Almon Brown Strowger

Strowger was born in Penfield, New York, near Rochester, the grandson of the second settler and first miller in Penfield. Little is known about his early life. It is said that if his mother gave her children a task, Strowger and his brothers would often try to devise a machine to do the task for them. He taught school in Penfield for a time.

In October 1861, he enlisted as a Musician in Company A, 8th New York Cavalry Regiment, to fight in the American Civil War. He was promoted to Sergeant and Chief Trumpeter of the regiment in February 1864, and ended the war as a Second Lieutenant. He was wounded in action at the Third Battle of Winchester in 1864, and discharged later that year.

After the Civil War, it appears he first became a country school teacher before he became an undertaker. He is variously attributed as living in El Dorado, Kansas, or Topeka, Kansas, and finally Kansas City, Missouri. It is not clear where his idea of an automatic telephone exchange was originally conceived, but his patent application identifies him as being a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 10, 1891.