The principles of the Lorimer system thus passed into international posterity, both in the U.S. and Europe, but the Lorimers themselves won no posthumous fame until the very recent rediscovery of their work by Robert Chapuis. A legitimate question would be why the Lorimer brothers' switching system sank into such total oblivion. Most telephone engineers have never even heard of their technology. Whatever the true answer, it is still intriguing to note that Canada's only technological contribution to the development of telecommunications before the contemporary period was in the field of electromechanical switching. Three-quarters of a century later, Northern Telecom was to repeat this exploit with the DMS digital switch, although this time with considerably more commercial success.
Switches are the brains of a network.
They are the key to its development. The inescapable conclusion, is that Canadians, separated as they are by such vast distances, realized that the mastery of telecommunications was essential to their survival as a society. And the switch, as the key to the system, was also the key to this mastery and thus their survival.