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A telephone exchange is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network or in large enterprises. An exchange consists of electronic components and in older systems also human operators that interconnect (''switch'') telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital systems to establish telephone calls between subscribers. In the public telecommunication networks a telephone exchange is located in a central office (CO), typically a building used to house the inside plant equipment of potentially several telephone exchanges, each serving a certain geographical ''exchange area''. Central office locations are often identified in North America as ''wire centers'', designating a facility from which a telephone obtains dial tone.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=General Definitions )〕 For business and billing purposes, telephony carriers also define ''rate centers'', which in larger cities may be clusters of central offices, to define specified geographical locations for determining distance measurements. In the United States and Canada, the Bell System established in the 1940s a uniform system of identifying each telephone exchange with a three-digit exchange code, or central office code, that was used as a prefix to subscriber telephone numbers. All exchanges within a larger region, typically aggregated by state, were assigned a common area code. With the development of international and transoceanic telephone trunks, especially driven by direct customer dialing, similar efforts of systematic organization of the telephone networks occurred in many countries in the mid-20th century. For corporate or enterprise use, a private telephone exchange is often referred to as a private branch exchange (PBX), when it has connections to the public switched telephone network. A PBX is installed in enterprise facilities, typically collocated with large office spaces or within an organizational campus to serve the local private telephone system and any private leased line circuits. Smaller installations might deploy a PBX or key telephone system in the office of a receptionist. ==Historic perspective== In the era of the electrical telegraph, post offices, railway stations, the more important governmental centers (ministries), stock exchanges, very few nationally distributed newspapers, the largest internationally important corporations and wealthy individuals were the principal users of such telegraphs.〔(Private Telegraphs ), ''The Sydney Morning Herald'', credited to ''The Times'', April 19, 1878, p. 6.〕 Despite the fact that telephone devices existed before the invention of the telephone exchange, their success and economical operation would have been impossible on the same schema and structure of the contemporary telegraph, as prior to the invention of the telephone exchange switchboard, early telephones were hardwired to and communicated with only a single other telephone (such as from an individual's home to the person's business). A telephone exchange is a telephone system located at service centers (central offices) responsible for a small geographic area that provided the switching or interconnection of two or more individual subscriber lines for calls made between them, rather than requiring direct lines between subscriber stations. This made it possible for subscribers to call each other at homes, businesses, or public spaces. These made telephony an available and comfortable communication tool for everyday use, and it gave the impetus for the creation of a whole new industrial sector. One of the first people to build a telephone exchange was Hungarian Tivadar Puskás in 1877 while he was working for Thomas Edison.〔(TIVADAR PUSKÁS (1844 - 1893) )〕 The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, and it was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877.〔Frank Lewis Dyer: Edison His Life And Inventions. (page: 71)〕 The world's first commercial telephone exchange opened on November 12, 1877 in Friedrichsberg close to Berlin.〔(120 Year Telephone anniversary )〕 George W. Coy designed and built the first commercial US telephone exchange which opened in New Haven, Connecticut in January, 1878. The switchboard was built from "carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire" and could handle two simultaneous conversations.〔See (National Park Service "first switchboard" page ).〕 Charles Glidden is also credited with establishing an exchange in Lowell, MA. with 50 subscribers in 1878. In Europe other early telephone exchanges were based in London and Manchester, both of which opened under Bell patents in 1879. Belgium had its first International Bell exchange (in Antwerp) a year later. In 1887 Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard, that had an epochal significance in the further development of telephone exchange.〔Francis S. Wagner: Hungarian Contributions to World Civilization - Page 68〕 Later exchanges consisted of one to several hundred plug boards staffed by switchboard operators. Each operator sat in front of a vertical panel containing banks of ¼-inch tip-ring-sleeve (3-conductor) jacks, each of which was the local termination of a subscriber's telephone line. In front of the jack panel lay a horizontal panel containing two rows of patch cords, each pair connected to a cord circuit. When a calling party lifted the receiver, the local loop current lit a signal lamp near the jack. The operator responded by inserting the rear cord (''answering cord'') into the subscriber's jack and switched her headset into the circuit to ask, "Number, please?" For a local call, the operator inserted the front cord of the pair (''ringing cord'') into the called party's local jack and started the ringing cycle. For a long distance call, she plugged into a trunk circuit to connect to another operator in another bank of boards or at a remote central office. In 1918, the average time to complete the connection for a long-distance call was 15 minutes.〔 Early manual switchboards required the operator to operate listening keys and ringing keys, but by the late 1910s and 1920s, advances in switchboard technology led to features which allowed the call to be automatically answered immediately as the operator inserted the answering cord, and ringing would automatically begin as soon as the operator inserted the ringing cord into the called party’s jack. The operator would be disconnected from the circuit, allowing her to handle another call, while the caller heard an audible ringback signal, so that that operator would not have to periodically report that she was continuing to ring the line.〔http://www.strombergcarlsontelephone.com/kellogg/PDF/1921%20SW%20BD%20INSERT.pdf〕 In the ringdown method, the originating operator called another intermediate operator who would call the called subscriber, or passed it on to another intermediate operator. This chain of intermediate operators could complete the call only if intermediate trunk lines were available between all the centers at the same time. In 1943 when military calls had priority, a cross-country US call might take as long as 2 hours to request and schedule in cities that used manual switchboards for toll calls. On March 10, 1891, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri, patented the stepping switch, a device which led to the automation of telephone circuit switching. While there were many extensions and adaptations of this initial patent, the one best known consists of 10 levels or banks, each having 10 contacts arranged in a semicircle. When used with a rotary telephone dial, each pair of digits caused the shaft of the central contact "hand" of the stepping switch to first step (ratchet) up one level for each pulse in the first digit and then to swing horizontally in a contact row with one small rotation for each pulse in the next digit. Later stepping switches were arranged in banks, the first stage of which was a ''linefinder''. If one of up to a hundred subscriber lines had the receiver lifted "off hook", a linefinder connected the subscriber's line to a free first selector, which returned the subscriber a dial tone to show that it was ready to receive dialed digits. The subscriber's dial pulsed at about 10 pulses per second, although the speed depended on the standard of the particular telephone administration. Exchanges based on the Strowger switch were eventually challenged by other exchange types and later by crossbar technology. These exchange designs promised faster switching and would accept pulses faster than the Strowger's typical 10 pps—typically about 20 pps. At a later date many also accepted DTMF "touch tones" or other tone signaling systems. A transitional technology (from pulse to DTMF) had DTMF ''link finders'' which converted DTMF to pulse, to feed to older Strowger, panel, or crossbar switches. This technology was used as late as mid-2002. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「telephone exchange」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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