A message for today from last century’s vast telephone exchanges

Seattle’s Telecommunications Museum, which has been in operation since the 1940s, shows how the telephone has brought us together and torn us apart. Annalee Newitz

To Annalee Newitz

I was standing inside a warehouse, sandwiched between two floor-to-ceiling frames. They looked like ancient bookshelves, or perhaps server his racks on another planet. Their faces were alive with chattering metal switches attached to wires, and old plastic sleeves faded to brown. I felt like I was trapped in a Charlie Chaplin movie machine. But I was actually inside the Number Five Crossbar Switching System (5XB) developed at Bell Labs in the 1940s to route thousands of calls at once. The sounds I heard were numbers going through an electrical switch mounted on the crossbar and established…