Today is November 3rd, 2006.

On this date in the year 1793, perhaps the most famous Texan of all time was born. Although he died a Texan, he started out as a Virginian. Stephen F. Austin was born on this date in Wythe County, Virginia 213 years ago.

On this date in 1998, a former US Navy Seal by the name of James George Janos would shock voters of our country when he would win the Governorship of Minnesota. So you’ve never heard of Governor Janos? Well, I’m sure you know his other name: Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota 8 years ago today.

Also, on this date in the year 1926, a lady by the name of Phoebe Ann Mosey died. Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with that name. I didn’t know it either until I researched this story. We know her now as sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Another thing that I didn’t know about her was that although she had accumulated great wealth during her life, she died with nearly nothing. During her last several years, she had spent her entire fortune on several charities that she had started.

And finally...

Our story today starts near Rochester, New York. It was there that Almon Brown Strowger (STRO-jer) was born. The year was 1839. As a young adult, he would spend time as a teacher and as a Civil War soldier. During the war, several of Almon’s close friends were killed. It has been written that this experience had a very significant and detrimental affect on his life. He would become bitter, irritable, and generally angry at the world. Many would describe him as an eccentric, paranoid madman.

After the war, he would head west to Kansas and take up the profession of undertaker. After a number of years, he would then move his business to La porte, Indiana.

Now, imagine if you will, that you lived in the mid to late 1800’s like Almon Strowger did, and you had to make a phone call. Well, if you were fortunate enough to even have a phone in your home, the process to place a call went something like this: You’d pick up the mouthpiece on the phone and you’d give a few vigorous cranks to the knob on the side of the phone. This would make an electrical signal travel down the line to the local Bell operator. The operator would receive the signal and would then pick up the mouthpiece and begin talking to you. You’d then tell the operator that you’d like to talk with your Aunt Jane, the banker, the butcher, the grocer, or whomever it was that you hoped to chat with that day. Or, perhaps, if you happened to be a customer of Almon Strowgers’, then you’d ask the operator to connect you to the undertaker. The operator would then use a few pieces of patch cord and manually patch your phone line to your destinations phone line. And then you could go on with the business of having your conversation.

Although there were occasional mistakes made when you would be accidentally connected to the wrong destination, this system, although archaic by today’s standards, worked remarkably well. That is, unless you happened to be a paranoid, schizophrenic undertaker. You see, Mr. Strowger believed that the phone operator in his town would intentionally redirect some of phone calls that were intended for his business but instead were connected to the other undertaker in town. Which, of course, was Mr. Strowger’s competitor. Growing frustrated by what he thought was a conspiracy against his business; he was quoted as saying, “No longer will my competitor steal all my business just because his wife is a Bell operator”.

The paranoid undertaker would solve this problem, or what he thought was a problem, by eliminating the need for the operator. He figured that if there were no operator then there would be no way for that operator to conspire against his business by sending his calls to his competitor. So he invented something called the Strowger Telephone Exchange Switch. This allowed anyone to pick up the phone, dial a number and without the need for an operator, to be automatically connected to his or her intended destination. Dialing the phone without the need for an operator. That is something that we all take for granted now, but, thanks to Almon Strowger, it was first implemented in La Porte, Indiana, on this date, November 3rd, in the year 1892.

And that is just one of the things that has occurred on this date in history.