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Unlike the telegraph, the telephone eventually penetrated almost every home in Canada. Alexander Graham Bell, who patented this user-friendly device in 1876, proposed that each telephone user be connected by wire to a central switching office, as had already been done in some urban telegraph systems. Here, where all subscriber lines converged, operators could connect any two lines on request. Canada's first telephone exchange opened in Hamilton in 1878.

Switching became a sort of manufacturing process as operators, usually women, repeatedly made temporary wire connections between telephone users. To maximize productivity the telephone company transformed the switching office into a factory. Switchboards were designed to reduce unnecessary movement and operators were instructed to speak in terse, carefully enunciated standard phrases.

On the line.Telephone operators worked in a special sort of factory. With few exceptions, their jobs are now done by machines.(Courtesy Bell Canada Historical Collection)

Although asked to perform like machines, the human operators in a busy exchange could rarely provide rapid, uniform, faultless service. And as the number of telephone subscribers increased, telephone companies had to hire and train more and more operators. Inventors and engineers began to explore ways of replacing people with machines. In Canada the first automatic telephone switches, which used electrical pulses sent from the subscriber's telephone to activate electromechanical switches or relays, were introduced soon after the turn of the twentieth century.

The Lorimer telephone in Connexions (740604) formed part of an automatic switching system designed by Hoyt and George William Lorimer of Brantford, Ontario. The brothers established the Canadian Machine Telephone Co. and opened a factory in Toronto in 1905. Their equipment was installed in Brantford and Peterborough, Ontario, and was exported to England and France. But the signalling system was incompatible with most other telephones, and subscribers could not connect with those of rival companies. As a result, the Lorimers could not raise enough capital to perfect their apparatus and begin large-scale production. Elements of their system, however, were later incorporated in more successful systems of automatic switching.

The Lorimer system, a Canadian innovation in automatic switching. Now almost fully automated, the telephone network has been called the world's largest machine. (Peter Lindell/CSTM)

Switching, first manual and then automatic, was the development that turned the telephone into a mass communication device. Without it, the telephone would never have become more than a private intercom system (which is how some first conceived it). With it, any telephone user could connect through a complex network of switches and circuits with any other telephone user and communicate directly. This was an open, two-way system with a huge number of access points and many alternative paths. Operating as a single, globe-spanning network, it has been called the world's largest machine.