March 4, 2025 • 49 mins
The telephone switchboard was a real wonder of technology and laid the groundwork for the next generation of connectivity. Learn how these things worked today.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck
ring Ring, there's Jerry and this is Stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
That's right. This is a Kyle joint. So there's a
little British factor to an ear is Kyle likes to
throw those in because that's where he lives.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, he keeps mentioning fish and chips every few paragraphs.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, what's a chippy. We are going to be talking
about telephone switchboards. Some overlap with a couple of other
episodes we've done, but this is all about the you know,
the the advancement of the telephone system and the United
States and abroad, and how the telephone switchboard was a crucial,
crucial part of that.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah. First, I want to give a shout out. If
you ever find yourself in the town of Maitland, Florida,
go to the Maitland I think, well, it's the Telephone Museum.
There's probably not more than one telephone museum in Maitland,
even though I can't remember the name of it. Just
ask somebody for directions there and they will tell you
(01:11):
or ask your app regardless. It's really cute. It's not
the biggest museum you'll ever find, but it's a very
dedicated museum.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
I leveled telephones. I would like to check that out.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh you'd love this. There's a bank of wall telephones
from the seventies probably, and each one's a different color.
It's very pretty. Oh my god, Yeah, you would like
this place. Check it. It reminded me that something that
was just such an integral part of our life is
a completely obsolete, outdated antique technology. There's basically no reason
(01:48):
for it to exist any longer, and it may not
as far as I know. Yeah, I think you still
have to have it to connect some home alarm systems maybe,
but that's the only application I know of anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Actually, you know what, that's We had that for that
landline for that reason for a while, but no longer.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I mean, I don't. I just don't think that there's
any reason for you to exist any Look, I'm sure
I'm wrong, but that's the best I can come up
with this home alarm systems.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I guess nostalgia's not a good enough reason.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Huh keeps this amazing network of technology still around?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Oh? Yeah, man, I mean lots of it's dumb. It's
just my my urgen x selves like looking back with
joy about walking around your bedroom with a long phone
cord and yeah, or your mom literally being able to
go to every point in the kitchen with like a
twenty five foot stretchy phone cord that you're ducking under
(02:45):
and it's knocking things over.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
And that's right, there goes the flower.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Wireless is better.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I know it's I don't think it's just nostalgia. I
think there is some real value or there's it's not
pointless to look at the telephone system that was created
over the decades in the twentieth century and just be impressed,
like it wasn't a marvelous technology and it did some
(03:12):
amazing stuff while it was around. It's just we've moved
on technology wise. But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, I wonder if they're they're safer like for like
government systems, you know, because you literally have to tap
the wire physically. It's not just in the airwaves, true dat.
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I don't know either, but that's a great point.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm curious. Surely someone knows. But let's talk about Alexander
Graham Bell, because he is the og. He's the guy
that invented, well patented the telephone at least, right, and
from Boston in eighteen seventy six, where he was not
trying to invent a telephone. He was trying to work
out the problem with the electrical telegraph, which was it
(03:57):
was just getting bunched up. Too many people are sending
too many you know, telegraphs, and it's a problem. So
there's too much traffic. So all of a sudden, Bell,
who was a sound guy anyway, realized that you could
send tones. And once he realized you could send a
tone along a wire, he was like, oh, forget the telegraph,
(04:19):
I'm going to come up with the harmonic telegraph and
one day I'm going to speak to somebody on the
other end of a wire.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, not dots and dashes, but hayes and how are
you is or a hoys? Yeah? Right. So he did
this in eighteen seventy six, right, He set out to
figure out the telegraph clogging and invented the phone pretty quickly.
The next year he found a Bell Telephone company, and
(04:47):
the first permanent telephone wires were in Boston, I think
that same year right, So we had telephone service set
up within a year of him inventing the telephone. One
of the other things too, is he helped kind of
spread telephone technology by giving lectures that people would come
see and then go off and like build their own
(05:07):
versions that would work. But initially, when you were talking
to somebody on a telephone, your telephone was physically connected
to their telephone, which made a lot of sense initially,
But if you want to talk to more than one
friend in town, you need another wire to connect your
phone to somebody else's telephone, and so on and so forth.
(05:31):
And if you just kind of follow that logical path,
you very quickly realize, like, man, we're going to need
a lot of wires to connect one person to everybody
else and everybody else to that one person. It just
that's the definition of exponential growth. And so they figured
out they needed a different way rather than connecting each
telephone physically, and that's where they came up with the
(05:53):
concept of the switchboard.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
That's right, What if all of the calls went into
a central location and it was a human being there
that would connect those two wires. It's a very elegant,
very simple, sort of system. It's you know, it's literally
connecting two calls by you know, by connecting them by
plugging them into the same what would you even call
(06:17):
that board?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Jack?
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, the same jack. The first switchboard commercially was in
eighteen seventy eight, so only geez, like a year after
the Bell Telephone Company was founded. This is in New Haven, Connecticut,
and it connected twenty one different subscribers in this case.
And this is a very old fashioned, primitive thing. Before
(06:40):
long they were like, why don't we wrap these chords
in cloth? It's like insulated, and why don't we make
the you know, the board look a little nicer and
we'll call them achrdboard. But everyone's still going to call
them a switchboard.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yes. One thing really quick too. When some of these
first commercial switchboards popped up in town, like the one
in New Haven that I guess George Coy was the
inventor of, they would publish phone books, and the first
phone books would be like one page with like fifty
people's names on because when you called, you would call
(07:15):
and your call would be connected by an operator. So
you'd pick up your phone and the only person that
would go to is that operator or switchboard and you
would say I want to talk to Chuck Bryant please,
and the operator would look up where your jack was
that went to your house and then now connected the call.
Right So they would plug my phone cord into your
(07:39):
phone jack and connect our call. But first they would write. First,
they would they would plug in themselves to you and
say Josh Clark calling for Charles Bryant, and you would say,
tell him, I'm in the shower.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
They would plug back.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Into mine and be like, he's in the shower, he
can't talk right now. And I would say tell him
that I know he's not in the shower and hang out, fang.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Really, you're not too far off.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
That is, if my jack is on that board. If
it was a big enough community, that switchboard operator might say,
I don't have Chuck on this board, but he's on
another board, so I'm going to contact that switchboard and
you know, patch it in that way.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So but first thing, spend ten minutes going down east
Jack like Chuck Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck Chuck Chuck.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Well, early on they just knew it, you know, in
a twenty one person situation, they just knew everybody. In fact,
that for a little while. They weren't even saying phone numbers.
They were just like Chuck Bryant, right exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
And one of the other things about a central switchboard too,
is there's a phone company employee connecting calls, and so
now you can track things more easily and hence bill
people more accurately too.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, because this is when making a call costs money,
and up until I mean not that long ago, in
the grand scheme of things, making a long distance call
costs extra money. So you had to build people, and
it was pretty ingenious. Things started growing, growing, growing, you
said the word exponentially, and that is the truth, because
between eighteen eighty and just thirteen years later we went
(09:11):
from sixty thousand phones to two sixty and then just
another ten years later there were three million phones in
the United States only Kyle points out, and then the
UK they were a little bit behind us. Nineteen fourteen
there were fewer than two telephones per one hundred people
compared to ten in the US, but they eventually caught
(09:34):
up to and everyone had phones.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
That's right. I'm sure there's some listeners like I didn't
have a phone when I was a kid. Well maybe
so as more and more people had phones, More and
more jacks were required in switchboards, so you're getting bigger switchboards,
more switchboards. It became kind of a mess in and
of itself, as we'll see. That was known as the
(09:58):
switchboard problem, right. Yeah, But then finally they figured out, okay,
there's a few tweaks we can do here that are
going to allow us just to support this growth. Because
the phone companies weren't like, well, we're good at ten
thousand subscribers, let's just hold here. They wanted everybody to
have a phone so they could bill everybody for using
(10:19):
those phones. And also America or the United States of
the world, I think, was like, we really want to
be able to pick up the phone and talk to people.
It was a huge, enormous technology that completely changed how
humans interact with one another. So everybody wanted a phone.
Phone company wanted to give people phones. The big sticking
point was how you can connect that many people in
(10:42):
an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after
switchboard after switchboard.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah. And you know something else we should point out too,
is this is a time where the phone company controlled
the phones themselves, and so you can just go to
a store and buy some cool looking Mickey mouse phone
or a Garfield phone or illustrated I had a I
did get that for free, actually, but those are always garbage.
(11:08):
Those are the ones that look like push button but
when you hit it, it dialed.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Oh really, do.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
You remember those who you know it had the keypad,
but when you hit nine, it.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Went No, I don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It was a big bait and switch. But you rented
your phone at the time, I guess you had a
or maybe they didn't sell them at all at first,
but I know for a long time they rented phones
to people, like into the seventies, right, yeah, I mean
like you used to rent your Some people still probably
rent their modem from their cable or whatever their Wi
Fi provider. Saying all the wrong words.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
No, I think you got it provider, yeah, or internet
is Internet Service provider ISP.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
That's okay. But yeah, anyway, they were they were controlling
the flow of money and more ways than just the bill.
They wanted as many people to have phones as possible
because they were renting those phones and eventually I guess
selling those phones.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah. I remember. Umi has a story from when she
was a kid of going to the phone store with
her dad and renting a princess phone.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Like I remember it, it's so weird.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
It is weird. It's just weird to think of. But
like you said, that was a way for them to
control revenue even more. And also I think it made
it more available to more people, because I think even
into the sixties to seventies, phones were still kind of
expensive to make, and so they were expensive to buy,
so you could lease them. But I think ultimately it
(12:32):
was it was really the phone companies, and they were
able to get away from this, as we'll see, because
for years and years and years there was essentially a
monopoly on the phone in the United States.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's right, But I got us a little off track.
You were talking about some new techniques because the switchboards,
all of a sudden, we're getting just more and more ubiquitous,
and they started to get a little clunky in like
how long it would take to connect calls. So one
of the things they did is came up with the
concept of what's called the divided exchange, which is really
(13:04):
just an organizational structural thing where people got more specialized.
You might have operators just answering the phone. You might
have people just connecting instead of the person going, oh hey, Josh,
let me see if Chuck's available. Like, all of that
was really streamlined eventually until they came up what was
called the Express system that had a lot of letter
(13:25):
B boards that converged on a letter A board and
there was an operator linking between those two.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Right, Yeah, so the A person, the person at the
A board would be like, oh, yeah, Josh is on
B board seventy two, but Chuck is on B board three,
So I need I need to be the one that
connects B board seventy two in B board three for
this call. These are human beings doing this and expected
to do it really fast too, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. They also just improved the signals, like signal strength.
All of a sudden, operators weren't like yelling at each
other and you know which can cause just chaos in
a room with a bunch of switchboard operators.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
What's the number for dominos?
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah, exactly. So just improving the signal really optimized how
those things function such, you know, even just making the
little signal lamps a little lights brighter, right, responding to
the current and the line, like everything just got a
little better.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, and the current in the line was a huge
thing too. Not only would it light up the little
light above your jack showing the operator like, oh, this
guy's trying to call right now, but it also allowed
for telephones to carry a little bit of a current,
which was how the voice was was broadcast anyway. But
it was one more thing that they controlled. They powered everything,
(14:43):
which made the whole thing more efficient. Rather than having
a bunch of batteries out by the lines, there was
a central group of batteries and power generation that came
from the main office too. So when you put all
this stuff together, they got really good at analyzing traffic
to to kind of put resources, you know, where it
needed at any given time. Put all this together. For
(15:04):
the next four or five decades, the phone system just
kept expanding and expanding and expanding, but there was always
a front tier there was. These were individual cities, individual towns,
and if the town or the city was close enough
to another town or city, they would probably be able
to connect. But for the most part, these phone systems
(15:24):
are growing intra well internally, let's just say that I
almost got really fancy for a second, but I'm just
gonna say they were internal into each town, growing and
growing and growing, connecting subscribers. But each town was kind
of like its own isolated island of telephony.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and so obviously the next thing to conquer would
be the LD long distance. At the time, if you
wanted to pick up a phone in New York City
and call San Francisco, you couldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
No, But I say we take a break, leave this
as a cliffhanger, and when we come back, we'll say
whether or not they were eventually able to do it. Stuck.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know what, Stucks.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
It's a great name. That's the name of it. It's
a great name, all right, Stuck's net with with an X. Okay.
So when they finally did start connecting towns, they would
(16:38):
use switchboards, right, so your your your town would be
connected to another town by a switchboard. They used trunk lines.
These are like these longer, stronger lines that people would
use to connect one town to another. And let's say
that you were in Topeka and you wanted to talk to.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Tacoma, Washington, Okay, two great tee towns.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Sure, when you picked up the phone and Topeka and
said give me Tacoma, uh, they would this would set
off a chain reaction of connections carried out by human
operators who would connect to this switchboard and the switchboard
connected to I don't know, Kansas City, and then that
switchboard connected to Erie pencil Erie, Pennsylvania'd be going the
(17:23):
wrong way Munchie in the Indiana Is it Muncie?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Boy, this is going terribly but I think it really
gets it really illustrates how cludgy the whole thing was. Uh.
And then it would go from Munsey slash Munchie to Garee, Indiana, Okay,
and then to I don't know, onwards and upwards until finally,
switchboard after switchboard after switchboard after switchboard, town to town
to town, it would finally connect all the way through
(17:50):
all these towns from switchboard to switchboard. You to your
friend Tacoma, who wasn't even home.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
That you were using the Miles Davis rebreathing technique.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You're breathing through your nose so you don't have to
stop talking.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I just didn't breathe.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Oh okay, that's the dizzy Gillespian message.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Speaking of dizzy.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yes, it's amazing. I guess we'll spoil it and say
eventually New York was able to talk to San Francisco,
and in fact, I think that was well. No, the
first long line was between New York and Philly, and
eighteen eighty five, New York to San Francisco finally came around, finally,
I say, in nineteen fifteen, which is incredible.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
You know, for that call, they brought Alexander Graham Bell
out of retirement because he'd left a super big, fat
rich man by this time, and had him talk to Watson.
Remember the first phone call. I was room to room
between him and Watson. He said, Watson came here, I
need you. And on this huge, monumental historical phone call
(18:58):
from New York to San Francisco, Belle said, Watson, come here,
I need you again, and Watson said, I will, but
it's going to take me a week to get there.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Watson. That's so Watson.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
It totally is Watson.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Classic Watson. You know, it didn't just work with like magic.
You can't send something that used to going like a
mile or let's say one hundred miles, all of a
sudden sending it, you know, close to three thousand miles.
So they had boosters, They had loading coils, which are electromagnets,
that would boost the transmission. They had these vacuum tubes
(19:33):
that would regenerate a weak signal. Those were called repeaters.
So it needed help along the way to finally get
you know, across country. But the fact that they were
able to do that by nineteen fifteen is remarkable. While
this is happening, I mean, I think you said that
Bell was an old, fat, rich guy by this point.
That is because through even the late eighteen hundreds, Bell
(19:58):
consistently swatted away Ry with lawsuits, with shutting people down
with saying like, no, you know, I have a patent
here till eighteen ninety four, So like there are people
out there building in their own phones and even their
own switchboards, but like I'm going to go after them
as fast as they can build them.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, they had detectives that would go bust down doors
and confiscate bogus phones, which were phones that weren't part
of the Bell network, which again held the patent. Then
even after the patent expired, they would just sue anybody
and everybody. They would bribe officials to keep new phone
companies from being allowed to develop or found themselves. It
(20:37):
was really ruthless and one of the reasons it was
ruthless is because JP Morgan by this time was the
head of either AT and T or Bell's board of directors,
and Bell eventually bought AT and T and just consolidated, consolidated, consolidated.
They would either following JP Morgan's typical example, they would
either buy up the competition or crushed them out of
(21:00):
existence if the competition didn't want to sell at AT
and T Bell's price. So this is just how it
was like that. I don't remember what year the US
government finally stepped in and broke up Bell into smaller
versions of itself, but it was a It was a monopoly,
a government sanctioned monopoly for decades, and in some ways
(21:23):
this was good because in other cases, where like local
phone companies were allowed to compete, it was super cluege.
Sometimes you had to subscribe to two different companies to
be able to call two different friends depending on who
they were subscribed to. The rates were all over the place.
There was very little regulation, so having this monopoly was
(21:45):
good in some ways, but in others. Monopolies typically overall,
are not good for the health of an economy.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah, and AT and T American Telephone and Telegraph. We
should point out that they were approached before that and expired,
and the reason they were initially approached was, I mean,
it was part of the plan just to you know,
snap up other companies, but part of it was, Hey,
I need AT and T to help me build these
long distance lines because that's the future. If we control
(22:14):
long distance and no one else has it, then we
can even if new companies pop up after this patent expires,
if we're the only ones doing long distance, then we
can lease those to other companies or not lease them
to other companies.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Huge, huge point.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, can we talk about phone numbers real quick?
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah? I think we should talk about phone numbers.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Because I don't have a complete handle on because how
phone numbers expanded was. You know, it wasn't just one exact,
uniform way in every place. It kind of depended on
how big the city was, as far as how many
digits they were using and stuff like that. So what
I've gathered is that from the beginning, it was two
to four numbers depending on how big your community was.
(22:57):
So sure, you could literally be living in a community
and your phone number was seven. Yeah, it could be seven.
I guess, well, I don't know zero counts, but let's
just say eleven.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No, I want to say seven, okay, your.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Phone number seven, mine's eleven.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You should get together and make a convenience store. But
as things started to expand and grow, obviously you needed
more and more numbers. And I remembered seeing in like
even like Happy Days and stuff and TV shows like
into the sixties and seventies when they would say, you know,
a word followed by numbers.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Give me klondike five six thousand exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
And so from this how I understand it is. And
if you found something different, let me know. But Klondike
would have been the uh, either the switchboard or the
central you know, hub for that town. And then whatever
the numbers you said would be the actual number.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
That's five to five.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah. As that got busier, cities started using what they
called two L in four INN format, so two letter
four number, so it would still be klondike five five
five five or whatever, but it would be kl and
then you would use the four numbers, and then eventually
it was I think two L five. Men. They just
(24:14):
kept taking away letters and adding numbers. The bigger and
bigger your city.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Got right and the reason why, like, if you have
four numbers, you can accommodate up to ten thousand subscribers.
But as you add more and more numbers or even letters,
then you can add more and more people. And so
I think that the numbers or the letters eventually or
initially were like that went to this particular switchboard station,
(24:41):
and that was this one group of people in town
whose connections were all coming out of this one station.
So if you ask for Klondike five five five five,
it took you to this one switchboard and then that
switchboard operator would find subscriber five five five five and
connect it. And the reason also I keep going to
cl five is because that's the original five five to
(25:03):
five fake number in movies. Like if you watch movies,
they ask for Klondike five all the time, like that's
the that's the phone number, because the apparently the phone
company set aside the five five five exchange for use
by movies.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, which I was told recently in a script I
wrote to take that out.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Oh really, did you tell them to go to hell?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Well, I mean, any kind of script note is just
there is no right answer. But this person said, yeah,
it just I don't it bugs me because it always
takes me out and makes me feel like I'm watching
a movie. So I was like, okay, so did.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
You or did you not tell them to go to
hell with their script?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Note? Did not. I got a lot of good notes
from this person, so right, I was on their side.
Is this a bad actor, No, it was a good writer.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Okay, there's a big difference. So to get a little
further to wrap that up. So those letters were eventually
overtaken by numbers. Because again, if you are I don't
even know if I said it and we edited it out,
but if you look at an old phone, I think
even a new phone, still you said it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
The numbers are associated with specific letters, so two was
associated with ABC, three is associated with the EF and
so on. So if it was Klondike, that's kl Both
of those are on the five. So eventually it just
became five five, five, whatever the rest of the thing is.
And when we went to all numbers, that was a
(26:32):
big step in the direction of eventually phasing out switchboard operators.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah. Then you went seven digits, and then eventually in
most places you needed the area code as well, and
we went to ten digit.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, but area codes weren't around for a while. I
think it was. Oh, I don't remember exactly when it was,
but I'm looking. That's why I'm still kind of talking
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I mean, we've talked about this before because we both
have our phone numbers memorized growing up, and that was
definitely not an area code ninety one nine O one nine.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That was me. I grew up with an area code.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Oh really, yeah, from the moment you could remember, No,
you're right.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, there was just an exchange. It wasn't. Yes,
you're right. Mine was three eight two nine four h
A right, Sorry, those.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Two numbers called each other like in some weird portal opened.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
That would be pretty awesome. What would be through the portal?
Either gnomes or robots. It's got to be one of
the two, really earthy or really futuristic.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Adam Curry?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Wait, wait which one?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh, Adam Curry dressed as a gnome?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Okay, thank you?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I knew you weren't gonna be satisfied. And until I too.
Should we talk a little bit about who this witchboard
operators were, all right? Or should we take our break
till I feel like.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
We went long before the first break, So keep going.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
All right, Well, most of these uh switchboard operators were women,
and initially they tried teenage boys. But I love this
little factoid. Kyle dug up. Apparently there was a quote
that said, unfortunately they matched insult for insult for Canadian
boys that were operators. So if like and as we'll
(28:14):
see there, you know, people call up and be surly
and or in a bad mood, or if it didn't
work right, they'd be cussing. These teenage boys will give
it right back to them. And so customer service is
suffering in the eighteen eighties because all these you know,
wisemouth kids. So they started hiring mostly women. In the
early twentieth century. I think eighty percent of ball operators
were women. Here and abroad they were called Hello girls,
(28:38):
ironic since apparently they weren't even allowed to say hello.
We'll get to that in a second. And Emma Nutt
was the first phone operator switchboard operator hired by AGB
in eighteen seventy eight at a wopping wage of about
a nickel an hour.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, which is even adjusted for inflation, that's only a
dollar fifty an hour. Today. Yeah, pretty pretty meager, but
she was. She was a pioneer, and probably one of
the reasons why she kept her job was eventually it
had a lot of prestige to it. It was one
of the more respected jobs a woman can have. But
(29:15):
it's also one of the very few jobs of women
could have. So women proved to be a fairly docile
workforce because they had so few choices other choices for work,
and so they were exploited to the bone as phone operators.
Sadly as it turned out.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, it took everything I had not to make a
nut job joke.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Can we hear it?
Speaker 1 (29:41):
But I guess I sort of just did. Yeh, I
no know. Her name was Emma Nut and everyone's like,
I want, I want a nut job.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
That was good? Sorry, you got me.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Uh So here's the deal, though it was very specific criteria.
You could just waltz in there and get this job
because like you said, there wasn't a lot of choice
for women in the workplace, and eventually they would pay them,
you know, Okay, not as much as their male counterparts,
of course, because that's just how things worked. Very sadly,
but it was a very It was known as a
(30:10):
pretty good job to get in the US, you had
to be well spoken, you had to be a high
school graduate. In Canada they sought women with good eyesight
no cough. You had to be of sufficient height and
were physically fit in order to tackle the exacting work
at the switchboard. And also this is in Canada also
(30:31):
a reference of moral character from their clergyman.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Wow, this is to get a job as a switchboard operator.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah. What about in the UK, because that's pretty fun too.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
You were required to speak the King's English and not
in a Cockney way or a Northern way.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
And so women would accept these positions. Again, these were
coveted positions in some cases that you paid them and
gave them financial freedom. They were looked upon with respect
by their community. Like to make it as an operator,
even be hired as an operator. It's told the rest
of society this one's a good egg, because we only
hire the best eggs. One of the things, though, like
(31:13):
you said, was that there were really strict rules on
their behavior, how they comported themselves when speaking to customers,
and then just how they even like sat and positioned
themselves at their switchboard. There's a nineteen ten booklet that
the Bell company wrote that Kyle found where they were saying, like,
(31:34):
do not answer these calls with Hello? They said, would
you rush into an office or up to the door
of a residence and blurt out, Hello, Hello, who am
I talking to? And when they put it like that,
it's actually a reasonable thing. But what's funny also is
there was a big debate initially when phones were invented
(31:55):
between whether the proper way to answer a call was
hello or hoy hoy. And Alexander Graham Bell was a
hoy hoy boy, and Thomas Edison, who was his big
rival in founding phone companies, he was a Hello guy.
And that's why you'll hear mister Burns say hoy hoy
when he answers the phone. It's just going to show
(32:16):
how ridiculously old he is.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, we talked about this on one episode. It was
a long time ago, but I used to have a
Hoya hoy written on my first flip phone when you
opened it up, the little home screen, because before they
had pictures and graphics, just said a hoya hoy written.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Did you write it in nail polish?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
No? No, no, it was typed out, and you know,
instead of like Chuck's phone or something.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Oh okay, I never had a phone that had any
feature like that.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, well, you know these were early flip phones.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
I thought you actually wrote it on the screen.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
No, no, no, no, it was typed letters.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So oh. There were a couple of things that I
saw that were really harsh. There was a view that
I found I think American Experience. They did a documentary
on the telephone and they were interviewing like some of
these original operators, and one of them was like, so
they used tailorism. So there was like five supervisors to
every single like switchboard operator, and they would just hover
(33:16):
over you like a hawk. They would constantly be like,
come on girls, faster, faster, that kind of stuff. And
this woman was like, if you even lifted your head
up from your switchboard, not even looked around, not even
talked like, you just lifted your head up, for supervisor
would be on you, being like, what do you need?
What's going on? There was another one that I think
(33:37):
it was on history dot com. They were writing about
telephone operators and they they quoted from a woman who
was like one of the original ones, who said I
had to work ten unpaid hours as punishment for a
single giggle, Like that's how how just regulated the women
(33:58):
operators were for decades and that was just part of
the job.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah. I never did telemarketing in college, but that was
a big dial America was a big job in Athens.
I'm sure you remember. You probably worked for Dialo America.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I didn't, but I worked for another company. I have
this story about that.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, it was a big, easy job to get in
Athens and I'm sure many colleges. But the central benefit
of any job like this is being able to put
your hand over the receiver and roll your eyes to
the person next to you and go, oh my god,
you got to get a load of this guy, or
you should hear this lady's voice. Like if you deny
your work or that, then you're not going to have
(34:35):
a happy workforce. That's the one perk you get when
you're not on a and right in front of someone
is that you can say something quietly and have a
quick laugh.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah. They could not do that. They would get in
trouble and possibly fired for that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
So, actually, one of the cool things is they figured
out that Okay, wait, there's thousands of us in this
workforce let's form a union. And they were told no,
they can't form a union. So they said, okay, we're
going on strike. And I think in nineteen nineteen New
England telephone operators walked out and just crippled the phone
network for basically half of New England. And the company
(35:16):
was very quick to be like, Okay, what did you
say you wanted to begin and yeah, I went back exactly.
So that was pretty cool. But for the most part
they were treated rather poorly.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
They were, and they in the face of you know,
like I said, some people would call in cursing. There
were men who would use foul language. Sometimes they would
get charged extra for their call. They would sometimes people
would call and say like, hey, do you know what
time it is? Or do you know what goes in
this recipe? Or do you know what time the train
runs from the station?
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Or does this shirt make me look fat?
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah? Exactly, And they're acting like information basically rather than
just connecting calls. You know. I guess they weren't being
as ragned in everywhere because or maybe they were to
the customer is always right. I don't know they were.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Then there were there was like five things you could
say to a customer, no matter what they said to you,
no matter how abusive they were, anything like that, you
could say like thank you or something like that.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
You'd safron.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, right, that was the safe word.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
The supervisor come in and be like, hey, hey, what
are you saying?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Well, if they got asked them in a recipe and
maybe they can only say five things, really hymns them
in So.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Are you allowed to leave? If not? Say saffron.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Here's one fun little thing. In World War One, there
were two hundred and twenty three American women who served
in Europe as switchboard operators because France's phone system was wrecked,
so the US Army Signal Corps literally built its own
phone system and had bilingual American switchboard operators working there
(36:49):
and sometimes giving like really important direct orders about you know,
bombings and raids and things like that.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Well, they would pass them along. I don't know if
they were making up the orders.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
And do you think anybody would have thought that I did?
You thought that's what I was saying.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
No, but it was still hilarious to hear you say
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
But this is the cool part. After sixty years, Finally,
nineteen seventy nine these women were recognized as veterans.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
I know that was very cool. It's sad that it
took that long, but at least they finally got there. Yeah,
I'm sorry. I keep imagining whole cadre of operators just
making up orders.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
For this lady just sent to storm the beach. It's
just chaos, all right. Now, we're going to take our break.
We're running a bit long, so we're gonna come back
and finish up on how it all ended with automation.
Right after this stucks net stucks stuck. I don't know,
you know it stucks stuck.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That sucks. It's a great name.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, that's the name of it.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
It's a great name. All right, stucks met with an okay, chuck.
So I think I said before that once they started
going to all numeric, well numbers, that was like a
(38:22):
huge first step toward automating the system and eventually phasing
out human operators. And one of the reasons why is
because you can take numbers and you can quantify them essentially,
and that's what those original phones, the roadary phones, then
apparently the fake keypad phones would do. When you dialed
a number, your finger would eventually hit a stop. For
(38:45):
like a three, the stop was closer, for the zero
of the stop was in eternity away, because once you
hit the stop, the dial would go back to the
original position, and as it did, it would put out,
you know, three pulses, say three electrical impulses when you
dial the three. And what that did was it told
(39:06):
the automated switches that were eventually invented to start paying
attention and start dialing some numbers here because I just
sent some electrical impulses.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
That's right. I think you mean pulses, don't you.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
What did I say plus impulses? Did I?
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Little late in the day and my brain's mush from
all the engineering week we've been doing.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Hey, I'm not just sitting here as correct you guy.
I just I think it's kind of funny. And somebody
would have written in and it's like, why are these
phones having impulses?
Speaker 2 (39:38):
No, hey, you got me back for the operators giving direction.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Here is where my mind exploded because I didn't learn
this yesterday. He's still liking that one. This didn't I
didn't learn this yesterday, but I learned it. I think
the last time you explain this because We explained that
in another episode about how you dial oh yeah a
rotary phone. I did not know that it was the
retreat of that dial back to its original position? Was
(40:07):
what was being quantified and pulsed?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Do you think it was the dial up? Like when
you got.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, you put your finger in it and you dial
the four over? You know, as a kid, you just
think a little like, yep, I'm hitting the four, and
I just take it out and it goes back to
its place. It going back to its place is the
key yeah, Which I don't.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Know if I knew that either, though it seems new
to me, so if I did explain it before, it
didn't stick.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
It's pretty cool, though, ton't. I mean, this is just
a fun little fact for anyone who still understands what
those are.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
One thing I do think we talked about in the
Phone Freaking episode was the invention of the Strouder switch,
which was invented by an undertaker named Almon Brown. Strouder
and the reason that he can't like. An undertaker in
Kansas City invented the automated phone switchboard because, as legend
has it, he was losing business to a rival undertaker
(41:04):
whose wife was the town operator. So when people call
up and said undertaker police, she would just rout him
to her husband's business and leave Strouger's business out. And
he's like, you know what, I want to get rid
of the operator. So he went and invented one of
the more sophisticated pieces of technology that was around at
the time. And this is in eighteen ninety that he
(41:24):
came up with the first automated switch. And it is impressive.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, I mean that's the one that led to the
rotary switch that we're talking about though, right, yes, do
you know how his work specifically.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Or difference, Actually, it's really fascinating.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Well, let's hear it. We got one minute, all.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Right, So let's say that you dialed that three, right,
that first number, those three impulses I think in slang
it's just called pulses. They went down the line and
they hit the first switch, and they told the first switch, okay,
we're going to three, and so that would narrow down
the number of subscribers to this telephone switchboard whose numbers
(42:04):
started with three, oh yeah, and then the next number
would come in five, yeah, right, Five more pulses of
electricity would come to the second switch, and it would
tell that switch. Okay, now we're just trying to get
to the people whose first two numbers are three, five,
and so on and so on, until finally all what eight, no, yeah,
eight seven numbers were dialed, and so it led to
(42:28):
the only person whose phone line could possibly be connected
to this specific circuit of seven numbers, and then it
would connect the call from the caller to the call lee.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Wow, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Yeah, it's really amazing. This guy came up with this
in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, and you know, we didn't even really mention it
seems obvious, but I guess we should say. The reason
they were looking to phase out and go into automation
is kind of like every reason always is money. You know,
less overhead. You as more more switchboards grew, you had
well a the switchboards cost a lot of money. They
cost you know, you had to have land in a building,
(43:06):
and you had to have people to operate them, and
they just couldn't keep hiring more and more people. I
think at one point they said, you know, we'd need
a million switchboard operators and that just wasn't even a
possibility at the time. So automation was always on the horizon. Interestingly,
along those lines, long distance switching took a lot longer,
(43:28):
like it was into the late nineteen sixties and even
some places in the seventies where you still had operators
that had to connect long distance lines because it was
as Kyle said that it was just no alternative to
human intelligence. It was too complex at the time. But eventually,
you know, they figured all that out.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
But that meant that there were humans who were walking
around knowing how to connect to Tacoma. They knew the
combination of switches, yeah, yeah, connector the number of levers
to pull, the number of like wishes to make I
don't know, okay, and they would they knew how to
connect to call like that and not just to peek
(44:09):
a ta coma like whatever city to whatever city. They
just knew how to view it. And I mean that's yeah,
that's just an overlooked part of history that there were
people walking around who knew how to do these complex
algorithms basically, and they were all different for depending on
what city was calling what city. So that kept operators
(44:29):
around for much longer than they would have been had
long distance not existed, because they got phased out at
the local level, but for long distance calling they were
just too valuable to get rid of at the time.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
What happens when you dial zero today from a landline?
Is there an operator?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well? Number one there's no landlines. There's just you get
like an alarm at somebody's house alarm. I think maybe yeah,
And then number two there's no zero anymore. Gen Z
got rid of it all right, good deal. So I
think by the the seventies the whole thing was digitized.
There was no corded switchboards any longer. But there were
(45:08):
some like pockets of switchboards that were still around, right,
that held on long beyond the time it was necessary.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yeah, there's a couple of competing last switchboard last operators.
One that you'll see a lot online as widely recognized
in nineteen eighty three Bryant Pond, Maine. I think this
specification heroes. It was the last hand cranked telephone system
and switchboard, like you know, you like you've seen the
(45:35):
old movies. There's a box on the wall and you go,
you crank a thing.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Give me Kondike five six thousand exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
And Susan Glynes was the last operator there. London's thank
you Kyle was at Infield and this was nineteen sixty
I think was retired. But the last caretaker telephone operator
in the and the UK retired in eighty four. But
(46:05):
then you found one in California that was ninety one.
And as best I could tell, that was a private
a sort of very small customer based private phone company
in Kerman.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
And what was sweet was I saw one of the
reasons that the owner of the company held on to
human operators for so long was because there were so
many migrants who lived in town that the phone operator
was bilingual. It could help connect calls between people who
spoke two different languages.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah, all the not even the final one. All of
their operators were bilingual.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Oh is that right?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Oh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
I think that was their specialty.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
No, serious, that's what they said at the company picnic,
that's our I.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Mean, I think that's honestly. They had most of their
customer base were people with family in Mexico, and so
they just had a niche for miners.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
I mean, I don't know why you're getting them that.
I don't believe you. I believe what you're.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Saying, because he keeps laughing at it, going that's funny.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
I'm still thinking about the operators telling everybody to bomb
Roy Win or something. You got anything else? No, big
thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one.
It was very technical and complicated. And since I said
technical and complicated, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Here's our Joe Thiseman follow up. We got quite a
few emails, and in fact a few from people whose
parents went to school with Joe Thiseman, the former quarterback
of the former Washington Redskins football team now the Commanders.
Hey guys, I uster freelance for a video company that
did a lot of conferences, and one time Joe Eisman
was the keynote speaker. The way he told the story
(47:47):
about his last name as his follows. Growing up, his
dad was very firm that their last name was pronounced
these men. Apparently, his dad would get quite cross when
folks would pronounce it wrong. People often said it wrong,
so Joe would call his dad and have him correct them.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Dad, they said it wrong, but Dead's gonna sue you.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
He snapped my leg. According to Joe's story, when he
was a candidate for the Heisman Trophy, his college coaches
thought it would be better if it was pronounced thisman
to rhyme obviously, So again Joe called his dad to
ask him, and his dad responded, I've told you it's thighsman.
So it sounds like Joe has made kind of a
fun little apocryphal story about this, but it seems confirmed
(48:27):
it was thiseman heard it from the man's own mouth.
And that's from Karen and Gil Pennington.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
Very nice, appreciate that big time.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Who was it, Karen, Karen Pennington, Thank.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
You very much, Karen, I'm just gonna call him Karen
Sure if you want to get in touch with us
like Karen did and give us a great story that
kind of sums up, ties up, circles up, a story
that we talked about. We love that kind of thing.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. RAO.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck
ring Ring, there's Jerry and this is Stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
That's right. This is a Kyle joint. So there's a
little British factor to an ear is Kyle likes to
throw those in because that's where he lives.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, he keeps mentioning fish and chips every few paragraphs.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, what's a chippy. We are going to be talking
about telephone switchboards. Some overlap with a couple of other
episodes we've done, but this is all about the you know,
the the advancement of the telephone system and the United
States and abroad, and how the telephone switchboard was a crucial,
crucial part of that.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah. First, I want to give a shout out. If
you ever find yourself in the town of Maitland, Florida,
go to the Maitland I think, well, it's the Telephone Museum.
There's probably not more than one telephone museum in Maitland,
even though I can't remember the name of it. Just
ask somebody for directions there and they will tell you
(01:11):
or ask your app regardless. It's really cute. It's not
the biggest museum you'll ever find, but it's a very
dedicated museum.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
I leveled telephones. I would like to check that out.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh you'd love this. There's a bank of wall telephones
from the seventies probably, and each one's a different color.
It's very pretty. Oh my god, Yeah, you would like
this place. Check it. It reminded me that something that
was just such an integral part of our life is
a completely obsolete, outdated antique technology. There's basically no reason
(01:48):
for it to exist any longer, and it may not
as far as I know. Yeah, I think you still
have to have it to connect some home alarm systems maybe,
but that's the only application I know of anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Actually, you know what, that's We had that for that
landline for that reason for a while, but no longer.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I mean, I don't. I just don't think that there's
any reason for you to exist any Look, I'm sure
I'm wrong, but that's the best I can come up
with this home alarm systems.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I guess nostalgia's not a good enough reason.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Huh keeps this amazing network of technology still around?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Oh? Yeah, man, I mean lots of it's dumb. It's
just my my urgen x selves like looking back with
joy about walking around your bedroom with a long phone
cord and yeah, or your mom literally being able to
go to every point in the kitchen with like a
twenty five foot stretchy phone cord that you're ducking under
(02:45):
and it's knocking things over.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
And that's right, there goes the flower.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Wireless is better.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I know it's I don't think it's just nostalgia. I
think there is some real value or there's it's not
pointless to look at the telephone system that was created
over the decades in the twentieth century and just be impressed,
like it wasn't a marvelous technology and it did some
(03:12):
amazing stuff while it was around. It's just we've moved
on technology wise. But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, I wonder if they're they're safer like for like
government systems, you know, because you literally have to tap
the wire physically. It's not just in the airwaves, true dat.
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I don't know either, but that's a great point.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I'm curious. Surely someone knows. But let's talk about Alexander
Graham Bell, because he is the og. He's the guy
that invented, well patented the telephone at least, right, and
from Boston in eighteen seventy six, where he was not
trying to invent a telephone. He was trying to work
out the problem with the electrical telegraph, which was it
(03:57):
was just getting bunched up. Too many people are sending
too many you know, telegraphs, and it's a problem. So
there's too much traffic. So all of a sudden, Bell,
who was a sound guy anyway, realized that you could
send tones. And once he realized you could send a
tone along a wire, he was like, oh, forget the telegraph,
(04:19):
I'm going to come up with the harmonic telegraph and
one day I'm going to speak to somebody on the
other end of a wire.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, not dots and dashes, but hayes and how are
you is or a hoys? Yeah? Right. So he did
this in eighteen seventy six, right, He set out to
figure out the telegraph clogging and invented the phone pretty quickly.
The next year he found a Bell Telephone company, and
(04:47):
the first permanent telephone wires were in Boston, I think
that same year right, So we had telephone service set
up within a year of him inventing the telephone. One
of the other things too, is he helped kind of
spread telephone technology by giving lectures that people would come
see and then go off and like build their own
(05:07):
versions that would work. But initially, when you were talking
to somebody on a telephone, your telephone was physically connected
to their telephone, which made a lot of sense initially,
But if you want to talk to more than one
friend in town, you need another wire to connect your
phone to somebody else's telephone, and so on and so forth.
(05:31):
And if you just kind of follow that logical path,
you very quickly realize, like, man, we're going to need
a lot of wires to connect one person to everybody
else and everybody else to that one person. It just
that's the definition of exponential growth. And so they figured
out they needed a different way rather than connecting each
telephone physically, and that's where they came up with the
(05:53):
concept of the switchboard.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
That's right, What if all of the calls went into
a central location and it was a human being there
that would connect those two wires. It's a very elegant,
very simple, sort of system. It's you know, it's literally
connecting two calls by you know, by connecting them by
plugging them into the same what would you even call
(06:17):
that board?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Jack?
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, the same jack. The first switchboard commercially was in
eighteen seventy eight, so only geez, like a year after
the Bell Telephone Company was founded. This is in New Haven, Connecticut,
and it connected twenty one different subscribers in this case.
And this is a very old fashioned, primitive thing. Before
(06:40):
long they were like, why don't we wrap these chords
in cloth? It's like insulated, and why don't we make
the you know, the board look a little nicer and
we'll call them achrdboard. But everyone's still going to call
them a switchboard.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yes. One thing really quick too. When some of these
first commercial switchboards popped up in town, like the one
in New Haven that I guess George Coy was the
inventor of, they would publish phone books, and the first
phone books would be like one page with like fifty
people's names on because when you called, you would call
(07:15):
and your call would be connected by an operator. So
you'd pick up your phone and the only person that
would go to is that operator or switchboard and you
would say I want to talk to Chuck Bryant please,
and the operator would look up where your jack was
that went to your house and then now connected the call.
Right So they would plug my phone cord into your
(07:39):
phone jack and connect our call. But first they would write. First,
they would they would plug in themselves to you and
say Josh Clark calling for Charles Bryant, and you would say,
tell him, I'm in the shower.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
They would plug back.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Into mine and be like, he's in the shower, he
can't talk right now. And I would say tell him
that I know he's not in the shower and hang out, fang.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Really, you're not too far off.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
That is, if my jack is on that board. If
it was a big enough community, that switchboard operator might say,
I don't have Chuck on this board, but he's on
another board, so I'm going to contact that switchboard and
you know, patch it in that way.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So but first thing, spend ten minutes going down east
Jack like Chuck Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck Chuck Chuck.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Well, early on they just knew it, you know, in
a twenty one person situation, they just knew everybody. In fact,
that for a little while. They weren't even saying phone numbers.
They were just like Chuck Bryant, right exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
And one of the other things about a central switchboard too,
is there's a phone company employee connecting calls, and so
now you can track things more easily and hence bill
people more accurately too.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, because this is when making a call costs money,
and up until I mean not that long ago, in
the grand scheme of things, making a long distance call
costs extra money. So you had to build people, and
it was pretty ingenious. Things started growing, growing, growing, you
said the word exponentially, and that is the truth, because
between eighteen eighty and just thirteen years later we went
(09:11):
from sixty thousand phones to two sixty and then just
another ten years later there were three million phones in
the United States only Kyle points out, and then the
UK they were a little bit behind us. Nineteen fourteen
there were fewer than two telephones per one hundred people
compared to ten in the US, but they eventually caught
(09:34):
up to and everyone had phones.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
That's right. I'm sure there's some listeners like I didn't
have a phone when I was a kid. Well maybe
so as more and more people had phones, More and
more jacks were required in switchboards, so you're getting bigger switchboards,
more switchboards. It became kind of a mess in and
of itself, as we'll see. That was known as the
(09:58):
switchboard problem, right. Yeah, But then finally they figured out, okay,
there's a few tweaks we can do here that are
going to allow us just to support this growth. Because
the phone companies weren't like, well, we're good at ten
thousand subscribers, let's just hold here. They wanted everybody to
have a phone so they could bill everybody for using
(10:19):
those phones. And also America or the United States of
the world, I think, was like, we really want to
be able to pick up the phone and talk to people.
It was a huge, enormous technology that completely changed how
humans interact with one another. So everybody wanted a phone.
Phone company wanted to give people phones. The big sticking
point was how you can connect that many people in
(10:42):
an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after
switchboard after switchboard.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah. And you know something else we should point out too,
is this is a time where the phone company controlled
the phones themselves, and so you can just go to
a store and buy some cool looking Mickey mouse phone
or a Garfield phone or illustrated I had a I
did get that for free, actually, but those are always garbage.
(11:08):
Those are the ones that look like push button but
when you hit it, it dialed.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Oh really, do.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
You remember those who you know it had the keypad,
but when you hit nine, it.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Went No, I don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It was a big bait and switch. But you rented
your phone at the time, I guess you had a
or maybe they didn't sell them at all at first,
but I know for a long time they rented phones
to people, like into the seventies, right, yeah, I mean
like you used to rent your Some people still probably
rent their modem from their cable or whatever their Wi
Fi provider. Saying all the wrong words.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
No, I think you got it provider, yeah, or internet
is Internet Service provider ISP.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
That's okay. But yeah, anyway, they were they were controlling
the flow of money and more ways than just the bill.
They wanted as many people to have phones as possible
because they were renting those phones and eventually I guess
selling those phones.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah. I remember. Umi has a story from when she
was a kid of going to the phone store with
her dad and renting a princess phone.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Like I remember it, it's so weird.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
It is weird. It's just weird to think of. But
like you said, that was a way for them to
control revenue even more. And also I think it made
it more available to more people, because I think even
into the sixties to seventies, phones were still kind of
expensive to make, and so they were expensive to buy,
so you could lease them. But I think ultimately it
(12:32):
was it was really the phone companies, and they were
able to get away from this, as we'll see, because
for years and years and years there was essentially a
monopoly on the phone in the United States.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's right, But I got us a little off track.
You were talking about some new techniques because the switchboards,
all of a sudden, we're getting just more and more ubiquitous,
and they started to get a little clunky in like
how long it would take to connect calls. So one
of the things they did is came up with the
concept of what's called the divided exchange, which is really
(13:04):
just an organizational structural thing where people got more specialized.
You might have operators just answering the phone. You might
have people just connecting instead of the person going, oh hey, Josh,
let me see if Chuck's available. Like, all of that
was really streamlined eventually until they came up what was
called the Express system that had a lot of letter
(13:25):
B boards that converged on a letter A board and
there was an operator linking between those two.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Right, Yeah, so the A person, the person at the
A board would be like, oh, yeah, Josh is on
B board seventy two, but Chuck is on B board three,
So I need I need to be the one that
connects B board seventy two in B board three for
this call. These are human beings doing this and expected
to do it really fast too, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. They also just improved the signals, like signal strength.
All of a sudden, operators weren't like yelling at each
other and you know which can cause just chaos in
a room with a bunch of switchboard operators.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
What's the number for dominos?
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah, exactly. So just improving the signal really optimized how
those things function such, you know, even just making the
little signal lamps a little lights brighter, right, responding to
the current and the line, like everything just got a
little better.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, and the current in the line was a huge
thing too. Not only would it light up the little
light above your jack showing the operator like, oh, this
guy's trying to call right now, but it also allowed
for telephones to carry a little bit of a current,
which was how the voice was was broadcast anyway. But
it was one more thing that they controlled. They powered everything,
(14:43):
which made the whole thing more efficient. Rather than having
a bunch of batteries out by the lines, there was
a central group of batteries and power generation that came
from the main office too. So when you put all
this stuff together, they got really good at analyzing traffic
to to kind of put resources, you know, where it
needed at any given time. Put all this together. For
(15:04):
the next four or five decades, the phone system just
kept expanding and expanding and expanding, but there was always
a front tier there was. These were individual cities, individual towns,
and if the town or the city was close enough
to another town or city, they would probably be able
to connect. But for the most part, these phone systems
(15:24):
are growing intra well internally, let's just say that I
almost got really fancy for a second, but I'm just
gonna say they were internal into each town, growing and
growing and growing, connecting subscribers. But each town was kind
of like its own isolated island of telephony.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and so obviously the next thing to conquer would
be the LD long distance. At the time, if you
wanted to pick up a phone in New York City
and call San Francisco, you couldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
No, But I say we take a break, leave this
as a cliffhanger, and when we come back, we'll say
whether or not they were eventually able to do it. Stuck.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know what, Stucks.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
It's a great name. That's the name of it. It's
a great name, all right, Stuck's net with with an X. Okay.
So when they finally did start connecting towns, they would
(16:38):
use switchboards, right, so your your your town would be
connected to another town by a switchboard. They used trunk lines.
These are like these longer, stronger lines that people would
use to connect one town to another. And let's say
that you were in Topeka and you wanted to talk to.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Tacoma, Washington, Okay, two great tee towns.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Sure, when you picked up the phone and Topeka and
said give me Tacoma, uh, they would this would set
off a chain reaction of connections carried out by human
operators who would connect to this switchboard and the switchboard
connected to I don't know, Kansas City, and then that
switchboard connected to Erie pencil Erie, Pennsylvania'd be going the
(17:23):
wrong way Munchie in the Indiana Is it Muncie?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Boy, this is going terribly but I think it really
gets it really illustrates how cludgy the whole thing was. Uh.
And then it would go from Munsey slash Munchie to Garee, Indiana, Okay,
and then to I don't know, onwards and upwards until finally,
switchboard after switchboard after switchboard after switchboard, town to town
to town, it would finally connect all the way through
(17:50):
all these towns from switchboard to switchboard. You to your
friend Tacoma, who wasn't even home.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
That you were using the Miles Davis rebreathing technique.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You're breathing through your nose so you don't have to
stop talking.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I just didn't breathe.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Oh okay, that's the dizzy Gillespian message.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Speaking of dizzy.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yes, it's amazing. I guess we'll spoil it and say
eventually New York was able to talk to San Francisco,
and in fact, I think that was well. No, the
first long line was between New York and Philly, and
eighteen eighty five, New York to San Francisco finally came around, finally,
I say, in nineteen fifteen, which is incredible.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
You know, for that call, they brought Alexander Graham Bell
out of retirement because he'd left a super big, fat
rich man by this time, and had him talk to Watson.
Remember the first phone call. I was room to room
between him and Watson. He said, Watson came here, I
need you. And on this huge, monumental historical phone call
(18:58):
from New York to San Francisco, Belle said, Watson, come here,
I need you again, and Watson said, I will, but
it's going to take me a week to get there.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Watson. That's so Watson.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
It totally is Watson.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Classic Watson. You know, it didn't just work with like magic.
You can't send something that used to going like a
mile or let's say one hundred miles, all of a
sudden sending it, you know, close to three thousand miles.
So they had boosters, They had loading coils, which are electromagnets,
that would boost the transmission. They had these vacuum tubes
(19:33):
that would regenerate a weak signal. Those were called repeaters.
So it needed help along the way to finally get
you know, across country. But the fact that they were
able to do that by nineteen fifteen is remarkable. While
this is happening, I mean, I think you said that
Bell was an old, fat, rich guy by this point.
That is because through even the late eighteen hundreds, Bell
(19:58):
consistently swatted away Ry with lawsuits, with shutting people down
with saying like, no, you know, I have a patent
here till eighteen ninety four, So like there are people
out there building in their own phones and even their
own switchboards, but like I'm going to go after them
as fast as they can build them.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, they had detectives that would go bust down doors
and confiscate bogus phones, which were phones that weren't part
of the Bell network, which again held the patent. Then
even after the patent expired, they would just sue anybody
and everybody. They would bribe officials to keep new phone
companies from being allowed to develop or found themselves. It
(20:37):
was really ruthless and one of the reasons it was
ruthless is because JP Morgan by this time was the
head of either AT and T or Bell's board of directors,
and Bell eventually bought AT and T and just consolidated, consolidated, consolidated.
They would either following JP Morgan's typical example, they would
either buy up the competition or crushed them out of
(21:00):
existence if the competition didn't want to sell at AT
and T Bell's price. So this is just how it
was like that. I don't remember what year the US
government finally stepped in and broke up Bell into smaller
versions of itself, but it was a It was a monopoly,
a government sanctioned monopoly for decades, and in some ways
(21:23):
this was good because in other cases, where like local
phone companies were allowed to compete, it was super cluege.
Sometimes you had to subscribe to two different companies to
be able to call two different friends depending on who
they were subscribed to. The rates were all over the place.
There was very little regulation, so having this monopoly was
(21:45):
good in some ways, but in others. Monopolies typically overall,
are not good for the health of an economy.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah, and AT and T American Telephone and Telegraph. We
should point out that they were approached before that and expired,
and the reason they were initially approached was, I mean,
it was part of the plan just to you know,
snap up other companies, but part of it was, Hey,
I need AT and T to help me build these
long distance lines because that's the future. If we control
(22:14):
long distance and no one else has it, then we
can even if new companies pop up after this patent expires,
if we're the only ones doing long distance, then we
can lease those to other companies or not lease them
to other companies.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Huge, huge point.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, can we talk about phone numbers real quick?
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah? I think we should talk about phone numbers.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Because I don't have a complete handle on because how
phone numbers expanded was. You know, it wasn't just one exact,
uniform way in every place. It kind of depended on
how big the city was, as far as how many
digits they were using and stuff like that. So what
I've gathered is that from the beginning, it was two
to four numbers depending on how big your community was.
(22:57):
So sure, you could literally be living in a community
and your phone number was seven. Yeah, it could be seven.
I guess, well, I don't know zero counts, but let's
just say eleven.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No, I want to say seven, okay, your.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Phone number seven, mine's eleven.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You should get together and make a convenience store. But
as things started to expand and grow, obviously you needed
more and more numbers. And I remembered seeing in like
even like Happy Days and stuff and TV shows like
into the sixties and seventies when they would say, you know,
a word followed by numbers.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Give me klondike five six thousand exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
And so from this how I understand it is. And
if you found something different, let me know. But Klondike
would have been the uh, either the switchboard or the
central you know, hub for that town. And then whatever
the numbers you said would be the actual number.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
That's five to five.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah. As that got busier, cities started using what they
called two L in four INN format, so two letter
four number, so it would still be klondike five five
five five or whatever, but it would be kl and
then you would use the four numbers, and then eventually
it was I think two L five. Men. They just
(24:14):
kept taking away letters and adding numbers. The bigger and
bigger your city.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Got right and the reason why, like, if you have
four numbers, you can accommodate up to ten thousand subscribers.
But as you add more and more numbers or even letters,
then you can add more and more people. And so
I think that the numbers or the letters eventually or
initially were like that went to this particular switchboard station,
(24:41):
and that was this one group of people in town
whose connections were all coming out of this one station.
So if you ask for Klondike five five five five,
it took you to this one switchboard and then that
switchboard operator would find subscriber five five five five and
connect it. And the reason also I keep going to
cl five is because that's the original five five to
(25:03):
five fake number in movies. Like if you watch movies,
they ask for Klondike five all the time, like that's
the that's the phone number, because the apparently the phone
company set aside the five five five exchange for use
by movies.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, which I was told recently in a script I
wrote to take that out.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Oh really, did you tell them to go to hell?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Well, I mean, any kind of script note is just
there is no right answer. But this person said, yeah,
it just I don't it bugs me because it always
takes me out and makes me feel like I'm watching
a movie. So I was like, okay, so did.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
You or did you not tell them to go to
hell with their script?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Note? Did not. I got a lot of good notes
from this person, so right, I was on their side.
Is this a bad actor, No, it was a good writer.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Okay, there's a big difference. So to get a little
further to wrap that up. So those letters were eventually
overtaken by numbers. Because again, if you are I don't
even know if I said it and we edited it out,
but if you look at an old phone, I think
even a new phone, still you said it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
The numbers are associated with specific letters, so two was
associated with ABC, three is associated with the EF and
so on. So if it was Klondike, that's kl Both
of those are on the five. So eventually it just
became five five, five, whatever the rest of the thing is.
And when we went to all numbers, that was a
(26:32):
big step in the direction of eventually phasing out switchboard operators.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah. Then you went seven digits, and then eventually in
most places you needed the area code as well, and
we went to ten digit.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, but area codes weren't around for a while. I
think it was. Oh, I don't remember exactly when it was,
but I'm looking. That's why I'm still kind of talking
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I mean, we've talked about this before because we both
have our phone numbers memorized growing up, and that was
definitely not an area code ninety one nine O one nine.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That was me. I grew up with an area code.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Oh really, yeah, from the moment you could remember, No,
you're right.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, there was just an exchange. It wasn't. Yes,
you're right. Mine was three eight two nine four h
A right, Sorry, those.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Two numbers called each other like in some weird portal opened.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
That would be pretty awesome. What would be through the portal?
Either gnomes or robots. It's got to be one of
the two, really earthy or really futuristic.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Adam Curry?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Wait, wait which one?
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Oh, Adam Curry dressed as a gnome?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Okay, thank you?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I knew you weren't gonna be satisfied. And until I too.
Should we talk a little bit about who this witchboard
operators were, all right? Or should we take our break
till I feel like.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
We went long before the first break, So keep going.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
All right, Well, most of these uh switchboard operators were women,
and initially they tried teenage boys. But I love this
little factoid. Kyle dug up. Apparently there was a quote
that said, unfortunately they matched insult for insult for Canadian
boys that were operators. So if like and as we'll
(28:14):
see there, you know, people call up and be surly
and or in a bad mood, or if it didn't
work right, they'd be cussing. These teenage boys will give
it right back to them. And so customer service is
suffering in the eighteen eighties because all these you know,
wisemouth kids. So they started hiring mostly women. In the
early twentieth century. I think eighty percent of ball operators
were women. Here and abroad they were called Hello girls,
(28:38):
ironic since apparently they weren't even allowed to say hello.
We'll get to that in a second. And Emma Nutt
was the first phone operator switchboard operator hired by AGB
in eighteen seventy eight at a wopping wage of about
a nickel an hour.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, which is even adjusted for inflation, that's only a
dollar fifty an hour. Today. Yeah, pretty pretty meager, but
she was. She was a pioneer, and probably one of
the reasons why she kept her job was eventually it
had a lot of prestige to it. It was one
of the more respected jobs a woman can have. But
(29:15):
it's also one of the very few jobs of women
could have. So women proved to be a fairly docile
workforce because they had so few choices other choices for work,
and so they were exploited to the bone as phone operators.
Sadly as it turned out.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, it took everything I had not to make a
nut job joke.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Can we hear it?
Speaker 1 (29:41):
But I guess I sort of just did. Yeh, I
no know. Her name was Emma Nut and everyone's like,
I want, I want a nut job.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
That was good? Sorry, you got me.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Uh So here's the deal, though it was very specific criteria.
You could just waltz in there and get this job
because like you said, there wasn't a lot of choice
for women in the workplace, and eventually they would pay them,
you know, Okay, not as much as their male counterparts,
of course, because that's just how things worked. Very sadly,
but it was a very It was known as a
(30:10):
pretty good job to get in the US, you had
to be well spoken, you had to be a high
school graduate. In Canada they sought women with good eyesight
no cough. You had to be of sufficient height and
were physically fit in order to tackle the exacting work
at the switchboard. And also this is in Canada also
(30:31):
a reference of moral character from their clergyman.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Wow, this is to get a job as a switchboard operator.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah. What about in the UK, because that's pretty fun too.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
You were required to speak the King's English and not
in a Cockney way or a Northern way.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
And so women would accept these positions. Again, these were
coveted positions in some cases that you paid them and
gave them financial freedom. They were looked upon with respect
by their community. Like to make it as an operator,
even be hired as an operator. It's told the rest
of society this one's a good egg, because we only
hire the best eggs. One of the things, though, like
(31:13):
you said, was that there were really strict rules on
their behavior, how they comported themselves when speaking to customers,
and then just how they even like sat and positioned
themselves at their switchboard. There's a nineteen ten booklet that
the Bell company wrote that Kyle found where they were saying, like,
(31:34):
do not answer these calls with Hello? They said, would
you rush into an office or up to the door
of a residence and blurt out, Hello, Hello, who am
I talking to? And when they put it like that,
it's actually a reasonable thing. But what's funny also is
there was a big debate initially when phones were invented
(31:55):
between whether the proper way to answer a call was
hello or hoy hoy. And Alexander Graham Bell was a
hoy hoy boy, and Thomas Edison, who was his big
rival in founding phone companies, he was a Hello guy.
And that's why you'll hear mister Burns say hoy hoy
when he answers the phone. It's just going to show
(32:16):
how ridiculously old he is.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, we talked about this on one episode. It was
a long time ago, but I used to have a
Hoya hoy written on my first flip phone when you
opened it up, the little home screen, because before they
had pictures and graphics, just said a hoya hoy written.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Did you write it in nail polish?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
No? No, no, it was typed out, and you know,
instead of like Chuck's phone or something.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Oh okay, I never had a phone that had any
feature like that.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, well, you know these were early flip phones.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
I thought you actually wrote it on the screen.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
No, no, no, no, it was typed letters.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So oh. There were a couple of things that I
saw that were really harsh. There was a view that
I found I think American Experience. They did a documentary
on the telephone and they were interviewing like some of
these original operators, and one of them was like, so
they used tailorism. So there was like five supervisors to
every single like switchboard operator, and they would just hover
(33:16):
over you like a hawk. They would constantly be like,
come on girls, faster, faster, that kind of stuff. And
this woman was like, if you even lifted your head
up from your switchboard, not even looked around, not even
talked like, you just lifted your head up, for supervisor
would be on you, being like, what do you need?
What's going on? There was another one that I think
(33:37):
it was on history dot com. They were writing about
telephone operators and they they quoted from a woman who
was like one of the original ones, who said I
had to work ten unpaid hours as punishment for a
single giggle, Like that's how how just regulated the women
(33:58):
operators were for decades and that was just part of
the job.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah. I never did telemarketing in college, but that was
a big dial America was a big job in Athens.
I'm sure you remember. You probably worked for Dialo America.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I didn't, but I worked for another company. I have
this story about that.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Yeah, it was a big, easy job to get in
Athens and I'm sure many colleges. But the central benefit
of any job like this is being able to put
your hand over the receiver and roll your eyes to
the person next to you and go, oh my god,
you got to get a load of this guy, or
you should hear this lady's voice. Like if you deny
your work or that, then you're not going to have
(34:35):
a happy workforce. That's the one perk you get when
you're not on a and right in front of someone
is that you can say something quietly and have a
quick laugh.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah. They could not do that. They would get in
trouble and possibly fired for that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
So, actually, one of the cool things is they figured
out that Okay, wait, there's thousands of us in this
workforce let's form a union. And they were told no,
they can't form a union. So they said, okay, we're
going on strike. And I think in nineteen nineteen New
England telephone operators walked out and just crippled the phone
network for basically half of New England. And the company
(35:16):
was very quick to be like, Okay, what did you
say you wanted to begin and yeah, I went back exactly.
So that was pretty cool. But for the most part
they were treated rather poorly.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
They were, and they in the face of you know,
like I said, some people would call in cursing. There
were men who would use foul language. Sometimes they would
get charged extra for their call. They would sometimes people
would call and say like, hey, do you know what
time it is? Or do you know what goes in
this recipe? Or do you know what time the train
runs from the station?
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Or does this shirt make me look fat?
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah? Exactly, And they're acting like information basically rather than
just connecting calls. You know. I guess they weren't being
as ragned in everywhere because or maybe they were to
the customer is always right. I don't know they were.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Then there were there was like five things you could
say to a customer, no matter what they said to you,
no matter how abusive they were, anything like that, you
could say like thank you or something like that.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
You'd safron.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, right, that was the safe word.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
The supervisor come in and be like, hey, hey, what
are you saying?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Well, if they got asked them in a recipe and
maybe they can only say five things, really hymns them
in So.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Are you allowed to leave? If not? Say saffron.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Here's one fun little thing. In World War One, there
were two hundred and twenty three American women who served
in Europe as switchboard operators because France's phone system was wrecked,
so the US Army Signal Corps literally built its own
phone system and had bilingual American switchboard operators working there
(36:49):
and sometimes giving like really important direct orders about you know,
bombings and raids and things like that.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Well, they would pass them along. I don't know if
they were making up the orders.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
And do you think anybody would have thought that I did?
You thought that's what I was saying.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
No, but it was still hilarious to hear you say
it exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
But this is the cool part. After sixty years, Finally,
nineteen seventy nine these women were recognized as veterans.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
I know that was very cool. It's sad that it
took that long, but at least they finally got there. Yeah,
I'm sorry. I keep imagining whole cadre of operators just
making up orders.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
For this lady just sent to storm the beach. It's
just chaos, all right. Now, we're going to take our break.
We're running a bit long, so we're gonna come back
and finish up on how it all ended with automation.
Right after this stucks net stucks stuck. I don't know,
you know it stucks stuck.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That sucks. It's a great name.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, that's the name of it.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
It's a great name. All right, stucks met with an okay, chuck.
So I think I said before that once they started
going to all numeric, well numbers, that was like a
(38:22):
huge first step toward automating the system and eventually phasing
out human operators. And one of the reasons why is
because you can take numbers and you can quantify them essentially,
and that's what those original phones, the roadary phones, then
apparently the fake keypad phones would do. When you dialed
a number, your finger would eventually hit a stop. For
(38:45):
like a three, the stop was closer, for the zero
of the stop was in eternity away, because once you
hit the stop, the dial would go back to the
original position, and as it did, it would put out,
you know, three pulses, say three electrical impulses when you
dial the three. And what that did was it told
(39:06):
the automated switches that were eventually invented to start paying
attention and start dialing some numbers here because I just
sent some electrical impulses.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
That's right. I think you mean pulses, don't you.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
What did I say plus impulses? Did I?
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Little late in the day and my brain's mush from
all the engineering week we've been doing.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Hey, I'm not just sitting here as correct you guy.
I just I think it's kind of funny. And somebody
would have written in and it's like, why are these
phones having impulses?
Speaker 2 (39:38):
No, hey, you got me back for the operators giving direction.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Here is where my mind exploded because I didn't learn
this yesterday. He's still liking that one. This didn't I
didn't learn this yesterday, but I learned it. I think
the last time you explain this because We explained that
in another episode about how you dial oh yeah a
rotary phone. I did not know that it was the
retreat of that dial back to its original position? Was
(40:07):
what was being quantified and pulsed?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Do you think it was the dial up? Like when
you got.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, you put your finger in it and you dial
the four over? You know, as a kid, you just
think a little like, yep, I'm hitting the four, and
I just take it out and it goes back to
its place. It going back to its place is the
key yeah, Which I don't.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Know if I knew that either, though it seems new
to me, so if I did explain it before, it
didn't stick.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
It's pretty cool, though, ton't. I mean, this is just
a fun little fact for anyone who still understands what
those are.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
One thing I do think we talked about in the
Phone Freaking episode was the invention of the Strouder switch,
which was invented by an undertaker named Almon Brown. Strouder
and the reason that he can't like. An undertaker in
Kansas City invented the automated phone switchboard because, as legend
has it, he was losing business to a rival undertaker
(41:04):
whose wife was the town operator. So when people call
up and said undertaker police, she would just rout him
to her husband's business and leave Strouger's business out. And
he's like, you know what, I want to get rid
of the operator. So he went and invented one of
the more sophisticated pieces of technology that was around at
the time. And this is in eighteen ninety that he
(41:24):
came up with the first automated switch. And it is impressive.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, I mean that's the one that led to the
rotary switch that we're talking about though, right, yes, do
you know how his work specifically.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Or difference, Actually, it's really fascinating.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Well, let's hear it. We got one minute, all.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Right, So let's say that you dialed that three, right,
that first number, those three impulses I think in slang
it's just called pulses. They went down the line and
they hit the first switch, and they told the first switch, okay,
we're going to three, and so that would narrow down
the number of subscribers to this telephone switchboard whose numbers
(42:04):
started with three, oh yeah, and then the next number
would come in five, yeah, right, Five more pulses of
electricity would come to the second switch, and it would
tell that switch. Okay, now we're just trying to get
to the people whose first two numbers are three, five,
and so on and so on, until finally all what eight, no, yeah,
eight seven numbers were dialed, and so it led to
(42:28):
the only person whose phone line could possibly be connected
to this specific circuit of seven numbers, and then it
would connect the call from the caller to the call lee.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Wow, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Yeah, it's really amazing. This guy came up with this
in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, and you know, we didn't even really mention it
seems obvious, but I guess we should say. The reason
they were looking to phase out and go into automation
is kind of like every reason always is money. You know,
less overhead. You as more more switchboards grew, you had
well a the switchboards cost a lot of money. They
cost you know, you had to have land in a building,
(43:06):
and you had to have people to operate them, and
they just couldn't keep hiring more and more people. I
think at one point they said, you know, we'd need
a million switchboard operators and that just wasn't even a
possibility at the time. So automation was always on the horizon. Interestingly,
along those lines, long distance switching took a lot longer,
(43:28):
like it was into the late nineteen sixties and even
some places in the seventies where you still had operators
that had to connect long distance lines because it was
as Kyle said that it was just no alternative to
human intelligence. It was too complex at the time. But eventually,
you know, they figured all that out.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
But that meant that there were humans who were walking
around knowing how to connect to Tacoma. They knew the
combination of switches, yeah, yeah, connector the number of levers
to pull, the number of like wishes to make I
don't know, okay, and they would they knew how to
connect to call like that and not just to peek
(44:09):
a ta coma like whatever city to whatever city. They
just knew how to view it. And I mean that's yeah,
that's just an overlooked part of history that there were
people walking around who knew how to do these complex
algorithms basically, and they were all different for depending on
what city was calling what city. So that kept operators
(44:29):
around for much longer than they would have been had
long distance not existed, because they got phased out at
the local level, but for long distance calling they were
just too valuable to get rid of at the time.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
What happens when you dial zero today from a landline?
Is there an operator?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well? Number one there's no landlines. There's just you get
like an alarm at somebody's house alarm. I think maybe yeah,
And then number two there's no zero anymore. Gen Z
got rid of it all right, good deal. So I
think by the the seventies the whole thing was digitized.
There was no corded switchboards any longer. But there were
(45:08):
some like pockets of switchboards that were still around, right,
that held on long beyond the time it was necessary.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yeah, there's a couple of competing last switchboard last operators.
One that you'll see a lot online as widely recognized
in nineteen eighty three Bryant Pond, Maine. I think this
specification heroes. It was the last hand cranked telephone system
and switchboard, like you know, you like you've seen the
(45:35):
old movies. There's a box on the wall and you go,
you crank a thing.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Give me Kondike five six thousand exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
And Susan Glynes was the last operator there. London's thank
you Kyle was at Infield and this was nineteen sixty
I think was retired. But the last caretaker telephone operator
in the and the UK retired in eighty four. But
(46:05):
then you found one in California that was ninety one.
And as best I could tell, that was a private
a sort of very small customer based private phone company
in Kerman.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
And what was sweet was I saw one of the
reasons that the owner of the company held on to
human operators for so long was because there were so
many migrants who lived in town that the phone operator
was bilingual. It could help connect calls between people who
spoke two different languages.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah, all the not even the final one. All of
their operators were bilingual.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Oh is that right?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Oh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
I think that was their specialty.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
No, serious, that's what they said at the company picnic,
that's our I.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Mean, I think that's honestly. They had most of their
customer base were people with family in Mexico, and so
they just had a niche for miners.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
I mean, I don't know why you're getting them that.
I don't believe you. I believe what you're.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Saying, because he keeps laughing at it, going that's funny.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
I'm still thinking about the operators telling everybody to bomb
Roy Win or something. You got anything else? No, big
thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one.
It was very technical and complicated. And since I said
technical and complicated, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Here's our Joe Thiseman follow up. We got quite a
few emails, and in fact a few from people whose
parents went to school with Joe Thiseman, the former quarterback
of the former Washington Redskins football team now the Commanders.
Hey guys, I uster freelance for a video company that
did a lot of conferences, and one time Joe Eisman
was the keynote speaker. The way he told the story
(47:47):
about his last name as his follows. Growing up, his
dad was very firm that their last name was pronounced
these men. Apparently, his dad would get quite cross when
folks would pronounce it wrong. People often said it wrong,
so Joe would call his dad and have him correct them.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Dad, they said it wrong, but Dead's gonna sue you.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
He snapped my leg. According to Joe's story, when he
was a candidate for the Heisman Trophy, his college coaches
thought it would be better if it was pronounced thisman
to rhyme obviously, So again Joe called his dad to
ask him, and his dad responded, I've told you it's thighsman.
So it sounds like Joe has made kind of a
fun little apocryphal story about this, but it seems confirmed
(48:27):
it was thiseman heard it from the man's own mouth.
And that's from Karen and Gil Pennington.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
Very nice, appreciate that big time.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Who was it, Karen, Karen Pennington, Thank.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
You very much, Karen, I'm just gonna call him Karen
Sure if you want to get in touch with us
like Karen did and give us a great story that
kind of sums up, ties up, circles up, a story
that we talked about. We love that kind of thing.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. RAO.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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