oss-purposes with the parent company's apparent goal of meting out progress in carefully measured dosages. This was apparent, for example, in the development of the dial tele- phone. During its original 17-year monopoly, telephone service was handled entirely via manual switchboards. AT&T employed thousands of operators, who sat in large rooms at boards full of plugs and jacks. While telephones had numbers, it was possible for an operator, especially in a small town, to place calls by name. Almon B. Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City who became con- vinced that the Southwestern Bell telephone operators were diverting his calls to a competitor. In 1888, he set out to address the problem via technology; in 1891, he was granted a patent on the first automatic dial telephone exchange. Although he sold the rights and did not long remain in the telephone industry, Strowger's design caught on among independent telephone companies. The company founded on his invention, Automatic Electric, supplied dial telephone exchanges to many of the independent telephone companies. During that early era of competitive telephone service, many cities had all-manual Bell networks competing with dial-enabled independents. AT&T itself did not begin to auto- mate its exchanges until the 1920s. Although the Strowger system, sometimes called Step-by-Step, was a worldwide success (manufacture continued into the 1960s), the first Western Electric dial exchanges used instead a homegrown vari- ant called Panel. Eventually, long after Strowger's patents were history, Western Electric adopted the Strowger design as well, deploying "stepper" switches in many parts of the country. While progress and innovation are nowadays almost universally lauded as being for the better, slow innovation had a certain logic of its own in the regula- tory environment of the mid-twentieth century. Slow depreciation schedules could result in lower local service rates. That was the main priority of many regulators; it was something that the average consumer coul