents a majormilestone in the Bell System's efforts to
produce better, faster, more flexiblecommunications service to meet theneeds of a growing and ever-changingcountry."
The following article traces the devel-opment of telephone communication.
It is based on an article by the authorin the Drakesville Times No.10 pub-
lished in May.
Yesterday and today. The building at 144 Route 10 West, housing the No. 1 ESS as it appeared in 1965 (left), and as it appears today as a Verizon facility (right). (Left photograph courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories; right photograph by Dev Gualtieri, Ledgewood, NJ)
n 1965, Bell Telephone was readyto change the way the worldmade phone calls. It chose Suc-
casunna as the place to do it.
On May 30, in a low, flat buildingthat still stands at the corner ofHunter Street and Route 10, com-puters were merged with the publictelephone system. The future ofphone calls arrived at 12:01 a.m.,when "Ma Bell" activated theworld’s first commercial electronicswitching system, and the 4,300residents of Succasunna had firstdibs.
Former Roxbury Mayor Louis Nero
was one of a select 200 who got toreally see what the new “No. 1 ESS”switching system could do. It didn’ttake him long to figure out how touse something called “three-waycalling.” The mayor, still at home,could simultaneously direct hisminions in town hall and chat withtownship attorney Alex Lozorisakwhile the counselor was in his officeacross town.
The mayor also got to test another
computer age miracle called “call
forwarding.” According to the De-cember 1965 issue of Popular Science, Nero did OK with the three-way call-ing part but stumbled somewhat with
the call forwarding, which he used totransfer calls to the home of a neigh-bor he visited.
“One thing about that transfer busi-ness is that you’ve got to remember tohave your calls put back on yourphone when you get home,” he toldthe magazine. “I had mine transferredto a neighbor’s house and the ex-change kept right on transferringthem. My neighbor kept telling eve-ryone who called that they had dialedthe wrong number and they kept call-ing back to deny it.”
The town lawyer said he liked thespeed dialing afforded by the newcomputerized system. They called it“abbreviated dialing” back then.
Hans Fantel, who wrote the article,was sufficiently impressed. “Judgingfrom the results of the Succasunnatests of ESS thus far, abbreviated dial-ing is here to stay,” he predicted, add-ing that “no matter what shape your
telephone takes in the years to come –
Touch-Tone, Trimline, or even Picture-phone – electronic switching, or ESS,will serve as your unseen genie.”
The Succasunna deployment of No. 1ESS, or "1 ESS," came after 10 years ofintense Bell Telephone research. Thequiet new system was designed to be
“immortal,” according to the PopularScience article, but its lifespan endedup being only 26 years; No. 1 ESS wasreplaced with No. 5 ESS on Sept. 28,1991.
In an upcoming entry to his blog, elec-trical engineer Devlin Gualtieri ofLedgewood pays tribute to No. 1 ESSand discusses details about itscutting-edge innards. “Circuit boardscontaining 64 magnetic reed relaysarranged in an 8x8 matrix acted as a
smaller, automated version of a tele-phone operator’s plug board,” wroteGualtieri. “Computers in the mid-1960s were primitive by today’s stan-dards.”
For example, Gualtieri said No. 1 ESSboasted 731,000 bytes of memory, justshy of one megabyte. “This is 2,000
Succasunna, 1965: The Wedding of Phones and Computersby Fred J. Aun
2
I
Frederick R. Koppel. Chairman of the Board of AT&T; Richard Hughes, Governor of New Jer- sey; and E. Hornsby Wasson, President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., (left to right) atthe master control center of the No. 1 ESS central office at Succasunna. (see Succasunna 1965 on page 3)
United States Secretary of Commerce John T.
Conner at the Waldorf Towers, New York City,receives an add-on conference call from Gov-ernor Hughes at Succasunna. Mayor Louis
Nero of Roxbury Township was the third partyin the call on No. 1 ESS.
easily have a universal telephone sys-tem with a few tens of operators.
The key element of telephone auto-mation was a device familiar to mostof us older than a few decades. It's
the telephone dial, that metal ringwith numbered holes used to “dial” anumber. Dialing was with us forsuch a long time that we still use theterm, “dial,” when we punch a num-ber into a keypad. The telephone dialsent coded clicks along the telephonewires to electrical relays, and theserelays decoded the dialed numbersinto electrical connections that simu-lated the actions of an operator.
These relays were mechanical; and,like all mechanical components, theywould fail after too many operations. The relay-switched telephone net-work had the additional problem thatit was slow. The dials on telephonesmoved slowly, since their pulsescouldn't outrun the speed of therelays. Both subscribers and the tele-phone company had an interest in abetter switching technology. It's not acoincidence that the transistor wasinvented at a telephone company re-
search center, Bell Laboratories, sincebetter means of switching telephonesignals was a goal of telephone re-search.
The transistor enabled not only im-proved amplifiers for long distancecalling, but also computing. By the1960s, it had become practical to usecomputers to enhance telephoneswitching. The first computerizedelectronic switching system, called a
stored program control telephoneexchange, was put into service inSuccasunna, New Jersey, in 1965. Adedication ceremony was held onMay 27, 1965, and the exchange, ini-tially serving 200 of the town’s 4,300customers, began service on May 30,1965.
In this automated telephone ex-change, miniature magnetic switchesreplaced the bulky relays of the older
telephone exchanges. The Suc-casunna exchange was called the"Number One Electronic SwitchingSystem," abbreviated as No. 1 ESS. No. 1 ESS was designed for a peakcapacity of 37,000-80,000 calls perhour, depending on the hardwareconfiguration.
The impetus for development of thistelephone exchange was not just theenhanced reliability that these newtechnologies offered. No. 1 ESS alsomade possible telephone enhance-ments that are now common, such ascall waiting and three-way calling. Italso allowed companies to have theirown centralized telephone exchangewithout needing equipment locatedat the company site.
The computer of the No. 1 ESS was10,000 times slower than a typicaldesktop computer of today, and thecomputer memory was likewiselimited. The program memory - thememory dedicated to the operatinginstructions for the exchange - wascontained in just under a megabyte. This is 2,000 times smaller than thememory capacity of a cellphone. Theoriginal 1965 No. 1 ESS was roughly
equivalent inspeed and mem-ory to a 1977 Ap-ple II desktop.
This introductionof a computerizedtelephone net-work broughtwith it the firstgroup of com-puter hackers,known as "phone
phreaks."
Tele-phone engineersdecided to usetones, similar tokeypad touch-tones, to sendnetwork com-mands along thesame wires used
times smaller than the memory of acellphone,” he pointed out.
But the passage of time should notdiminish the awe at what Bell cre-ated 50 years ago. “Tomorrow’sTelephone is Reality,” was the head-line of a story in the June, 10, 1965,Rome News-Tribune. The paper saidthe equipment at work in Suc-casunna was the result of “morethan 2,000 man-years of researchand development and a $100 millioninvestment” and was “the Bell Sys-tem’s largest research and develop-ment undertaking” to date.
In a June 1965 Bell Laboratoriespublication, the company said thedesire to replace slow, noisy and
limited human and
electro-mechanical phone call switchingwith electronic switching pre-datedWorld War II. “Note that this wasyears before the transistor was in-vented or named,” said the report.“Thus, we come to the fruition of 20years of Bell System organized effordirected toward an electronicswitching system.”!
!"#$% '()*"$+,- ". !"# %&'( )(*+,-./ /01
234 23567
(from Succasunna 1965 on page 2)(from No. 1 ESS on page 1)
The master control center at the Succasunna No. 1 ESS office. Controls
and lamps on the panels at the far right are used for various maintenance
and administrative functions. The teletypewriter supplements the panel
controls. The tape reels at the left are used for automatic message ac-
for transmitting voice signals. Speci-fications for these tone commandswere discovered by electronic hobby-ists who used them to make free longdistance calls. One phone phreak,known as "Captain Crunch," was re-
nowned as using a cereal box toywhistle as a source of command tones.
Eventually, hobbyists constructedelectronic boxes to precisely generatethese "in-band" tones. These "blueboxes" became such a problem thatthe telephone company revised itstelephone switches to send com-mands as "out-of-band" signals thatcould not be generated at a consumertelephone. Many of the phonephreaks went on to participate inearly personal computer culture, suchas the Silicon Valley-based HomebrewComputer Club. Members of thatclub started the earliest personalcomputer companies, including AppleComputer.
In 1976, improvements were made toexisting 1 ESS central office switches. The upgraded version, called No. 1AESS had a processor with a fourfoldfaster speed and computer disk stor-
age, all in a quarter of the originalvolume. Thousands of No. 1 ESS andNo. 1A ESS systems were deployed,but most were replaced in the 1990sby more advanced central officeswitches. A few No. 1A ESS systemsstill remain, most of which are locatedin the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitanarea; the Saint Louis, Missouri, met-ropolitan area; and the Dallas/FortWorth, Texas, metropolitan area.
In the past decade, telephone com-munication has advanced from apoint-to-point affair, in which a callerin one place would attempt to contactsomeone in another place, to aperson-to-person affair enabled bycellphones. Today, more than 90 per-cent of American adults own a cell-phone, and the number of cellphonesis now estimated to exceed the worldpopulation.
Just a decade ago, 90 percent of UShouseholds had a landline telephone. Since many people now maintain acellphone as their only telephone, thisportion has declined to just 50 percentin those 10 years. Telephone commu-nication was a separate technology for
more than a hundred years, but it hasnow merged in your cellphone withInternet access and music/video playthrough a process of technologicalconvergence. There is more comput-ing than telecommunication in thetelephones of today.!
4
New Jersey Bell Switchman Fritz Blume checks circuit at the No. 1 ESS office in Succasunna, NJ. In the foreground are some of the basic units of this electronic telephone switching system. (Pho-tograph courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories)
(from 1 ESS on page 3)
8/20/2019 Heritage Commission Summer 2015 Newsletter, Special Edition
ewcomers to the area afterMay 30, 1965, were baffled bythe telephone services theywere offered. This might not
have been true had they happened tovisit the Bell System Pavilion at theWorld's Fair in 1964, where the newtechnology was already on view, in-cluding picture phones.
At the time, calls were charged bythe minute and were more expensiveduring the daytime on weekdays:people chose to economize by mak-ing their calls in the evenings and atweekends. Subscribers were begin-ning to convert from circular dialphones to push button. Succasunna
had also been the first office in Mor-ris County to convert to the dial sys-tem back in 1939. 1 Prior to that theSuccasunna switchboard, like many
other rural exchanges operated fromprivate homes, was run by Mrs. Bar-bara Bryant of North Hillside Avenue.A recent reminiscence from Jane
Freund, a former Roxbury resident,recalls:
"I am now 92. In the early 1930s Iremember visiting the phone com-pany switchboard in a privatehouse on the south side of HillsideAvenue between Meeker Street andMain Street. The girls (ladies) saton high chairs with earphones on,putting phone plugs in and out ofthe switchboard as calls wererequested. As I remember, theswitchboard was in the living room
or front room of the house."
Barbara Bryant had started her tele-phone career in 1900 at HopatcongHouse. This was when the New Jersey
Bell Telephone company opened fourswitchboards in Morris County: Ho-patcong, Succasunna, Mendham andMillington. The first woman tele-
phone operator had been Emma Nuttin Boston in 1878, her career almost aslong as Barbara Bryant's 39 years.Originally teenage telegraph boys hadinherited the switchboard positions,but they were irresponsible andswore. Emma Nutt and her sisterStella were the first women to replacethem. 2 Their soothing voices and cul-tured accents were such a success thatby the late 1880s women dominatedthe profession. !
1. The History of Roxbury Township, vol.
1, pp. 125-126. 2...0''#1223334&535&67"&809:'(-9;"7:(;95'.4;(<25<<"=&,''=3(-78:=>:'=3(<"&='575#0(&5=(#5-"'(-2
5
Early Switchboard Operation in SuccasunnaBy Miriam Morris
N
"Cellphone communication is enabled by the multiple, often unsightly, cellphone towers distributed along our roadways. Not that the landline tele- phone didn't come with its associated artifact, the telephone pole. However, these poles, more properly called 'utility poles,' also carried electricityto our homes and businesses, so the addition of a few more wires for telephony was never seen as a problem." Devlin Gualtieri. Utility poles on thecorner of Main Street and Hillside Avenue, near future sites of the Succasunna switch boards and No. 1 ESS. Photo courtesy of Richard Cramond
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