The Pioneers of Electromechanical and Computer-Controlled Electronic Exchange Switching Systems

With more than 700 million telephones in use worldwide and with facsimile, data, and video communication growing at an ever-increasing rate, the problem remaining once transmission paths have been created by cable, radio, or satellite is to enable any customer to find and communicate with another anywhere in the world. Today this problem has been solved through the efforts of a number of pioneering scientists, engineers, and mathematicians and their successors who have evolved efficient, economic, and reliable exchange switching systems to provide the necessary interconnection between customers, whether in the same town or on opposite sides of the world. The creation of a worldwide telecommunication network has necessarily involved international cooperation on a large scale to secure a commonality of technical and operational procedures to ensure that both local and long-distance connections can be made with equal ease—and which has been achieved through the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCITT) of the International Telecommunication Union. The world telecommunication network may well be the most extensive, complex, costly, and indispensable artifact yet created—it is in fact the “nervous system” of civilized mankind. The contribution of exchange switching engineers to the creation of this artifact has been critical, demanding both innovative skills and intellectual ability of a high order.