And by 1884 there had come to be a fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be.
The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been its devotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little known inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E.Scribner.Of the nine thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more.

Ever since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has been the wizard of the switchboard.

It was he who saw most clearly its requirements.

Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the one man who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in the end became the master of his craft.
It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that he was born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and that his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work and anxious for its success.

His father was a judge in Toledo; but young Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law.