Leich History
Leich phones originated as the
Eureka Electric Company, McCordsville, Ind. and moved to Chicago in 1898.
In 1902 they absorbed the Advance Electric Company and the year following, the
company moved to Genoa, Ill. With manufacturing
in Genoa, Leich became a pioneer in telephone instruments, dial central-office
equipment and switchboards. A half-century later, Leich would become part of
the Automatic Electric family. In 1907 Leich was sold and reorganized as
the Cracraft-Leich Electric Co. The name was changed to the Leich
Electric Co. in 1917. "GTE"/Automatic Electric, purchased
Leich in the mid 1950's. The Leich name was used until the early
1960's as a subsidiary of GTE.
Magneto
Phones to Dial Phones
Strowger
received a patent for his invention of an automatic telephone switch on March
10, 1891. The concept of the Strowger switch would be used until the emergence
of digital technologies 70 years later.
The undertaker's
invention came to the attention of Joseph B. Harris, a traveling salesman who
persuaded Strowger to set up a business in Chicago. Strowger, Harris and a
friend, Moses A. Meyer, incorporated the new company as the "Strowger
Automatic Telephone Exchange" on Oct. 30, 1891.
The first installation of a Strowger system was a 99-line switch in LaPorte,
Ind., in 1892. The automatic exchange became a tremendous and much publicized
success.
After Strowger's
retirement, Harris interested a group of investors in financing the continued
growth of the company. They organized in 1901 under the name Automatic Electric
Co., often called "AE." AE purchased the rights to sell Strowger
equipment, and the two companies consolidated in 1908. Strowger produced a more
sophisticated working model of a telephone switch in 1888, with the help of his
nephew Walter S. Strowger. This step-by-step, up-and-around switch moved the
shaft by pawls and electromagnets responding to short pulses of electricity.
Theodore Gary and Co. Bought Automatic Electric Co.in 1919. Theodore aimed to cash in on the accelerating
trend of replacing manual labor with machinery, and saw great potential in the
Bell System market. Gary formed a syndicate that secured an option on the
majority of Automatic Electric Co. (AE) common stock. In 1919, he exercised his
option to purchase the company.
By the mid-1920s, AE was
licensing about 80 percent of the automatic telephone equipment in the world.
It became the second largest telecommunications manufacturer in the United
States after Western Electric. The list of firsts and inventions filled volumes
in the industry history during the rest of the 1900s, including product
introductions, worldwide installations and consumer success stories. More pages
are devoted to numerous subsidiaries, mergers and name changes.
This is a story about a
working magneto telephone system that's still in use today. It's at the Oregon
Caves National Monument. It's quite a large complex consisting of a 5-story
lodge with about 50 rooms. Many of the rooms have a magneto telephone in them
ranging from Leich desk sets to Western Electric single box sets.
There is a Kellogg 20 line desk mounted switchboard in the lobby. There are
also magneto telephones in the park ranger station, the maintenance building,
the kitchen, the gift shop, the cave tour ticket sales office and various other
places. There is even a separate magneto system with four stations in the cave
itself with additional lines going out to the ticket office and ranger station.
The magneto system inside the cave
finally had to be worked on because the original cloth wires (installed in
1920) were constantly shorting out due to rotting cloth resulting from the
dampness. The entire system was replaced with 4,500 feet of state of the art six
pair "armored" buried drop line, and four newfangled Stromberg
Carlson intercom sets. It was quite a job. The cave is nearly 1 mile long and
is full of twisting crawl holes. They didn't want any wire showing, so they had
to pioneer a "new route" to pull the wire through the cave. It took
10 people to be in strategic places to accomplish this.