The Erickson brothers and Frank Lundquist
Exchange Automation Pioneers
Alexander E. Keith, Frank A. Lundquist and the Erickson brothers collaborated on many early telephone related patents. A search of US Patent Office shows that various combinations of these four inventors have more than 200 patents granted. Some patents are Keith only, some Lundquist only, some Charles J. Erickson only, some with two, three or four named co-inventors. Together they were an engineering juggernaut for telephone systems and apparatus from 1893 until the 1920's. For the most part, independent from AT&T/Western Electric.
This section's focus is on Lundquist and the Ericksons. See Appendix B here for more on Alexander E. Keith. Some of the materials and the picture below are from Ref 1.
John Erickson was born in Långbanshyttan, Sweden, January 25, 1866. He died on October 18, 1943. Charles J. Erickson was born at Lindsborg, Kansas, on July 23, 1870. He died On September 28, 1954. Frank A. Lundquist was born in Galva, Ill., June 23, 1868. He died On April 6, 1954. Biographical information on the Ericksons is found in Svenska Nyheter, Chicago, July 19, 1904.
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Lindsborg is often called "Little Sweden USA". The Swedish influence is still felt more than 150 years after the Erickson family settled in Lindsborg in 1868 and started a farm.
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Almon Strowger is widely recognized as the pioneer of the automatic exchange. However, as with many groundbreaking ideas, others also recognized the potential and contributed to the field's development. Frank Lundquist (apparently without knowledge of Strowger) appears to be one who saw the same opportunity and actively decided to build a telephone switch for exchange automation.
From an account by Frank -- "I loitered around a hotel lobby in Salina, Kansas. I made a regular pest of myself examining the switchboard. The idea occurred to me then that someday those connections would be made automatically. I went back home and began to figure and tinker away with the idea." Lundquist had a little shop in the loft of an old red barn at his home in Lindsborg, where he tried to translate his ideas into reality.
Frank was good friends with the Erickson brothers John and Charles. They too were born inventors having learned to be resourceful by working on their parent's farm. You can see their love of inventing from this account -- "The Erickson's first project was to solve the perpetual motion problem! They worked on it for three years, but were forced, like countless others, to abandon it." It wasn’t a fools pursuit since they likely had no knowledge of the recently discovered Laws of Thermodynamics, that proved perpetual motion was impossible.
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Lundquist discussed his telephone switch ideas (possibly after learning about Strowger's first exchange in La Porte, Indiana, 1892) with the Ericksons. Their response to the possibility of developing an automatic exchange is recorded by Charles as follows- "After John and I thought about the problem for a few minutes we saw that it could be done on somewhat the same principle as the printing telegraph we had underway. After we had explained to Frank Lundquist how we saw it possible, he was up in the air with enthusiasm. "
By start of 1892 the three inventors had a prototype switch completed with a capacity of one hundred lines. Naturally, it was not easy to turn a rudimentary model into a practical commercial success. US patent No. 763,412 appears to be the first patent filed by the three inventors in 1893 but not granted until 1904. It's unclear if any ideas from this patent influenced future switch development. It used a subscriber operated hand crank to facilitate dialing.
Toward the end of 1893, A. E. Keith and A. B. Strowger contacted the three inventors and requested a meeting with the objective of discussing automatic switching.
The rest is history with the five inventors joining forces at Strowger's company, to be renamed the Automatic Electric Company (AEC) in 1901. It's possible that the "Zither switch" concepts were originally conceived by Lundquist and/or the Ericksons. However, Keith's name is listed first, Lundquist is second, on their first joint patent US540168A (Zither, 1894 filed, granted 1895).
Together these five principals and associates defined the path forward for small exchange switching automation. Starting in 1919, AT&T/Western Electric became a long term customer of AEC for small city exchange hardware replacing switchboards. General Telephone and Electronics (GT&E) acquired AEC through a merger with Theodore Gary & Company in 1955, and continued operating the unit into the 1980s (Ref 2).
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Check out the article here for more about the steady progress towards dial automation.
References
Ref 1: Emory Lindquist, The Invention and Development of the Dial Telephone: The Contribution of Three Lindsborg Inventors. THE KANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY. Volume XXIII, Spring 1957, Number I