Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "" video.

A fair bit of nonsense is given in this film. Strowger did NOT devise a practical switch. He merely thought up the stepping/rotating contact basic concept and explained it to a family member, who decided to set up a company and comercialise the idea. They employed a competent electrical engineer to devise the switch, something the unskilled Strowger could never do. The idea that Strowger was worried that the phone company was connecting potential customers to the opposition undertaker is an old urban myth. At the time, Kansas was a large city with dozens of undertakers, but very few people had a telephone. Business communication was conducted by messenger boys/runners - an early form of courier service. Or if you wanted something, you hailed a horse-drawn cab or walked to the business premises. The narrator claimed multiple times that electronics works at the speed of light. The sort of silicon chips available when this film was made worked at best at a small fraction of the speed of light, and cables carried signals at only a fraction, sometimes a very small fraction, of the speed of light.
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@CableWrestler No, they most certainly DO NOT, as any competent electronics engineer or technician knows.. In a vacuum, electrons can be accelerated by an electric field. Since they have mass, Einstein's E = MC^2 applies - the closer you get them to the speed of light, the greater their effective mass becomes. An electron velocity of the speed of light cannot be attained as then their effective mass would be infinite, requiring an infinite force to achieve. The highest practical speeds are obtained in vacuum devices such as X-ray tubes, where extraordinary voltages are required, hundreds of kilovolts, resulting in speeds a small fraction of the speed of light. In ordinary metallic conductors, where the voltages are small (a few millivolts/inch at most), electron speeds are tiny - a tiny fraction of an inch per second. In semiconductors such as silicon, electron velocity is typically about 1000 times faster, this is still a very tiny tiny fraction of the speed of light. The advent of radio electron tubes (what the British call valves), where electrons are accelerated in a vacuum, and strike a metallic plate called the anode is how electron mass was measured for the first time. Due to their mass, they have kinetic energy, and this energy is converted to heat in the anode, which can be accurately measured. The quantity of electrons is precisely known from the current, and their acceleration known from the anode voltage.
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