up an electronic switching lab at Blackheath. This lab was headed by John Flood, who had been a founder member of Tommy Flowers' electronic switching team at Dollis Hill. In the Siemens team was an engineer called Jim Warman. It was his trunking ideas (sectionalisation, serial trunking, line scanning, route choice, repeat attempt etc.), which were to be central to the development of the British TXE exchanges. Following the failure to win major contracts in Australia in 1960 and the subsequent failure of Highgate Wood, it was necessary for the British manufacturers to come up with something different until a fully digital system could be developed (this eventually turned out to be System X and System Y). Ericsson had twenty years of experience of manufacturing the crossbar system and reducing its cost, so there was no point in trying to compete with them (Plessey Telecommunications, a subsidiary of Plessey, took a different view and continued to urge the GPO to adopt crossbar). At this time, in the US, Bell Labs were developing a system based on electronically controlled reed relays, and this looked promising. One of Ericsson's marketing points for crossbar was that it used precious-metal contacts, but reed relays would be even better as their precious metal contacts were hermetically sealed. Also their very short operating and release times (<1 ms) made them ideal for electronic control, and these reed-electronic exchanges were considered the most practical switching system to proceed with at the time and electronic enough, until a truly electronic system could be developed, although Tommy Flowers did not approve as he advocated going straight to a digital system. The manager at AEI (W G Patterson) decided that reed-electronic space-division switching was the way to go, and it was then that the term 'TXE'(Telephone exchange electronic) was coined, even although the reed relays themselves were not regarded as electronic components. A much bigger team was needed to undertake the detailed development and AEI persuaded AT&E and STC to join them in the work. The initial result of their work was a prototype system called TXE1. TXE1 The TXE1 was developed by three members of the Joint Electronic Research Committee (JERC) which was formed in 1956 and lasted until 1969. The JERC consisted of the GPO, Siemens Brothers (later AEI), Automatic Telephone and Electric (later Plessey), the Ericsson Telephones (also later Plessey), General Electric Company (GEC), and Standard Telephones