January 14, 2021 • 25 mins
Matt and Helen discuss a time when phones didn't have dials and making a call required talking to a switchboard operator. Sarah Autumn from the Connections Museum in Seattle helps them connect to this Jobsolete profession and they listen in to what it took to make a long distance phone call in the 1940s.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Jobs Elite. I'm Matt Beat and I'm Helen
holl And. Today we're talking about switchboard operators longer. This
is Friday and homicide. I'd like to place a call
to Mr Frank Renard and Murphy, Idaho number seven six one.
(00:24):
That's right. Do you want me to call your backside? Okay,
I'll thank it for you. Say you live in Los
Angeles and you want to call your friend who lives
in Tokyo, Japan. You have to know the exit code
for the United States, which is zero one one in
case you were wondering, and the country code for Japan,
which is eighty one in case you're wondering. But then
(00:45):
you've punched in the area code for Tokyo and finally
the seven digit local phone number. Easy peasy, Right, this
has taken for granted. Right, The process is so automatic
that we take it for granted. But would you believe
that asking see read to make a phone call is
almost as old as the telephone itself? Well it is.
(01:07):
There used to be humans who actually delivered your call,
actual humans who had to keep the process moving along
as efficiently as possible. They were the ones who manually
connected calls by inserting a pair of phone plugs into
the appropriate jacks, and sometimes there would be several of
(01:27):
them doing this for one single phone call. So stay
connected with us, as in this episode, we will be
learning about the switchboard operator. I just learn from your
intro that zero one one is the exit code to
get out of the United States on a phone call.
(01:49):
And I've made international calls and dial zero one one
and just assumed that it was like a heads up,
I'm making an international call, but I thought it was
zero one and everywhere I did not know it was
an exit code to dial out of the United States.
So I'm already feeling a little bit stupid and foolish.
Thank you for educating me right out the gate. Oh,
(02:12):
I knew all about that since yesterday. Actually, there's something
I wanted to try here, Uh, Siri, call Helen Hong
calling Helen's mom. There, I'm gonna try to mina Hey, Siri,
call Matt Beat calling Matt Beat. Oh jeez, yes she
(02:33):
actually is. And see that was instant. You're in Los Angeles.
I'm in Kansas. That was less than a well, that
was a second. Oh, I just hung up on you, Siri,
hang up on Matt beat he's too busy right now
recording a podcast. Okay, she hung up on you. Well, Siri,
is today's uh, you could say switchboard operator. I mean,
(02:55):
obviously there's a lot of differences what you're going to
get into. So I mean, I think that I knew
about the existence of a switchboard operator from old timey movies, right,
Like it's it's like a common theme in a lot
of old timey movies where it's like, you know, you
just pick up a phone, go yes, uh, Kansas City please.
It's always a woman, right, It's always a woman, and
(03:17):
she's like plugging a bunch of wires into a switchboard
thing and they're connected. I don't know, like we assumed that,
oh yeah, this this must have been like a very
quick process. So, Helen, you've seen them in the movies.
But how about a radio show. There's actually this is
a we think is a real recording of a long
(03:39):
distance telephone call from l A to Idaho in Would
you like to listen to that clip? I sure would. Okay,
let's play it longer. This Friday and homicide, I'd like
to place a call to Mr Frank Gronod and Murphy Idaho.
(04:02):
The number seven six one Bahn pick one. Yeah, that's right.
Call has been played with a business office. All right,
do you want me to call your Backsidon? No, I'll
hang on, Okay, I'll brank. Good for you. Oh. I
love that she gave him the option to call him back. Yeah.
You know this is gonna be a while, don't you,
Because it's like it's like when you call customer service
(04:22):
and they're life going to be an hour Idaho Murphy
pick one? Okay, youkay, they're pretty efficient, correct for all
the medicine deven nine pick one? Thank you? The comond
Kurk is gonna call for great about crater rate O
rater not moment waste can the idahole routing and person,
(04:48):
I don't even know what's happening. She called somebody else
to be like, I need to get the Murphy Idaho's like, okay,
all right, thing when there's a lot of people working
in the background, connect directly too to Murphy Village and
(05:09):
I don't m M, I'm calling napper. Wow, no wonder
She offered to call him back. This is forever, you know, man,
(05:34):
that I have the millennial attention, saying, so I'm already bored.
I'm already like I don't need to talk to him
that bad. I'm on the edge of my seat right now.
What's gonna happen next? Oh? Aliens are landing? Clarious, what
do you want? Good than we're not going calling? I'm
(05:57):
frankran alright, I can go ahead. Hello. Wow. So that
was for all that we didn't get to hear the message. Oh,
I'm sure they had a wonderful conversation. But no, I'm
sure they didn't because they both forgot what they were
talking about. Because it was fourteen minutes ago that he
wanted to make the call. That is insane. Okay, As
(06:21):
someone who has a millennial attention span, I am mind
boggled that this is how phone calls were made like
that it was like seven and a half minutes just
to talk to the person. Yeah, and you gotta remember, though,
that it's still amazing for n to be even tying
talking to someone across the country or two states over.
(06:44):
So I think we might have to go back before
the telephone even here, because I don't think a lot
of times we really think about how amazing it is
we can talk to someone on the other side of
the world instantaneously, and what was what was the technology
that they were using immediately before the telephone was a telegraph. Yeah,
like you had to like or telegram or something or
(07:05):
you're like you had to like do the clicks and
the clokes. Yeah, yeah, that goes back to Samuel Morse,
the guy who invented the telegraph. That was eighteen thirties seven.
The telephone was eighteen seventy five, and so we saw
the first switchboard operators just a few years after that
in the eighteen eighties is when it really took off
(07:27):
as a profession. But yeah, we spoke with an expert.
My name is Sarah Autumn, and I am a volunteer
at the Museum of Communications in Seattle, Washington. I am
one of the core volunteers who works on the actual
telephone switches themselves, the great big automated machines that would
have connected your call in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties,
(07:49):
and fifties. Since there's only very few of these machines left,
it requires it sort of a crazy amount of specialized
skill to even know how to work on them. There's
a few of us there who actively do that, and
I'm one of them. She actually gets to do the switching,
the plugging of the cables in and like knowing which
plug goes where to like connect a phone call. That's
(08:11):
so cool. Yeah, we have an expert who actually does
the job wow NTO as part of a museum. So
because it's not it's not she's not doing it to
connect you you talking to me, Matt, Well, don't spoil
it now. We we don't want to let the audience
know if this job still exists or not. So to shay,
(08:32):
the first telephones in the eighteen seventies were local. You know,
the wires still had to connect directly to who you
were talking to. So think about it, like, you know,
if I'm calling you from a a landline phone at
traditional telephone the first telephone, my phone is literally connected
to a wire. The wire is connected to your phone
and amazing, that's yeah, So it could quickly become a mess,
(08:54):
you could imagine, Yeah, because if you had to physically
have a wire connecting every fall own to each other,
that's a lot of wires. The more phones there are,
so as the population was growing and as more and
more people were getting phones, obviously they needed more like
a more organized system to connect phones to each other, right, right,
and something that that Sarah said that I really didn't
(09:17):
even think about. You know, you pick up the phone
in those early days, and there was no dial tone
in the very early days of the telephone, in the
days of the manual operator. There wasn't really a dial
on the phone like we're used to seeing today, even
on our cell phones. You know, you would just pick
up the phone and the operator would answer with number please,
(09:37):
and then you would give the operator the number. Wow,
So somebody's always just there on the other ende of
the phone. You just pick up the phone and someone's
always there, you know. Like I said, they realized this
is gonna be just a giant mess, and so like,
we gotta get some help here, We gotta get some
people to connect these calls. They're all over the place.
And so that's the birth of theccupation of switchboard operator.
(10:02):
But yeah, typically in pop culture, their portrayed is is women.
But the earliest operators were actually teenage boys. Like that's
like why why young boys? Why were they like, hey,
you know, who would be great at this job? Young boys?
Was it like the same as like like newspaper delivery, boy,
I should probably say the reason why they stopped using
(10:25):
young boys to do it. The boys were very rude
on the phone. They were cussing out the customers sometimes,
and so uh, they began hiring women because women were
generally nicer and more pleasant to talk to, and so
that kind of just stuck so mad it seemed like
it was mostly women doing this job. But if you
wanted to do the job, what were their requirements? Well,
(10:45):
coming up, we're going to find out what exactly they
looked for in the ideal switchboard operator. Well, the phone
companies usually had very particular requirements for who was allowed
to become an operator. Now in the early twentieth century,
(11:10):
those requirements were usually that you had to be a young,
unmarried woman, you could not have kids, you could not
have any other job previously, and you had to have
a certain height and weight requirements. What I mentioned before
that there could be up to ten thousand lines in
(11:34):
one city switchboard and an operator, a completing operator would
have to access all of those ten thousand lines between
the tip of her left fingers and the tip of
her right fingers with her arms fully outstretched. So a
lot of the height and weight requirements were because of that,
because they wanted the operators to be able to reach
(11:56):
all of those jacks while still remaining seated. Oh okay,
I have so many questions. Okay, now that she explained
the height thing, I understand why one would have to
be a certain height. You have to be tall enough
to reach the very tippy top, like I wouldn't get
the job because I'm five feet tall and I wouldn't
be able to reach the tippy top plugs. Right, um,
(12:19):
But wave requirement seems a little a little uh. I
don't know why why there's a requirement for weight. And
then also you have to be an unmarried woman who's
never who doesn't have kids, that never had a job before,
so you had to be like a job virgin, unmarried
woman with no children. Why why? Well, yeah, that that
(12:42):
that was I I am honestly not completely sure. I
can only make assumptions upon that. But what are the assumptions?
Careful there? What are your assumptions? I want to know? Uh? No,
I mean, from what I understand the job, they wanted
someone who was able to be agile, and I think
is that flames the you know, being fairly physically fit
(13:05):
to handle, Like I know, it's still like that's so sexist.
It's very sexist, very sexism, right, it's just sexism. It's
just it's just like the phone operator boss. Dudes, we're like, yeah,
I want to be able to hit on hit on
the ladies when I go down to the switchboard. It
was like that, right, I mean, let's face it, like,
there's no other reason why you would need to be
(13:29):
an unmarried woman with no children and have never had
a job before. It was just it was just a
way of saying, like, I want you to be young
and cute and available. Yeah, as far as the whole
unmarried thing, I'm wanting to say, no comments, I have
no idea, but yeah, but at least to the women
(13:49):
in the beginning where they were hired because of their
the presumption that they were more pleasant on the phone, Okay,
I could see that, Like I could see first of all,
whoever's idea was to hire the young boys, that was
already a bad idea out the gate. If you're other
cheap though you could pay them hardly anything. That's the thing.
It probably made sense, like if you're newspaper boy, like
(14:10):
that was a typical boy. Young boys job like delivering newspapers,
and I could see this being an extension of that, like, hey,
we use boys to deliver newspapers, why don't we use
boys to make the phone calls to I could kind
of see how like that, you know that the logic
behind that, But then I could see how immediately it
(14:31):
was like a bad idea, like the boys are like
rough housing and like breaking equipment. Then you know they
have a coca cola during lunch and then they're bouncing
off the walls quite literally because of the actual cocaine
in the coca cola back then. So yeah, I see that.
But yeah, the unmarried, no kids, and the and the
wait requirement or the size of requirement, that's just sexism.
(14:53):
I can tell you that right now, Matt, I'm calling
it sexism. A lot of that going around in the eighties.
I think it might be best to kind of get
into like the actual job, because sure, it's like moving
wires around, but what did that actually look like? So
I think we'll listen to Sarah describe how complex the
(15:14):
job really was. It was quite a complex job being
an operator. You had to be able to manage several
things simultaneously and be really excellent multitasking. For instance, not
only were you connecting and disconnecting calls and ringing bells,
you were also monitoring calls that were currently in progress,
anywhere from one to twenty or thirty of them on
(15:37):
your board. In addition to just monitoring calls in progress,
you were also filling out tickets for billing, and you
were handling re rings where the customer would get back
on the line and say, operator, the call is not good,
you need to reconnect me. So there was a lot
they were doing. Wow. They were very, very busy. Wow.
So you're like a ticket taker on a train and
(16:02):
you're like person with the flag, like leading the plane
into the runway. I mean you're like, yeah, you're doing
a lot of stuff. I'm curious about what she means
when monitoring calls. Does she mean that they were listening
into these phone calls. Yeah, they could listen in to
any phone call they wanted to. They could at all. Yeah,
(16:22):
sometimes they would eavesdrop if they actually had the time
to do that. So if you're so if you're having
an illicit affair, say you're cheating on your wife with
a side lady, and you're like saying like you're having
a dirty phone call with your side lady and this,
and the and the operator could be listening in. They
have a lot of power then all of a sudden,
don't they. In a small town, it's more likely that
(16:44):
operators got bored, and operators frequently passed the time by
listening in on the phone calls and the gossip that
was going around in that now, so you know, well
that was never officially allowed, it surely happened. And you
know they sort of knew who was talking about what,
(17:04):
and who was getting married, and who was having a baby,
and who was fighting and all of that good stuff too.
That's juicy. So if you're calling the chemist to pick
up your prescription for who knows what? The operator knew
all about your health condition. And this is before hippo,
before the health privacy laws that we have now. And
(17:31):
if you were like, say you say, you, Matt, we're
trying to ask a girl out, you'd be like, so, um, so, Beth,
I was wondering if and then you can just hear
somebody giggling he did you know? Her name was Beth
spot On? So yeah, it was both. It wasn't just
the neighbors listening in. It could it could be the
(17:51):
switchboard operator. Wow, she was like she was literally connected
more so than the local priest in the confessional booth,
so that that would not happen. That these uh, these
bigger and these bigger operations that you saw in the cities,
like where there would be hundreds of lines to connect.
You know, nobody got time to be listening in on
(18:13):
no phone calls if you're connecting hundreds of lines. You know.
One thing about all this, though, is as far as
the technical side of it, it's still an enigma to me.
(18:33):
It's like, how much do you know about this at
the technical side of how this worked? Like the age
connection that was made, the connections that you heard in
that clip. I have no idea I have. I still
don't know how sound travels through wires, Like I still
don't get it, Like it's it's a mystery to me,
and I just I don't understand how like plugging one
(18:55):
like a cable into a plug and then plugging the
other side into another somehow gets you a phone call
from here to Kansas. There were actually several different kinds
of operators, all working behind the scenes that a caller
may not interact with directly, but all these different operators
(19:16):
had a role in completing their calls. The switchboards were very,
very long. They usually spanned a wall anywhere from you know.
The smallest ones where a few feet long, and the
largest ones in big cities could be upwards of a
hundred feet long. And they kind of looked like tables
with a bunch of keys and levers and lights on them.
(19:37):
These tables also had these vertical backing panels. On these
back panels, which were directly in front of the operator,
there were hundreds and thousands of jacks and lamps. All
of those Jackson lamps were for the hundreds or thousands
of subscribers that would have been served from that exchange.
The operators had a set of cords that they used
(20:00):
to plug into these jacks, and that's how you connected
various subscribers. There was, in fact a jack for every
single subscriber in an exchange. In a standard large city exchange,
there could be up to ten thousand subscribers. This, that
whole clip makes me really makes me so thankful of
(20:26):
the way phones work right now, because we take for
granted how easy it is to make a phone call,
and even now like if I if I hit you know,
if I tell Syria to call, you know, my friend,
and she takes more than like point oh two seconds
to do it, like I'm annoyed. And so it's just
(20:47):
it's just mind boggling how much we take for granted
that I can make a phone call. I don't even
have to press anything, I don't have to die anything.
I can tell Sirie to call and it's like instantaneous,
and that could happen all of the world. But also
the second thing I thought of when she was describing
how to make a phone the cost down is, uh, this,
this would make drunk dialing. So I'm consuming and and
(21:11):
a little bit like dissuade you from drunk dialing, right yeah.
The operator can be like, hey, look, look maybe you
just thought to hang up right now. Okay. If I'm like, listen,
I want to talk to my ex boyfriend, get him
on the I know he's married, I don't care, get
him on the phone right now, she'd be like, you
(21:31):
know what, why don't you settled down the fact that
just not one, not two, not three, maybe four or
five six people are between you and another person across
the country in one phone call. So obviously we don't
have switchboard operators anymore, kind of thank god. But what
(21:51):
but what was like? What was what happened to phase
which word operators out? Well, after the break, we'll talk
about what change changed as far as the technology that
made it so we we didn't need humans anymore to
connect our calls. In large cities, particularly New York City,
the number of telephone subscribers was growing at a rate
(22:16):
that was so fast that they did not have enough
operators to handle the influx of subscribers who were placing calls.
This was exacerbated after World War One by a general
strike where a bunch of operators and a bunch of
other people just stopped working because they were there one strike.
And the telephone company saw that, you know, very quickly
(22:40):
that they needed something to replace or augment the role
of operators. So they deployed, you know, automatic dial switching
in New York and that eventually spread to the rest
of the country. But it took many, many, many, many
many years for that to happen, and it certainly didn't
have and overnight. By the I'd say, by the nineteen
(23:03):
fifties nineteen sixties, the majority of telephone exchanges were dial
by that point, and certainly by the nineteen seventies, the
role of the operator was very, very rapidly diminishing in
American society. I'm very sad to hear that the replacement
of telephone operators was like the genesis of it was
(23:25):
a general strike. It's like, these poor workers are trying
to like get better working conditions and get better pay,
and then of course these big corporations like, well, we
don't need you anyway. It's like Amazon. It's a story
that is that does rhyme throughout history at time and
time again we see like the workers are fed up,
(23:47):
they're not getting paid enough, they're working long hours, and
they go on strike and like fine, the the ones
who owned the means of production, they're like, hey, we're
just gonna replace you with machines. A bummer. So are
there any like traditional switchboard operators in the world right now,
maybe maybe outside of the US, or like, is this
a job that's completely dead? It is a job. It
(24:10):
is completely dead. Now, what do you think? Yeah, I
mean yeah, right, because the customer service rep is not
the same thing. If you get a customer service rep
on the phone, we have modern technology for that. We
just have Seri, who's a robot who connects me to
you know, the phone which goes out into this cellular
(24:31):
world or however phone phone calls are made nowadays. Um,
but there's no person involved in that. So yeah, can
you imagine if you needed an operator to help you
send a tweet or a text every day? Uh, let
us know what you think of this episode at Job
Sleete pod on Twitter. Job Slete is produced for I
(24:57):
Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You.
It's hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt
beat That's Me. The show was conceived and produced by
Anthony Savini, Jason Elliott, and Steve Zamarki. Our editor is
Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka, our production coordinator
(25:18):
is Angie Hymes, and theme music is by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to our I Heart Radio team
led by Nikki Eatore, Katrina Norvell, Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hattie Kador,
Will Pearson, conal Burne and Bob Pittman.
This is Jobs Elite. I'm Matt Beat and I'm Helen
holl And. Today we're talking about switchboard operators longer. This
is Friday and homicide. I'd like to place a call
to Mr Frank Renard and Murphy, Idaho number seven six one.
(00:24):
That's right. Do you want me to call your backside? Okay,
I'll thank it for you. Say you live in Los
Angeles and you want to call your friend who lives
in Tokyo, Japan. You have to know the exit code
for the United States, which is zero one one in
case you were wondering, and the country code for Japan,
which is eighty one in case you're wondering. But then
(00:45):
you've punched in the area code for Tokyo and finally
the seven digit local phone number. Easy peasy, Right, this
has taken for granted. Right, The process is so automatic
that we take it for granted. But would you believe
that asking see read to make a phone call is
almost as old as the telephone itself? Well it is.
(01:07):
There used to be humans who actually delivered your call,
actual humans who had to keep the process moving along
as efficiently as possible. They were the ones who manually
connected calls by inserting a pair of phone plugs into
the appropriate jacks, and sometimes there would be several of
(01:27):
them doing this for one single phone call. So stay
connected with us, as in this episode, we will be
learning about the switchboard operator. I just learn from your
intro that zero one one is the exit code to
get out of the United States on a phone call.
(01:49):
And I've made international calls and dial zero one one
and just assumed that it was like a heads up,
I'm making an international call, but I thought it was
zero one and everywhere I did not know it was
an exit code to dial out of the United States.
So I'm already feeling a little bit stupid and foolish.
Thank you for educating me right out the gate. Oh,
(02:12):
I knew all about that since yesterday. Actually, there's something
I wanted to try here, Uh, Siri, call Helen Hong
calling Helen's mom. There, I'm gonna try to mina Hey, Siri,
call Matt Beat calling Matt Beat. Oh jeez, yes she
(02:33):
actually is. And see that was instant. You're in Los Angeles.
I'm in Kansas. That was less than a well, that
was a second. Oh, I just hung up on you, Siri,
hang up on Matt beat he's too busy right now
recording a podcast. Okay, she hung up on you. Well, Siri,
is today's uh, you could say switchboard operator. I mean,
(02:55):
obviously there's a lot of differences what you're going to
get into. So I mean, I think that I knew
about the existence of a switchboard operator from old timey movies, right,
Like it's it's like a common theme in a lot
of old timey movies where it's like, you know, you
just pick up a phone, go yes, uh, Kansas City please.
It's always a woman, right, It's always a woman, and
(03:17):
she's like plugging a bunch of wires into a switchboard
thing and they're connected. I don't know, like we assumed that,
oh yeah, this this must have been like a very
quick process. So, Helen, you've seen them in the movies.
But how about a radio show. There's actually this is
a we think is a real recording of a long
(03:39):
distance telephone call from l A to Idaho in Would
you like to listen to that clip? I sure would. Okay,
let's play it longer. This Friday and homicide, I'd like
to place a call to Mr Frank Gronod and Murphy Idaho.
(04:02):
The number seven six one Bahn pick one. Yeah, that's right.
Call has been played with a business office. All right,
do you want me to call your Backsidon? No, I'll
hang on, Okay, I'll brank. Good for you. Oh. I
love that she gave him the option to call him back. Yeah.
You know this is gonna be a while, don't you,
Because it's like it's like when you call customer service
(04:22):
and they're life going to be an hour Idaho Murphy
pick one? Okay, youkay, they're pretty efficient, correct for all
the medicine deven nine pick one? Thank you? The comond
Kurk is gonna call for great about crater rate O
rater not moment waste can the idahole routing and person,
(04:48):
I don't even know what's happening. She called somebody else
to be like, I need to get the Murphy Idaho's like, okay,
all right, thing when there's a lot of people working
in the background, connect directly too to Murphy Village and
(05:09):
I don't m M, I'm calling napper. Wow, no wonder
She offered to call him back. This is forever, you know, man,
(05:34):
that I have the millennial attention, saying, so I'm already bored.
I'm already like I don't need to talk to him
that bad. I'm on the edge of my seat right now.
What's gonna happen next? Oh? Aliens are landing? Clarious, what
do you want? Good than we're not going calling? I'm
(05:57):
frankran alright, I can go ahead. Hello. Wow. So that
was for all that we didn't get to hear the message. Oh,
I'm sure they had a wonderful conversation. But no, I'm
sure they didn't because they both forgot what they were
talking about. Because it was fourteen minutes ago that he
wanted to make the call. That is insane. Okay, As
(06:21):
someone who has a millennial attention span, I am mind
boggled that this is how phone calls were made like
that it was like seven and a half minutes just
to talk to the person. Yeah, and you gotta remember, though,
that it's still amazing for n to be even tying
talking to someone across the country or two states over.
(06:44):
So I think we might have to go back before
the telephone even here, because I don't think a lot
of times we really think about how amazing it is
we can talk to someone on the other side of
the world instantaneously, and what was what was the technology
that they were using immediately before the telephone was a telegraph. Yeah,
like you had to like or telegram or something or
(07:05):
you're like you had to like do the clicks and
the clokes. Yeah, yeah, that goes back to Samuel Morse,
the guy who invented the telegraph. That was eighteen thirties seven.
The telephone was eighteen seventy five, and so we saw
the first switchboard operators just a few years after that
in the eighteen eighties is when it really took off
(07:27):
as a profession. But yeah, we spoke with an expert.
My name is Sarah Autumn, and I am a volunteer
at the Museum of Communications in Seattle, Washington. I am
one of the core volunteers who works on the actual
telephone switches themselves, the great big automated machines that would
have connected your call in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties,
(07:49):
and fifties. Since there's only very few of these machines left,
it requires it sort of a crazy amount of specialized
skill to even know how to work on them. There's
a few of us there who actively do that, and
I'm one of them. She actually gets to do the switching,
the plugging of the cables in and like knowing which
plug goes where to like connect a phone call. That's
(08:11):
so cool. Yeah, we have an expert who actually does
the job wow NTO as part of a museum. So
because it's not it's not she's not doing it to
connect you you talking to me, Matt, Well, don't spoil
it now. We we don't want to let the audience
know if this job still exists or not. So to shay,
(08:32):
the first telephones in the eighteen seventies were local. You know,
the wires still had to connect directly to who you
were talking to. So think about it, like, you know,
if I'm calling you from a a landline phone at
traditional telephone the first telephone, my phone is literally connected
to a wire. The wire is connected to your phone
and amazing, that's yeah, So it could quickly become a mess,
(08:54):
you could imagine, Yeah, because if you had to physically
have a wire connecting every fall own to each other,
that's a lot of wires. The more phones there are,
so as the population was growing and as more and
more people were getting phones, obviously they needed more like
a more organized system to connect phones to each other, right, right,
and something that that Sarah said that I really didn't
(09:17):
even think about. You know, you pick up the phone
in those early days, and there was no dial tone
in the very early days of the telephone, in the
days of the manual operator. There wasn't really a dial
on the phone like we're used to seeing today, even
on our cell phones. You know, you would just pick
up the phone and the operator would answer with number please,
(09:37):
and then you would give the operator the number. Wow,
So somebody's always just there on the other ende of
the phone. You just pick up the phone and someone's
always there, you know. Like I said, they realized this
is gonna be just a giant mess, and so like,
we gotta get some help here, We gotta get some
people to connect these calls. They're all over the place.
And so that's the birth of theccupation of switchboard operator.
(10:02):
But yeah, typically in pop culture, their portrayed is is women.
But the earliest operators were actually teenage boys. Like that's
like why why young boys? Why were they like, hey,
you know, who would be great at this job? Young boys?
Was it like the same as like like newspaper delivery, boy,
I should probably say the reason why they stopped using
(10:25):
young boys to do it. The boys were very rude
on the phone. They were cussing out the customers sometimes,
and so uh, they began hiring women because women were
generally nicer and more pleasant to talk to, and so
that kind of just stuck so mad it seemed like
it was mostly women doing this job. But if you
wanted to do the job, what were their requirements? Well,
(10:45):
coming up, we're going to find out what exactly they
looked for in the ideal switchboard operator. Well, the phone
companies usually had very particular requirements for who was allowed
to become an operator. Now in the early twentieth century,
(11:10):
those requirements were usually that you had to be a young,
unmarried woman, you could not have kids, you could not
have any other job previously, and you had to have
a certain height and weight requirements. What I mentioned before
that there could be up to ten thousand lines in
(11:34):
one city switchboard and an operator, a completing operator would
have to access all of those ten thousand lines between
the tip of her left fingers and the tip of
her right fingers with her arms fully outstretched. So a
lot of the height and weight requirements were because of that,
because they wanted the operators to be able to reach
(11:56):
all of those jacks while still remaining seated. Oh okay,
I have so many questions. Okay, now that she explained
the height thing, I understand why one would have to
be a certain height. You have to be tall enough
to reach the very tippy top, like I wouldn't get
the job because I'm five feet tall and I wouldn't
be able to reach the tippy top plugs. Right, um,
(12:19):
But wave requirement seems a little a little uh. I
don't know why why there's a requirement for weight. And
then also you have to be an unmarried woman who's
never who doesn't have kids, that never had a job before,
so you had to be like a job virgin, unmarried
woman with no children. Why why? Well, yeah, that that
(12:42):
that was I I am honestly not completely sure. I
can only make assumptions upon that. But what are the assumptions?
Careful there? What are your assumptions? I want to know? Uh? No,
I mean, from what I understand the job, they wanted
someone who was able to be agile, and I think
is that flames the you know, being fairly physically fit
(13:05):
to handle, Like I know, it's still like that's so sexist.
It's very sexist, very sexism, right, it's just sexism. It's
just it's just like the phone operator boss. Dudes, we're like, yeah,
I want to be able to hit on hit on
the ladies when I go down to the switchboard. It
was like that, right, I mean, let's face it, like,
there's no other reason why you would need to be
(13:29):
an unmarried woman with no children and have never had
a job before. It was just it was just a
way of saying, like, I want you to be young
and cute and available. Yeah, as far as the whole
unmarried thing, I'm wanting to say, no comments, I have
no idea, but yeah, but at least to the women
(13:49):
in the beginning where they were hired because of their
the presumption that they were more pleasant on the phone, Okay,
I could see that, Like I could see first of all,
whoever's idea was to hire the young boys, that was
already a bad idea out the gate. If you're other
cheap though you could pay them hardly anything. That's the thing.
It probably made sense, like if you're newspaper boy, like
(14:10):
that was a typical boy. Young boys job like delivering newspapers,
and I could see this being an extension of that, like, hey,
we use boys to deliver newspapers, why don't we use
boys to make the phone calls to I could kind
of see how like that, you know that the logic
behind that, But then I could see how immediately it
(14:31):
was like a bad idea, like the boys are like
rough housing and like breaking equipment. Then you know they
have a coca cola during lunch and then they're bouncing
off the walls quite literally because of the actual cocaine
in the coca cola back then. So yeah, I see that.
But yeah, the unmarried, no kids, and the and the
wait requirement or the size of requirement, that's just sexism.
(14:53):
I can tell you that right now, Matt, I'm calling
it sexism. A lot of that going around in the eighties.
I think it might be best to kind of get
into like the actual job, because sure, it's like moving
wires around, but what did that actually look like? So
I think we'll listen to Sarah describe how complex the
(15:14):
job really was. It was quite a complex job being
an operator. You had to be able to manage several
things simultaneously and be really excellent multitasking. For instance, not
only were you connecting and disconnecting calls and ringing bells,
you were also monitoring calls that were currently in progress,
anywhere from one to twenty or thirty of them on
(15:37):
your board. In addition to just monitoring calls in progress,
you were also filling out tickets for billing, and you
were handling re rings where the customer would get back
on the line and say, operator, the call is not good,
you need to reconnect me. So there was a lot
they were doing. Wow. They were very, very busy. Wow.
So you're like a ticket taker on a train and
(16:02):
you're like person with the flag, like leading the plane
into the runway. I mean you're like, yeah, you're doing
a lot of stuff. I'm curious about what she means
when monitoring calls. Does she mean that they were listening
into these phone calls. Yeah, they could listen in to
any phone call they wanted to. They could at all. Yeah,
(16:22):
sometimes they would eavesdrop if they actually had the time
to do that. So if you're so if you're having
an illicit affair, say you're cheating on your wife with
a side lady, and you're like saying like you're having
a dirty phone call with your side lady and this,
and the and the operator could be listening in. They
have a lot of power then all of a sudden,
don't they. In a small town, it's more likely that
(16:44):
operators got bored, and operators frequently passed the time by
listening in on the phone calls and the gossip that
was going around in that now, so you know, well
that was never officially allowed, it surely happened. And you
know they sort of knew who was talking about what,
(17:04):
and who was getting married, and who was having a baby,
and who was fighting and all of that good stuff too.
That's juicy. So if you're calling the chemist to pick
up your prescription for who knows what? The operator knew
all about your health condition. And this is before hippo,
before the health privacy laws that we have now. And
(17:31):
if you were like, say you say, you, Matt, we're
trying to ask a girl out, you'd be like, so, um, so, Beth,
I was wondering if and then you can just hear
somebody giggling he did you know? Her name was Beth
spot On? So yeah, it was both. It wasn't just
the neighbors listening in. It could it could be the
(17:51):
switchboard operator. Wow, she was like she was literally connected
more so than the local priest in the confessional booth,
so that that would not happen. That these uh, these
bigger and these bigger operations that you saw in the cities,
like where there would be hundreds of lines to connect.
You know, nobody got time to be listening in on
(18:13):
no phone calls if you're connecting hundreds of lines. You know.
One thing about all this, though, is as far as
the technical side of it, it's still an enigma to me.
(18:33):
It's like, how much do you know about this at
the technical side of how this worked? Like the age
connection that was made, the connections that you heard in
that clip. I have no idea I have. I still
don't know how sound travels through wires, Like I still
don't get it, Like it's it's a mystery to me,
and I just I don't understand how like plugging one
(18:55):
like a cable into a plug and then plugging the
other side into another somehow gets you a phone call
from here to Kansas. There were actually several different kinds
of operators, all working behind the scenes that a caller
may not interact with directly, but all these different operators
(19:16):
had a role in completing their calls. The switchboards were very,
very long. They usually spanned a wall anywhere from you know.
The smallest ones where a few feet long, and the
largest ones in big cities could be upwards of a
hundred feet long. And they kind of looked like tables
with a bunch of keys and levers and lights on them.
(19:37):
These tables also had these vertical backing panels. On these
back panels, which were directly in front of the operator,
there were hundreds and thousands of jacks and lamps. All
of those Jackson lamps were for the hundreds or thousands
of subscribers that would have been served from that exchange.
The operators had a set of cords that they used
(20:00):
to plug into these jacks, and that's how you connected
various subscribers. There was, in fact a jack for every
single subscriber in an exchange. In a standard large city exchange,
there could be up to ten thousand subscribers. This, that
whole clip makes me really makes me so thankful of
(20:26):
the way phones work right now, because we take for
granted how easy it is to make a phone call,
and even now like if I if I hit you know,
if I tell Syria to call, you know, my friend,
and she takes more than like point oh two seconds
to do it, like I'm annoyed. And so it's just
(20:47):
it's just mind boggling how much we take for granted
that I can make a phone call. I don't even
have to press anything, I don't have to die anything.
I can tell Sirie to call and it's like instantaneous,
and that could happen all of the world. But also
the second thing I thought of when she was describing
how to make a phone the cost down is, uh, this,
this would make drunk dialing. So I'm consuming and and
(21:11):
a little bit like dissuade you from drunk dialing, right yeah.
The operator can be like, hey, look, look maybe you
just thought to hang up right now. Okay. If I'm like, listen,
I want to talk to my ex boyfriend, get him
on the I know he's married, I don't care, get
him on the phone right now, she'd be like, you
(21:31):
know what, why don't you settled down the fact that
just not one, not two, not three, maybe four or
five six people are between you and another person across
the country in one phone call. So obviously we don't
have switchboard operators anymore, kind of thank god. But what
(21:51):
but what was like? What was what happened to phase
which word operators out? Well, after the break, we'll talk
about what change changed as far as the technology that
made it so we we didn't need humans anymore to
connect our calls. In large cities, particularly New York City,
the number of telephone subscribers was growing at a rate
(22:16):
that was so fast that they did not have enough
operators to handle the influx of subscribers who were placing calls.
This was exacerbated after World War One by a general
strike where a bunch of operators and a bunch of
other people just stopped working because they were there one strike.
And the telephone company saw that, you know, very quickly
(22:40):
that they needed something to replace or augment the role
of operators. So they deployed, you know, automatic dial switching
in New York and that eventually spread to the rest
of the country. But it took many, many, many, many
many years for that to happen, and it certainly didn't
have and overnight. By the I'd say, by the nineteen
(23:03):
fifties nineteen sixties, the majority of telephone exchanges were dial
by that point, and certainly by the nineteen seventies, the
role of the operator was very, very rapidly diminishing in
American society. I'm very sad to hear that the replacement
of telephone operators was like the genesis of it was
(23:25):
a general strike. It's like, these poor workers are trying
to like get better working conditions and get better pay,
and then of course these big corporations like, well, we
don't need you anyway. It's like Amazon. It's a story
that is that does rhyme throughout history at time and
time again we see like the workers are fed up,
(23:47):
they're not getting paid enough, they're working long hours, and
they go on strike and like fine, the the ones
who owned the means of production, they're like, hey, we're
just gonna replace you with machines. A bummer. So are
there any like traditional switchboard operators in the world right now,
maybe maybe outside of the US, or like, is this
a job that's completely dead? It is a job. It
(24:10):
is completely dead. Now, what do you think? Yeah, I
mean yeah, right, because the customer service rep is not
the same thing. If you get a customer service rep
on the phone, we have modern technology for that. We
just have Seri, who's a robot who connects me to
you know, the phone which goes out into this cellular
(24:31):
world or however phone phone calls are made nowadays. Um,
but there's no person involved in that. So yeah, can
you imagine if you needed an operator to help you
send a tweet or a text every day? Uh, let
us know what you think of this episode at Job
Sleete pod on Twitter. Job Slete is produced for I
(24:57):
Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You.
It's hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt
beat That's Me. The show was conceived and produced by
Anthony Savini, Jason Elliott, and Steve Zamarki. Our editor is
Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka, our production coordinator
(25:18):
is Angie Hymes, and theme music is by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to our I Heart Radio team
led by Nikki Eatore, Katrina Norvell, Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hattie Kador,
Will Pearson, conal Burne and Bob Pittman.
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