Telephone Switchboards Through History – By Donna Schlachter with Giveaway

Switchboard Operators 1915 -- History Channel

Following the invention and then widespread use of telephones, one thing became quickly apparent—folks wanted to talk to more than one person on their newfangled invention. At the beginning, the telephone was much like the tin can-and-string contraption—two units connected by a single wire. You could call the person at the end of your wire, or they could call you.

In just about a year, The Holmes Burglar Alarm Company in Boston, Massachusetts, came up with the first central office and switchboard, serving as both a security office at night for banks and other businesses, as well as a telephone system.

The switchboard consisted of a desk-like piece of furniture where an operator set, plugging and unplugging calls and callers through a series of connections. At first, young men were hired, the thought being that since they worked well as telegraph operators. However, easily bored and sometimes with coarse language, they tended to get into trouble during slow times, sometimes ending up wrestling or causing a disturbance, other times wandering away from their station completely, leaving calls unanswered and unconnected. Thus, on September 1st, 1878, the Boston Telephone Dispatch hired Emma Nutt as the first woman operator.

Early switchboards in larger cities often spanned floor to ceiling to allow operators to reach all the lines in the exchanges. However, by the 1890s, divided switchboards were developed so teams served customers, working only the plugs in their section. Customers often knew their operator’s name, depending on what time they placed a call. At first, callers could ask for their party by name, but as populations with telephones increased, eventually the system assigned a unique number for each customer, which became known as their telephone number.

Eventually, callers would figure out they could call long distance, and so long-distance operators were employed to take the information of who was being called, would then make that call, then call back to connect the parties.

If you want to know more about how a switchboard actually operates, check out the article listed below from Wikipedia entitled “Telephone Switchboard”.

Switchboard operators were trained not only in the physical connection of calls, but also in switchboard etiquette. For example, there were rigid rules of dress. In the early days of the telephone, many parents were reluctant to give permission for their daughters to work at a telephone exchange, so the highest values of decorum, dress, and language were insisted upon. In particular, an operator could not be married, must be of high moral character, and no matter what the customer said, could only reply, “Thank you.” Long black dresses were the uniform, sometimes with a white blouse, and no jewelry visible. My character Juliette gets around this by wearing the string of pearls her late husband gave her on their wedding day underneath her shirtwaist, out of sight.

One note worth mentioning is that during the First World War, more than 200 female telephone operators facilitated communication between American, British, and French troops on the Western front, serving as operators and often also as translators. President Woodrow Wilson was so impressed that he changed his mind and dropped his objection to women’s suffrage in 1918, citing that partnering with women in war seemed to lead automatically to including them in voting rights.

With the coming of technology, however, telephone operators positions have decreased. By 1930, 235,000 operators worked in the US;, by 1940, less than 200,000. In 2021, only 5,000 workers were classified as telephone operators, with the number decreasing each year.



Giveaway: answer the following question to be entered into a random drawing for Juliette, Book 6 of the Switchboard Sisterhood. Please cleverly disguise your email address so the ‘bots don’t get you!



What is your funniest memory of using a telephone operator?



About Juliette:

A widow with her future planned out—and it doesn’t include marrying again. A physically scarred man resigned to remaining single. Can God work through a missing cat to bring them together?



Releases January 31st, but ebook is available for preorder here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ66NX1Q

And you can check out the rest of the Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BNPJF8SJ



 

About Donna:

A hybrid author, Donna writes squeaky clean historical and contemporary suspense. She has been published more than 60 times in books; is a member of
several writers groups; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; ghostwrites; edits; and judges in writing contests. She loves history and research, traveling extensively for both, and is an avid oil painter.

www.DonnaSchlachter.com Stay connected so you learn about new releases, preorders, and presales, as well as check out featured authors, book reviews, and a little corner of peace. Plus: Receive 2 free ebooks simply for signing up for our free newsletter!




Resources:

https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_switchboard

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/telephone-development/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/telephone/

"Who would ever want to use one?" ~ Tidbits of Telephone History

 

A question that has entered my peripheral research time and again centers around whether or not my characters’ households would own a telephone. Given the era of the story, that might seem like a no-brainer, but actually it is a question never easily answered. The biggest factors for each story depend upon locales. Are settings urban or rural? In well-off households or less so? Where did the lines run and how far out did they reach during the years in which my story takes place? What was the rate of home phone ownership there at that time? Would it have been likely that this character would have owned such a resource?

Ah, such rabbit trails! There’s a little wiggle room of course, but not much in my desire for historical and story accuracy.

I’m asking myself that question in another work-in-progress today. Would these people, in this small town, have their own telephone, or would they have to go to another place to use a public telephone? At the workplace or a nearby store perhaps. I continue my quest to be sure. In the process, I uncover some interesting historical tidbits about the telephone that drew a grin:

In 1876, when President Rutherford B. Hayes examined the telephone for the first time, he said to Alexander Graham Bell: “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” (I suppose some of us still feel that way.)

The same year, as Bell struggled with his company, he offered to sell the patent to Western Union for $100,000 and was roundly turned down. Western Union’s reply:

“We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their ‘telephone devices’ in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States? … Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy … This device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.”

I bet bet they regretted that decision for a long, long time.

Over in Britain, they thought the device might be useful to Americans because we lacked domestic servants, while in that country, there was a “superabundance of messengers, errand boys and things of that kind.” (Ah. . .servants. What a novelty.)

Engineers and visionaries saw it differently. They looked to the future of the telephone a lot like we view space travel today. I presume that's what G.G. Hubbard's "fanciful predictions" seemed like.

When we view the telephone in light of the past, it’s easy to see how the general public had the same hesitancies about the new device as we’ve had about the internet and our various "smart" technologies today. There were concerns about invasion of privacy back then too—a very real concern with having to use the telephone in a public place. Then, once lines were brought house to house, there was the invasion of eavesdroppers over the shared lines. Even the telephone operators were privy to more private conversations than was probably fit for public consumption.

"AHOY!"

Nowadays we have voice mail to collect our phone calls and some of us still use answering machines to screen our calls. We can leave greetings on them for when the phone picks up. But what about that first, "Hello, Musches"? It was Thomas Edison who suggested we say hello when picking up a ringing phone. Bell's suggestion that we answer with a smart, "Ahoy" never caught on. (I might have to try that sometime.)

Telephone use became common to nearly everyone during the first half of the 1900s (though I still have that conundrum of how far lines reached and when). In 1946, Bell's company hired 250,000 women as switchboard operators for both public and business services.

They say President Lyndon Johnson's preferred method of handling white house communications and accomplishing most presidential work was the telephone, and he used it profusely. In fact, when he took office after President Kennedy's death, he had phones installed in so many places around the white house, he could literally move from phone to phone like a relay system, continuing conversations while going about his tasks. There were phones on coffee tables, in bathrooms, and on window sills. Even a phone beneath both the dinner table and the hammock. Not only did he prefer working by telephone, but LBJ is known to have secretly taped at least 9000 of his conversations😮. He used the transcripts to review his daily work. 6000 of them are available through the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

Another fun bit of history is the ring system. Nowadays, we select a tone we want to hear when our cell phone rings. We can pick jazzy music or funny movie lines. Back in the early days of home phones and the party line, individual households had their home's ring pattern to help them know if the call was for their house or for another family on their line. It might be two short rings followed by two long, or one long and three short, and so on. I'm old enough to remember when my grandparents and our family got a "private line".

Now we're back to wondering who might be listening in. Not because of party lines of course, but because of concerns we have about Big Brother. 

What foreseeable changes do you think are coming to our ways of communicating? Will you welcome them, or do you abhor the notions?

Do you have a favorite read featuring old telephone systems or characters who are switchboard operators? One of my favorites lately is Candice Patterson's Saving Mrs. Roosevelt, in which Coast Guard characters include switchboard operators and spies on the home front during WWII.

There are a host of terrific Christian novels out there featuring switchboard operators. I had fun in my novel The Love Coward involving an off-scene operator who had the habit of spreading bits of gossip she'd overheard on the line, but she could be very helpful too. 

Do you find yourself ever being nostalgic about those old telephone days when we were still attached to the wall instead of the computer? So many useful storylines remain to be written! I still crack up when Oliver Wendell Douglas has to climb the telephone pole to answer the telephone on Green Acres. 

One of the richest blessings I've had lately regarding modern telephone technology happened only this morning as I was writing this post. A reader looked me up and gave me a call. She had stumbled upon Season of My Enemy at her library, and because of some connections she had to a town I mentioned in the book, she decided to search me out. Surprisingly, once she found me online, she discovered we had some close ties through my immediate family, so she rang me. We had a lovely time acquainting ourselves. I so appreciated the technology that brought that about!

Researching tidbits of telephone history has kept me hopping with several of my books. Here are a few titles where that research has played out.

 

       

The Love Coward (Post WWII, 1947), Season of My Enemy (1944-1947), The Deepest Sigh (1915-1919), The Brightest Hope (1924)

Looking back nostalgically,

Naomi

naomimusch.com

The Hello Girls of World War 1

Years ago when I was in high school I was hired by the local Bell Telephone office to work as a telephone operator during the summers. My grandfather, a life-long employee of Ohio Bell, said to me, “So you’re going to be a hello girl.” I had no idea what he meant and didn’t know until I started researching World War 1 home-front information for the third book in my historical series.

            Public Domain, Sgt. Abbott, U.S. 

            Army Signal Corps [Public domain]

Almost the entire war was fought in trenches dug out of France’s farmland. It was a nasty muddy and dirty war. The telephone had already made its appearance in the U.S. and homes were being connected to the people in their communities as well as across the country through telephone operators. When the troops experienced difficulties communicating with other troops fighting a distance away, they decided to use telephone cable that was connected to a central switchboard quite a distance back from the front line. Almost on a daily basis, soldiers would have to roll up the cable that was laid to their current position and take it to the next position and roll it out again. To connect one company with another in order to develop plans of attack, they would use the field telephone and call the central operator and the operator would then connect them with the other officers. All done on switchboards exactly like those used at home. At first, they tried hiring French operators which didn't work well because the French operators had no English language skills. Then they trained soldiers to man the switchboards, but the men were not as agile as the women in connecting calls swiftly and correctly. 

In late 1917, General Pershing sent out an emergency appeal for experienced U.S. telephone operators who were bilingual in French and English to apply for the positions. After strident language tests and skill testing the 700 applicants were narrowed down to 300. In March of 1918, Chief Operator, Grace Banker, led the first group of women in their journey overseas first to England and then across the channel to France where a bank of switchboards awaited them in Chaumont, France, and other locations around France.

Grace Banker: Public Domain, Wikipedia

Although the telephone operators were issued Army uniforms and were considered to be part of the Signal Corp, after the war ended and the operators applied for veteran’s status they were denied. The Army decided to consider them “contract workers.” Over the years the women petitioned U.S. presidents and their congressional representatives, asking to be seen as war veterans. In 1977, they were finally recognized, but many of the ‘hello girls’ had died by that time. Those that were still living were able to start receiving the benefits they should have received from the beginning. 

In 2018, a documentary was released that tells the story of the Hello Girls. It was shown at the women's memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in March 2018, nearly 100 years after the first ship carrying the operators overseas left the U.S. You can view this film by going to this link: https://www.military.com/off-duty/2018/02/12/hello-girls-documentary-celebrates-wwi-female-telephone-operators.html

You can also read more about the Hello Girls of World War 1 through a non-fiction book called The Hello Girls by Elizabeth Cobbs. I also enjoyed the novel, Girls on the Line by Aimie K. Runyan.

Pamela has written most of her life, beginning with her first diary at age eight. Her novels include Surprised by Love in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and Second Chance Love. Safe Refuge and Shelter Bay, Books 1 & 2 in her Newport of the West series, are set in her hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She lives in northeastern Illinois with her two rescue cats.