Party lines aren’t the ones where people wait to get in where the action’s going on. Not the Texas Two-Step, the Electric Slide, or the Hustle, either. In rural areas there were so few telephone owners that it was impractical and too costly to run lines to each home for each to have their own private telephone line. So a dozen people were given a single phone line to share.
As often as not, people would want to make a call and find a neighbor was already having a conversation on the party line. Conflicts arose when someone tied up the line for what others thought too many minutes. No more gossip over the back fence, now that the snoops and busybodies had this cutting-edge technology.
Number, Please: A Closer Look at Telephone Switchboard Operators
Every phone line on the exchange was connected to the switchboard. Each telephone had a crank callers turned to get the switchboard operator’s attention. Once connected, the callers gave the name of the party* they wanted to be connected with. The operator inserted a corded plug into the socket of the one to be called, thus forming the connection between the caller and the person who answered the call.
In time, someone figured out it would be easier to ask for numbers than names, and that’s how we came to have our own assigned telephone numbers.
Most of us have been butt-dialed
Most of us have also been butt-dialers. The more genteel are likely to call it a pocket dial. Either way, there is no dial and it’s no longer your nickel. The word is left over from the time telephones had a big round dial with finger holes. Callers would put their index finger in the hole labeled with the letter they wanted. What’s that? Letters?
Yep, early telephone exchanges were named after the neighborhood
See the Elizabeth Taylor film BUtterfield 8, or better yet, watch and listen to Glenn Miller’s PEnnsylvania 6-5000 and the Marvelettes’ BEechwood 4-5789.
Callers turned the dial with their index fingers until they hit the shiny little gizmo that said you’ve gone far enough
When they removed their fingers, the dial rotated back to its starting position and they’d wind the second letter into the system. Then five numbers. In the old black and white films, characters often dial only five or six digits from when there were fewer phones.
Pushbutton phones were an upgrade because we no longer had to wind up the round dial seven times for local calls and eleven for long distance
It was much easier to just tap on the button that corresponded with the number we were ‘dialing.’ This action was the same as tapping out numbers on adding machines and calculators, with one big difference. The calculator’s number keys were arranged that way hundreds of years before the telephone was invented.
Why didn’t the phone company copy their layout?
It’s been reported that the layout was determined by consumer research that tested the 1-2-3 layout vs. the 7-8-9 layout. The 1-2-3 layout was preferred because it was more like the phone dials that had the 1 at the top.
In rural areas, general stores had the first telephone
After all, they were the business and social centers and the post office. The phone was a wooden box on the wall with a crank on the side. Attached to the box was a speaking tube on the front and a bell-shaped listening device hanging from a wire on the side. Callers turned the crank vigorously, sending an electrical signal that rang the operator’s bell to get his attention.
His?
The earliest operators were boys who had worked at telegraph offices and messenger services. But soon the boys were horsing around, not paying attention to their tasks, cursing some customers and ignoring others, glorying in their gatekeeping roles.
It was common knowledge back then that boys were snakes and snails and puppy dog tails
Girls were sugar and spice and everything nice. They were more polite, patient, reliable, faster, and cheaper than the boys, an easy staffing decision. Before long, 98% of operators were young women, girls (period correct), actually.
The telephone operator’s job was to plug cords with jacks into holes on a board in front of them about where a computer screen sits today, within an arm’s reach. Instead of keyboards, they worked with wires and switches.
The phone company gave operators strict rules
It defined the things operators could say to customers and things they were never to say. No conversations with other operators was at the top of a long list that treated giggling and squirming as punishable infractions.
Operators were trained in grammar, pronunciation, style, and tone until they learned the preferred “customer voice.” No one with a foreign accent or speech impediment was accepted.
Operators were densely packed together, thigh to thigh nearabout, so size had to be taken into account, too
Not too tall, not too short for the standardized dimensions of the equipment. There was no room for Widettes in single-sized chairs. (SNL inside joke, revealed below).
Operators were watchdogged constantly
Supervisors positioned behind the switchboard operators monitored five or six of them all day long. A 20-operator switchboard would have four or five supervisors sitting and standing behind the operators’ backs, always watching, always listening, always judging. How many jobs today are like that? That’s right, call centers, in the States and offshore, too.
More than 200 American women went to Europe during WWI as the Signal Corps Telephone Operators Unit
They were chosen from a pool of more than 10,000 applicants. Many of them spoke English and French, the language of our occupied ally. The SCFTOU operators answered every call with the word “hello.” Everyone ignored the clunky mouthful and called them the Hello Girls, a name they were fiercely proud of.
There’s a story going around the industry about a Kansas City undertaker
His name was Almon Strowger, and he invented the first automatic telephone switching machine. This was the technology that eliminated the need for the middleman operator. He was moved to do so when he learned a shrewd competitor had paid the local telephone operator to steer callers his way, stealing business away from Strowger.
Beginning in 1930, telephone companies gradually replaced switchboard operators with automatic relay switching equipment
When customers were able to make calls themselves, the need for switchboard operators tanked. The number of operators employed by phone companies dropped from a high of 350,000 in 1950 to only a handful today.
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*The telephone company referred to each caller as a party because they were considered to a “party to the conversation,” someone involved in the call.
Bonus
Mary Tyler Moore began her television career on the show Richard Diamond, Private Detective. She played the sultry and seductive-voiced switchboard operator who worked as Diamond’s answering service. None of that nasal Laura Petrie and whiny Mary Richards.
Moore’s character was named Sam and only her long, beautiful, dancer’s legs were shown on screen
This gimmick was used to “intrigue viewers and create a sense of mystery.” according to DuckDuckGo’s search agent.
My first telephone was two empty tin cans and a piece of string.
