Historic Shell Temporary Telecom Museum
Complementary Telecom Museum at Historic Shell in Downtown Issaquah Celebrates the Theatre’s Opening of Dial M for Murder.
DIA’s temporary museum at Historic Shell gives a nod to the play and roots of modern communication technologies, which made possible the development of radio, TV, and computers, in addition to telephones in all shapes and functions. The museum exhibits will take you back to the time of party lines, rotary phones, and switchboards. The displays are interactive with real working vintage phones.
Peter Amstein, Board President of the Telecommunications History Group, with volunteers from their Connections Museum in Seattle, set up the Shell display and lent his deep expertise. “For the first 20 years after the introduction of the telephone, calls were made manually by (mostly) friendly operators sitting at switchboards and plugging cords into jacks to make the connection.”
Peter’s oration on the history of the phone industry is riveting. For instance, he says an undertaker from Kansas City named Almon Strowger was frustrated by the service he was receiving in 1890 from his local telephone operators. This inspired him to invent a machine to do the job instead. His basic design was extremely successful and was used worldwide for the next 100 years. The telephone dial itself was patented a few years later in 1898 by engineers working for Automatic Electric, the company that Strowger started.
One highlight at DIA’s exhibit is a working Strowger switch. This demonstration system is rather small compared with those in large cities, where entire buildings contained thousands of these mechanisms. The machinery inside responds to electrical pulses that come from the dials on the telephones to make a connection from the caller to their desired party. A Strowger switch appears prominently in the trailer of the Hitchcock film.
Also on exhibit are several different telephones with rotary dials, including models from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Historic Shell Temporary Telecom Museum Details:
Dates: Friday, January 31 – Sunday, March 9
Address: 232 Front Street N., Issaquah, WA 98027
Hours: Before Village Theatre Main Stage shows and after matinees
Schedule:
Wednesday – Friday Noon – 3pm
Saturday and Sunday noon – 7:30pm
Thursday, February 13 noon – 7:30pm.
If those dates won’t work, give us a call or email to set up your very own appointment:
(425) 391-1112 or events@downtownissaquah.com
For even more telecom history, visit Connections Museum any Sunday between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. For local, historically hip displays, turn back time by visiting Issaquah History Museums Issaquah History Museums.
Dial M for Murder is a great play being put on by The Village Theatre. Please think about going to see it! There are pay-what-you-will days, rush ticket days, and small-batch ticket options.
