Rotary International downtown Chicago, United States, at Harris's friend Gustave Loehr's office in the Unity Building on Dearborn Street on February 23, 1905. In addition to Harris and Loehr (a mining engineer and freemason), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor) were the other two who attended this first meeting. The members chose the name Rotary because initially they rotated subsequent weekly club meetings to each other's offices, although within a year, the Chicago club became so large it became necessary to adopt the now-common practice of a regular meeting place. The next four Rotary Clubs were organized
Rotary system Rotary system The rotary machine switching system, or most commonly known as the rotary system, was a type of automatic telephone exchange manufactured and used primarily in Europe from the 1910s. Formally named the No. 7-A Machine Switching System, it was developed in Belgium by International Western Electric, a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), at the same time when AT&T's American engineering division, Western Electric, was developing the Panel switch in the United States. The Rotary and Panel systems were very different systems, but both used the same newly developed component technology, such as Western Electric's latest relays,