https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4__Nz5HWY

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My great grandfather William Gilliland's first cousin Ezra Gilliland invented the switchboard here celebrated by Lily Tomlin. Ezra was a partner of Thomas Edison; his switchboard revolutionized the phone industry worldwide. It was still in use when I was kid I think, in 1970s! It was behind the infamous 'party line', I surmise, when you'd hear your neighbors on the phone and had to wait till they got off before you could make your own call--and don't listen in to their conversations! We're talking almost a hundred years after Ezra invented the machine! Immensely impressive technological genius--those 'inventive Yankees' hard at work. PS my surmise was correct re party line from switchboard, here's Wikipedia: "A party line is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers. Party line systems were widely used to provide telephone service, starting with the first commercial switchboards in 1878." Note 1878 was date of Ezra's patent--and I heard my grandparents' neighbors exactly a century later in 1970s!! What a lasting inventive creation.