Erna Schneider Hoover

Dr. Erna Schneider Hoover earned a PhD in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. After some difficulty finding a research job, she landed at Bell Laboratories, where she designed the first computer-controlled switching system for the telephone system. This was the largest ever project of the telephone system at the time it was created and allowed the telephone system to respond to its rapidly increasing call traffic without overloading and freezing. It was necessitated by the rapid rise of telephone usage and facilitated by the invention of the transistor. Thanks to Dr. Hoover’s invention, which changed the switching logic from hardware (wired) to software, it became simple to handle the large telephone load and to add new features such as call waiting, call forwarding, and shortcut dialing.