Behind every bowling lane, in a shallow trench called the pit, a boy crouched in the half-dark and waited for the thunder. When the ball struck, ten maple pins exploded toward him at speeds that could break a shin or split a lip. His job was to leap clear, then leap back: clear the fallen pins (the deadwood), roll the ball into the return gutter, and reset the survivors or, between frames, drop a fresh rack of ten into a spotting jig so each pin stood on its painted spot. Then he climbed up on his perch and waited for the next ball. A fast boy could keep two lanes going at once.
The work was piecework, paid by the line (a single game), and the pay was pennies. The boys who did it were usually that, boys, working evenings and weekends after school, and the alleys that hired them were frequently rough, smoky, late-night places. The pinsetter, or pinboy, or pinspotter, was the human bottleneck at the heart of bowling: no matter how popular the game became, a house could only run as many lanes as it had boys willing to sit in the pit.
That bottleneck is what an automatic machine finally broke. Gottfried (Fred) Schmidt, an engineer, built a working mechanical pinsetter in the 1930s; his patent was assigned to and developed by American Machine and Foundry (AMF), which demonstrated prototypes in 1946 and shipped its first commercial Pinspotters in 1952. Brunswick followed in 1956. Within a decade the machine had not only replaced the pinboy but unleashed bowling’s enormous postwar boom, because a house was no longer limited by how many boys it could keep in the pit.
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s the pinboy was a memory in nearly every American tenpin house. The trade survives today only at the margins: a handful of historic alleys and duckpin houses, especially in the Northeast, that still pay a person to sit behind the lanes and set the pins by hand, more as living heritage than as economics.
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.