Seattle can be both a quirky city and a fun destination in which to find unusual sites to visit. Have you heard about The Connections Museum? As many times as I’ve visited Seattle, I hadn’t either. We all think of Seattle as a tech hub, but now with the Connections Museum the city is a home to the tech of years gone by.
What Is The Connections Museum?
The Connections Museum is a place where self-described technology nerds such as Peter Amstein are preserving and restoring machines that ran America’s first landline telephone network.
Peter Amstein works in Seattle’s tech industry, but in his spare time he’s a lead volunteer, tour guide and board president of the group that runs the Connections Museum.
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These days Americans often connect to other humans through machines and computers, everything from texting to dating apps to Zoom. So it’s easy to forget how we got here and about how the first social networks were formed by phone systems.
“So much of the stuff that I built my whole [tech] career on comes out of the telephone system, out of the early developments,” Amstein says.
The backstory dating back to the 1870’s as told in this article is fascinating.
The first system operators were woman and in the museum you can actually sit down at one of the old cable switchboards and work the phones
For the first generation of payphones, for example, women operators listened to musical notes rung by different-sized coins as they were dropped into the slot.
“She could hear it,” Amstein says. “The microphone was here [in the phone box], and she could hear the sound of the bells.”
Clever but super slow. Not practical if you want to connect thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people.
There’s a lot to see and much to learn at the Connections Museum.
Take a look at the article and you’ll see Amstein showing off one of the prizes of the museum’s collection: a panel switch system that fills whole corridors of equipment racks.
“This is the last of its kind anywhere, the only working panel switch anywhere on the planet,” he says.
They found this machine mothballed and abandoned in a phone company storage room. One of the volunteers, Sarah Autumn, spent months splicing it back together again.
The technology feels ancient. But in the rumble and clatter of these old machines, you can glimpse a piece of how America got to where we are now — an age of smart phones, TikTok and AI.
Have you been to the Connections Museum? For sure I’ll visit the next time I’m in Seattle. Always helps to look back and put things into perspective, especially things as ubiquitous as technology.
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