Telephones: Thinking Back to “Number, Please” – September 2009

Operator, Operator

Telegraph offices had always employed young boys, so when the first telephone exchanges needed staff, they hired young men. They soon proved to be too impatient to wait for telephone calls to come in. They rough-housed with each other to fill the time, and this opened up a job opportunity for women. In the early 20th century, women were primarily relegated to working as servants, teachers, or nurses. A few types of factory jobs were open to them, but the chance to be trained as an operator was viewed as a step up.

Women embraced the opportunity, and they soon dominated the field. They worked for low wages and had to abide by a strict code of conduct, including quitting if they got married.

The job of operator involved sitting in front of a board filled with telephone jacks. When a phone service subscriber lifted the receiver on their home unit, a light went on in the central office next to the jack that connected to their household. The operator then inserted her “answer cord,” and asked how to direct the call. If the call was a local one, the operator plugged a “ringing cord” into the called party’s jack.

If the call was long distance, she plugged into a trunk circuit to begin making the necessary connections to another locale. The call could be completed only if all the intermediate trunk lines between the calling centers were available at the same time. The average time to complete a connection for a long distance call in 1918 was 15 minutes. This time estimate extended to two hours during World War II when the government was given priority for military calls.

A city operator might process as many as 600 calls in an hour. A rural operator often had the switchboard in her home and was given an extra long wire for her headset so that she could move around and do other things until a call came in.

Necessity: Mother of Invention

As the use of telephone systems grew, businesspeople and professionals began to realize that a certain level of automation was necessary to keep the system running well.

Calling Without an Operator

An undertaker in Kansas City by the name of Almon Brown Strowger is credited with developing the first exchange where callers could connect to other local subscribers without the aid of an operator.

The story goes that Strowger noted that callers to his funeral home were being diverted by a local operator who was married to a competing undertaker. Strowger got to work on a way to automate calling, and in 1891 he was given a patent for his invention. By this time, Strowger was living in La Porte, Indiana, and the first automatic telephone exchange was installed there on November 3, 1892. It had 75 subscribers and the system could handle as many as 99.

The Beginning of Telephone Numbers

The first telephone systems had a “small-town” feel. Callers would pick up the receiver and when the operator came on the line, the caller would state the name of the family he or she was calling.

The need for a system based on phone numbers was envisioned in 1889 when Dr. Moses Greeley Parker of Lowell, Massachusetts became concerned about a measles epidemic that was spreading in the area. He noted that if the operators became ill, the telephone system would be paralyzed since substitute operators would not know which jacks corresponded with which families. He pushed for creation of a system that involved using numbers instead of names so that substitutes could quickly pick up the system. Parker went on to be a big investor in various phone companies.

Fast Facts about Early Telephones

The very first telephones were sold in pairs and were generally intended to connect a business owner’s home with his office. There was no existing infrastructure, so telephone wire had to be strung between the two places specified.

Magneto telephones were “crank” telephones. The caller cranked the handle to notify the operator that he or she wanted to make a call. When the picked up, callers would give the family name-or later a number-so the operator could connect the two parties.

Party lines were common and made telephone service more affordable for the middle class. Each family was given a specific “code,” perhaps 2 short rings and a long one. Anyone on the party line could listen in if they so chose. Operators with extra time often did so as well.

Operators became information sources and subscribers would call in for weather reports and traffic information.

On a personal note, my brother says that the first full sentence he learned to repeat was “Little boy, this is the operator. Please hang up the phone now.”