The high prices of Bell equipment and…

The high prices of Bell equipment and services had led Henrik Tore Cedergren to form an independent telephone company in 1883 called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.

As Bell would not deliver equipment to competitors, he forms a pact with Ericsson, which is to supply the equipment for his new telephone network.

In 1884, a technician named Anton Avén at Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag had combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece of a (by then) standard telephone into a handset.

It was used by operators in the exchanges that needed to have one hand free when talking to their customers.

Ericsson picked up this invention and incorporated it into Ericsson products, beginning with a telephone named The Dachshund.

In 1884 also, a multiple-switchboard manual telephone exchange had been more or less copied from a design by C. E. Scribner at Western Electric.

This is legal, as the device is not patented in Sweden, although in the U.S. it holds patent 529421 since 1879.

A single switchboard can handle up to ten thousand lines.

The following year, L. M. Ericsson and Cedergren tour the US, visiting several telephone exchange stations to gather "inspiration".

They find that U.S. engineers are well ahead in switchboard design but Ericsson telephones are as good as any available.