Telphone museum dials up past Ellsworth facility offers hands-on experience

ELLSWORTH – Almon B. Strowger was angry.

In the late 1800s, the Topeka, Kan., undertaker was losing business and he didn’t know why.

When he discovered the phone company switchboard operator – the wife of a competing undertaker – was routing all calls for funeral services away from Strowger and to her husband, he decided to take action.

“I needed a way to circumvent the operator and go directly to the people I wanted to reach,” Strowger, as portrayed by Ellsworth resident Doug Arntzen, said Saturday at the New England Museum of Telephony.

Strowger invented a mechanical switching system that allowed callers to dial their parties directly, an invention that became the forerunner of the telephone system that has allowed America to reach out and touch someone for most of the last century.

Strowger’s switching system is just one of the attractions at the museum, which held its annual open house Saturday. The museum was formed in 1983 and for the last 10 years has been located off Winkumpaugh Road in Ellsworth on a 100-acre farm owned by Charles and Sandra Galley. Galley, who is vice president of the museum’s board, offered a building on the property as a home for the museum’s growing collection.

“They had a collection of stuff without a home,” Galley said Saturday. “I had the potential home.”

The museum’s collection includes some of the earliest magneto or crank-type phones, which remained in service in some areas of Maine until the 1980s, as well as more modern systems removed from service in Maine towns in the late 1980s. The systems provide visitors with the hands-on experience of calling phones located throughout the building.

On Saturday, they kept retired switchboard operator Jean Leboucher of Ellsworth busy on one of several switchboards at the museum. In her day, a telephone exchange was limited to 10,000 lines, a number determined by how far an operator could reach.

“When you were hired, they would measure you to make sure you were able to reach the 10,000 numbers without knocking the next girl out of her chair,” Leboucher said.

The exhibits at the museum also include more modern equipment such as a mechanized relay system removed from the Belfast phone system in the early 1990s. Museum member Jeff Birkner of Natick, Mass., spends about 12 days a year at the museum working on the equipment – which covers about a quarter of the museum’s space – in an effort to get it to work. He estimates it will take 15 years to get the system running and tied into the rest of the museum exhibits.

“There’s a lot of equipment to work through just to get the dial tone,” he said. “As long as we make a little progress each time, it’s well worth the effort.”

Saturday’s open house also featured an exhibit on the Telstar satellite, explaining its role in the first transatlantic transmission of a television signal in 1962 from Andover, Maine, via satellite to France.

Much of the museum’s collection is stored in a building in a back field and in the private barns and garages of museum members. The board hopes to begin a capital campaign soon to raise funds for a new reception center for the first of several new buildings planned for the site.

The museum is open from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.