Connections Museum Seattle


The Connections Museum Seattle is located in Centurylink's Duwamish Central Office at East Marginal Way S. and Corson Avenue S. in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. It "reveals the history of the telephone and the equipment that makes it all work." It features vintage equipment from AT&T, Western Electric, Pacific Northwest Bell, USWest, and other organizations.
The museum was originally sponsored by the Washington Telephone Pioneers, and is now a part of Telecommunications History Group, based in Denver, along with Connections Museum Denver and THG Archives.

History

The museum was founded by Don Ostrand and Herb Warrick, both employees of Pacific Northwest Bell. As a result of the Modification of Final Judgement in 1984, the AT&T monopoly was broken up, and an organizational mandate required Pacific Northwest Bell to modernize their aging telephone switching equipment. Realizing that this was perhaps the last opportunity to save examples of vintage electromechanical switches, Warrick requested that Pacific Northwest Bell make arrangements to transfer ownership of selected equipment to the Telephone Pioneers and allow them to set up a museum somewhere in Seattle. Originally envisioned to be one of three telephone museums in the Pacific Northwest, this was the only one that materialized. Work started in 1985, and the museum opened to the public in Fall of 1989. Frames of electromechanical switching equipment were brought in from existing central offices, and lifted to the third floor by cranes. From there, volunteers rewired the equipment to make it functional once again.
In 2016 the museum was featured on a popular YouTube channel run by Tom Scott, as part of the "Things You Might Not Know" series.

Collection

The museum has the following notable items in its collection:
Most of the artifacts in the museum's collection are functional, and are maintained regularly by volunteers. Some switching systems, particularly the Panel Switch, No. 1 Crossbar, and 3ESS offices, are the only remaining switches of their type in the world that are still functioning. The No. 5 crossbar office is one of two that operate in a museum setting in the U.S.. Although they are no longer connected to the PSTN, visitors can make calls between the switches in the museum. A computer program has been set up to continually simulate calls and keep the equipment exercised.