Few remember that Cle Elum was the last municipality in Washington to offer rotary dial telephone service. Until September 18, 1966—more than two decades after Seattle debuted rotary dial phones—every call into and out of Cle Elum required the assistance of an operator manually plugging and unplugging wires on a switchboard. Today, the 1918 brick building on Wright Avenue that once housed the town’s switchboard equipment and staff (and also served as a critical node connecting western Washington with the nation’s transcontinental copper wire telephone network) has been repurposed as the Telephone Museum, a repository of artifacts and exhibits tracing the evolution of a technology that transformed the way people communicated over long distances, from Alexander Graham Bell’s first voice transmission over telephone wires in 1876 until the first wireless cellular call in 1973.
A switchboard operator exhibit. (Courtesy Northern Kittitas County Historical Society)
What might become tomorrow’s Telephone Museum?
Perhaps Seattle’s Westin Building, a 34-story office tower built in 1981 as the corporate headquarters of Westin Hotels that’s now home to the Seattle Internet Exchange, one of the busiest internet traffic hubs in the continental United States. Or maybe the Columbia Data Center, a server farm Microsoft developed in partnership with the City of Quincy and the Grant County PUD in 2006. Today, a campus of 20 hangar-like buildings encompassing 2 million square feet sprawls over 300 acres near a bend on the Columbia River, harvesting raw computational power that’s driving the AI revolution.
Which is more consequential, only time will tell.
The 1918 building housing Cle Elum's Telephone Museum once was a critical telecommunications hub for the region. (Courtesy Northern Kittitas County Historical Society)