I was watching Pawn Las Vegas when I discovered this and... it's amazing :-)
The American funeral director - Almon Brown Strowger - created the automatic telephone exchange because he thought (accorting to wikipedia) that it should be subscribers, rather than the operator, who chose who was called - anecdotally, Strowger's undertaking business was losing clients to a competitor whose telephone-operator wife was intercepting and redirecting everyone who called Strowger - he first conceived his invention in 1888, and patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891. It is reported that he initially constructed a model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.