Almon Brown Strowger Almon Brown Strowger ( Penfield , New York , United States , Feb 11 , 1839 – St . Petersburg , Florida , United States , May 26 , 1902 ) gave his name to the electromechanical telephone exchange technology that his invention and patent inspired . Early years . Strowger was born in Penfield , near Rochester , New York . Little information is available about his early life , but it is known that he was the grandson of the second settler and first miller in Penfield . In her history of the Town of Penfield , Katherine Thompson reports that if his mother gave her children a task , he and his brothers would spend most of their time figuring out a machine that would do the task for them . He taught school in Penfield for a time , and served in the 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry during the American Civil War . It is believed that he fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run near Manassas , Virginia . 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 . " " ' Rotary dialing . Convinced that it should be subscribers , rather than the operator , who chose who was called - anecdotally , Strowger ' s undertaking business was losing clients to a competitor whose telephone - operator wife was intercepting and redirecting everyone who called Strowger - he first conceived his invention in 1888 , and patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891 . It is reported that he initially constructed a model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins . Finances . While he may have come up with the idea , he was not alone in his endeavours and sought the assistance of his nephew William and others with a knowledge of electricity and money to realise his concepts . With this help the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company was formed and it installed and opened the first commercial exchange in ( his then home town of ) La Porte , Indiana on November 3 , 1892 , with about 75 subscribers and capacity for 99 . He married Susan A . ( 1846 – 1921 ) from Massachusetts in 1897 as his second wife . Strowger sold his patents to his associates in 1896 for $ 1 , 800 and sold his share in the Automatic Electric Company for $ 10 , 000 in 1898 . His patents subsequently sold to Bell Systems for $ 2 . 5 million in 1916 . The company ' s engineers continued development of Strowger ' s designs and submitted several patents in the names of its employees . It also underwent several name changes . Strowger himself seems to have not taken part in this further development . He subsequently moved to St . Petersburg , Florida and appears to have returned to being an undertaker , as H . P . Bussey Funeral Home records report an unidentified body being moved " for Mr . Strowger " in December 1899 . The same funeral home subsequently buried Strowger himself . Strowger was a man of some wealth at his death and was reported as owning at least a city block of property . Death . He died , aged 62 , of an aneurysm after suffering from anemia , at St . Petersburg , Pinellas County , Florida and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery the next day . His grave is marked with the traditional white headstone with an inscription that reads : " Lieut . A . B . Strowger , Co . A , 8 NY Cav . " Widow . He was survived by his widow Susan A . Strowger ( 1846 – 1921 ) . After her death in Tampa , Florida , on April 14 , 1921 , her obituary appeared in the St . Petersburg Times , claiming she had additional " revolutionary " Strowger designs , but she had refused to make them public while she was alive because only others would profit from her husband ' s designs . She had claimed that her husband had only received $ 10 , 000 for his invention , when he should have received a million . Legacy . A bronze plaque , to commemorate his invention , was placed on his grave in 1945 by telephone company officials . Strowger was admitted to the hall of fame of the U . S . Independent Telephone Association ( now called the USTA ) in 1965 . Apart from his invention , his name has also been given to a locomotive and a company business award . In 2003 , the Verizon Foundation awarded $ 4500 to Pinellas Heritage , Inc . and the Pinellas Genealogy Society in Strowger ' s memory . The funds were used to develop a website to impart the history of the cemetery where Strowger is buried , and to restore two Civil War memorials . The Greenwood Cemetery project won an organization achievement award from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation .