There are no great solutions without big problems: Just ask Almon

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“The day is coming when (telephone) wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas. Friends will converse with each other without leaving their homes.”

In a letter to his father, Alexander Graham Bell made this prediction in 1876, before the first telephone was ever sold.

He would have been laughed at in 1876 for thinking his talking machine would be commonplace, but by the late 1880s, it was common enough to make one businessman take action.

Almon Strowger

Almon Strowger was angry. He was an undertaker in Kansas City, Kansas, and his business was beginning to flounder. He thought it might have something to do with his rival’s wife, who was an operator at the local telephone exchange.

When people called for an undertaker or even asked for him directly, Strowger believed his calls were sent to the competition.

He was forced into a period of creative thinking.

Strowger wanted to rid Kansas City, and the world, of telephone operators. By 1891 he had patented a crude but effective automatic exchange system.

His system was never installed in Kansas City, but his vision ultimately did eliminate the need for operator connections, assuring callers of more privacy and faster service.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but pesky problems are apt to bring great solutions too.