Erna Hoover

By Mark Steer

Erna Hoover
(1926 - )

In 1954 Erna Hoover took a position with Bell Laboratories having completed a degree in medieval history and a PhD in mathematics. She worked her way up through the labs and it wasn’t long before she was given the task of sorting out an increasingly frustrating problem. As more and more people were using telephones, the exchange systems were becoming overloaded and had started to seize up. Bell Labs needed to replace their hard-wired and mechanical telephone exchanges with something more reliable.

It wasn’t an easy problem to solve and it took a fairly drastic event for Hoover to have a flash of inspiration: child birth. Erna was in hospital having given birth to one of her three daughters when she sketched out the first plans for her new exchange system. At times of high call traffic it would prioritise important tasks, such as incoming and outgoing calls over those less important, such as collating billing information and record keeping.

The whole system, which was patented in 1971, was much more reliable and no longer prone to overload. It was one of the first ever patents awarded for computer software and the basis of Hoover’s work still underlies the mechanics of telephone exchanges and switchboards to this day.

Such was the inspiration behind her invention Hoover was promoted to Supervisor of the Technical Division at the Bell Labs, the first woman ever to hold the position. During her tenure the labs continued to pioneer the use of software to control telecommunications implementing artificial intelligence, large databases and transaction systems in order to support ever increasing amounts of telephone calls.

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