Switchboard Operator

Summary

Before a telephone call could reach anyone, a person had to make the connection. At the manual exchange, an operator sat before a tall cord board, a wall of jacks each wired to a subscriber's line, answered the small falling signal of an incoming call with the words Number, please, and physically joined caller to called by plugging a pair of cords into the right two jacks. For most of the telephone's first century, a phone call was a handshake between two strangers, brokered by a third person you never saw.

The first operators, in the late 1870s, were teenage boys carried over from the telegraph offices, and they were a disaster: impatient, profane, and prone to pranks. On September 1, 1878, the Telephone Dispatch Company in Boston hired Emma Nutt, the world's first female telephone operator; her calm voice and manner were such a success that within a few years operating became overwhelmingly a women's occupation, and the switchboard became one of the largest employers of young women in the industrial world.

The machine that would end the job was patented almost as early as the job itself. In 1891 Almon Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker convinced that operators were steering his customers to a rival, patented an automatic telephone exchange, the girl-less, cuss-less telephone, that let a caller dial a number directly and be connected by machinery. Through the twentieth century, automatic dial exchanges and direct dialing spread across the network, and the manual switchboard slowly retreated from the cities to the towns to the smallest rural hamlets.

The retreat ended in the 1980s. As the last small manual exchanges in the United States were cut over to automatic dial, the cord board fell silent town by town. The most celebrated finale came in Bryant Pond, Maine, where the country's last hand-crank, manually switched telephone system, run from the operators' living room, was disconnected on October 11, 1983. With it, the switchboard operator as a connector of ordinary local calls passed into history.

Decline Timeline

The Work

The operator's instrument was the cord board, a vertical panel studded with hundreds of jacks, one per subscriber line, faced by a sloping desk of cord pairs, keys, and small signal lamps or falling shutters. When a subscriber lifted the receiver, a lamp lit or a shutter dropped on the board. The operator inserted the answering cord, said Number, please, listened to the request, and then pushed the connecting cord of the same pair into the called party's jack and threw a key to ring them. A pair of cords held the conversation; when a supervisory lamp told her the call was over, she pulled both cords down and was ready for the next.

The work was fast, exacting, and tightly supervised. In a busy urban exchange an operator handled a great many connections an hour, repeating the same motions under the eyes of supervisors who timed her, scored her courtesy, and corrected her diction. She wore a headset, the heavy early models giving way to lighter ones, and sat shoulder to shoulder with other operators along a curved board, a layout designed so that one position could reach across to help with another's traffic at peak. Speed, accuracy, an even temper, and a pleasant voice were the whole of the job description.

The operators were overwhelmingly young, unmarried women, hired for the voice and manner that the early boy operators had so conspicuously lacked, and held to strict rules of conduct, dress, and speech. For many it was respectable, steady employment and an entry into the workforce; for the telephone companies it was a vast, disciplined, comparatively low-paid labor force. By the early twentieth century the telephone operator was one of the most common occupations for women in the United States and across the industrializing world.

The Disruption

The technology that would replace the operator was invented while the job was still young. Almon B. Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, reportedly believing that a local operator married to a competitor was diverting calls away from his business, set out to remove the human from the connection entirely. In 1891 he patented the automatic, or Strowger, exchange, a system of electromechanical switches that responded to the pulses sent by a subscriber's dial, letting the caller select the wanted line directly. Boosters called it the girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, wait-less telephone.

Adoption was gradual and uneven. Automatic exchanges and the rotary dial spread first where traffic was heaviest and the labor savings greatest, and the great national networks converted their exchanges to dial operation piecemeal over decades. The Bell System in the United States carried large numbers of manual exchanges well into the mid-twentieth century even as it automated, and the operator's role narrowed from connecting every call to handling the calls machines still could not: long distance, information, emergencies, and assistance.

The mechanism of the disruption was simple substitution: every exchange cut over from manual to automatic eliminated the operators who had worked it for local connections. Direct distance dialing, which spread through the 1950s and 1960s, then removed the operator from long-distance calling as well. By the latter part of the century the manual local switchboard survived only in the smallest and most remote exchanges, where low traffic had made conversion uneconomic, the last redoubts of a once-enormous occupation.

What Killed It

Legacy

The switchboard operator embodies a peculiar kind of intimacy that automation erased: for a century, every telephone call passed through a human being who heard your request and made the connection by hand. The operator knew the town's numbers, fielded its emergencies, and in small places was a node of community memory as much as a switch. Direct dialing gave callers privacy and speed and took that human node away, trading the voice that said Number, please for a dial tone.

The job's social weight is hard to overstate. From Emma Nutt in 1878 onward, telephone operating became one of the defining mass occupations for women, a respectable, regimented entry into the wage economy for generations of young women, and a workplace where they organized, struck, and built early female-dominated unions. When the cord boards went dark, one of the largest categories of women's employment in the industrial era went with them.

Bryant Pond's iron telephone and the museum-cased Maine switchboard are monuments to a vanished everyday act. We still speak of the operator and of getting an operator, and a switchboard now lives on chiefly as a metaphor, in the brain's neural switchboard, in a busy switchboard of messages, faint echoes of the women who once sat shoulder to shoulder at the cord board and connected the world by hand.

Lessons

References

• Emma Nutt Wikipedia
• Maine's Last Hand-Crank Telephone Company Down East Magazine
• Bryant Pond Switchboard Maine State Museum
• End of an era for Maine crank phones UPI Archives
• Goodbye, Operator Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Econ Focus