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Switchboard operator

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Seattle telephone operators in a private branch exchange in 1952

In the early days of telephony, companies used manual telephone switchboards, and switchboard operators connected calls by inserting a pair of phone plugs into the appropriate jacks. They were gradually phased out and replaced by automated systems, first those allowing direct dialing within a local area, then for long-distance and international direct dialing.

Description

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A typical manual telephone switchboard has a vertical panel containing an array of jacks with a desk in front. The desk has a row of switches and two rows of plugs attached to cables that retract into the desk when not in use. Each pair of plugs was part of a cord circuit with a switch associated that let the operator participate in the call or ring the circuit for an incoming call. Each jack had a light above it that lit when the customer's telephone receiver was lifted (the earliest systems required the customer to hand-crank a magneto to alert the central office and, later, to "ring off" the completed call). Lines from the central office were usually arranged along the bottom row. Before the advent of operator distance dialing and customer direct dial (DDD) calling, a switchboard operator would work with their counterparts in distant central office to complete long-distance calls. Switchboard operators are typically required to have very strong communication skills.[1][2]

Before the advent of automatic exchanges, an operator's assistance was required for anything other than calling telephones across a shared party line. Callers spoke to an operator at a central office who then connected a cord to the proper circuit in order to complete the call. Being in complete control of the call, the operator was in a position to listen to private conversations. Automatic, or dial, systems were developed in the 1920s to reduce labor costs as usage increased, and to ensure privacy to the customer. As phone systems became more sophisticated, less direct intervention by the telephone operator was necessary to complete calls. With the development of computerized telephone dialing systems, many telephone calls which previously required live operators could be placed directly by calling parties without additional human intervention.

As well as the people that were employed by the public networks, operators were required at private branch exchanges (PBX) to answer incoming calls and connect them to the correct extensions. Today, most large organizations have direct inward dialing, or direct dial-in. Smaller workplaces may have an automated system which allows callers to enter the extension number of the called party, or a receptionist who answers calls and performs operator duties. Depending on the employment setting, the roles and level of responsibilities of a PBX operator can vary greatly, from performing wake-up calls in a hotel to coordinating emergency responses, dispatching, and overhead paging in hospitals. Operators employed in healthcare settings may have other duties, such as data entry, greeting patients and visitors, taking messages, triaging, or performing after-hours answering service. Experienced, well-trained operators generally command higher salaries.[citation needed]

New York telephone exchange in the 1880s, with both men and women as operators
Paris telephone exchange, 1900

History

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Telephone operators in Stockholm, Sweden 1902–1903

In January 1878 George Willard Croy became the world's first telephone operator when he started working for the Boston Telephone Dispatch company.[3]

United States phone operator in 1911

Emma Nutt became the first female telephone operator on 1 September 1878 when she started working for the Boston Telephone Dispatch company, because the attitude and behavior of the teenage boys previously employed as operators was unacceptable.[4] Emma was hired by Alexander Graham Bell[3] and, reportedly, could remember every number in the telephone directory of the New England Telephone Company.[3][4] More women began to replace men within this sector of the workforce for several reasons. The companies observed that women were generally more courteous to callers, and women's labor was cheap in comparison to men's. Specifically, women were paid from one half to one quarter of a man's salary.[5] In the United States, any switchboard operator employed by any independently owned public telephone company with no more than seven hundred fifty stations were excluded from the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Harriot Daley became the first telephone switchboard operator at the United States Capitol in 1898.[6][7][8]

Julia O'Connor, a former telephone operator, led the Telephone Operators' Strike of 1919 and the Telephone Operators' Strike of 1923 against New England Telephone Company on behalf of the IBEW Telephone Operators' Department for better wages and working conditions.[9][10][11] In the 1919 strike, after five days, Postmaster General Burleson agreed to negotiate an agreement between the union and the telephone company, resulting in an increase in pay for the operators and recognition of the right to bargain collectively.[12][13] However, the 1923 strike was called off after less than a month without achieving any of its goals.[11]

On October 11, 1983, in Bryant Pond, Maine, Susan Glines became the last switchboard operator for a hand-crank phone when that exchange was converted.[14] Manual central office switchboards continued in operation at rural points like Kerman, California,[15] and Wanaaring, New South Wales, as late as 1991, but these were central-battery systems with no hand-cranked magnetos.

Operators at an international telephone exchange in 1967 in Japan at KDD, Japan's only international telephone company at the time. Replaced by International direct dialing which allows international calls to be placed without an operator.

According to a 2024 study, the mechanization of switchboard operations harmed the economic outcomes of incumbent telephone operators, but did not harm the employment prospects of young women overall, as future cohorts of young women entered into other growing economic sectors.[16]

Notable switchboard operators

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Author Dorothy M. Johnson worked as a relief switchboard operator as a teenager in Whitefish, Montana, in the early 1920s. Full-time operators were paid roughly $50 a month at this time.[17]

The most famous group of American operators were in the "Women of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit" of the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917–1919, also known as the Hello Girls. They were bilingual female switchboard operators sent to France during World War I. These operators were not formally recognized for their military service until 1978.[18][19]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Principles of Hotel Front Office Operations - Page 55, Sue Baker, Pam Bradley, Jeremy Huyton - 2001
  2. ^ Kaplan Civil Service Exams - Page xii, Kaplan - 2008
  3. ^ a b c Petersen, J. K. (29 May 2002). The Telecommunications Illustrated Dictionary, Second Edition. CRC Press. ISBN 9781420040678.
  4. ^ a b "SBC Michigan Recognizes 125 Years of Telephone Operators; Personal Service, Availability Are Hallmarks of Communications Professionals". AT&T (Press release). Archived from the original on 8 June 2011.
  5. ^ Rakow, Lana. "Women and the Telephone: The Gendering of a Communications Technology" (PDF). Technology and Women's Voices: Keeping in Touch: 171–199.
  6. ^ Jacobs, Andrea (19 April 2018). "Overlooked No More: Harriott Daley, the Capitol's First Telephone Operator". New York Times. Retrieved 2018-04-20.
  7. ^ "First Capitol telephone operator still on job. Washington, D.C., July 30. When Miss Harriot Daley was appointed telephone operator at the United States Capitol in 1898 there were only 51 stations on the switchboard. Today Miss Daley is Chief Operator and supervises a staff of 37 operators as they answer calls from 1200 extensions. The picture above shows the present switchboard with Miss Daley still on the job, 7/30/37". Library of Congress. Retrieved 2018-04-25.
  8. ^ "The Upsides to Working Without Internet Access for 80 Days". The Atlantic. 2012-04-09. Archived from the original on 2012-04-14. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
  9. ^ Norwood, Stephen H. (1990). Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp. 180–193. ISBN 0-252-01633-5.
  10. ^ "Telephone Strike Won by Workers" (PDF). New York Times, April 21, 1919. April 21, 1919. Retrieved 2011-04-17.
  11. ^ a b Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923, pp. 262-291
  12. ^ Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923, pp. 180-193
  13. ^ "Telephone Strike Won by Workers" (PDF). New York Times, April 21, 1919. April 21, 1919. Retrieved 2011-04-17.
  14. ^ "Goodbye, Central: Crank Phone Dies". New York Times. 12 October 1983. Retrieved 23 May 2014.
  15. ^ "Pulling the Plug : Phone Company to Replace Last Manual Switchboard". Los Angeles Times. 8 April 1991.
  16. ^ Feigenbaum, James; Gross, Daniel P. (2024). "Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 139 (3): 1879–1939. doi:10.1093/qje/qjae005.
  17. ^ Dorothy M. Johnson, "Confessions of a Telephone Girl" Montana: The Magazine of Western History 47.4 (1997): 68-75. online
  18. ^ Elizabeth Cobbs, The hello girls: America's first women soldiers (Harvard University Press, 2017).
  19. ^ April Middeljans, " 'Weavers of Speech': Telephone Operators as Defiant Domestics in American Literature and Culture." Journal of Modern Literature, 33#3, (2010), pp. 38–63.

Further reading

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  • Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992), a major scholarly history.
  • Green, Venus. “Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of ‘Personal Service’ in the Bell System, 1878–1921.” Technology and Culture 36#4 (1995), pp. 912–49. online
  • Kramarae, Cheris and Lana F. Rakow, eds. Technology and women's voices: keeping in touch (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988)
  • Lipartito, Kenneth. “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920.” American Historical Review 99#4 (1994) pp. 1074–111. ONLINE
  • Mueller, Milton. "The switchboard problem: scale, signaling, and organization in manual telephone switching, 1877-1897." Technology and Culture 30.3 (1989): 534–560. online
  • Muller, Michael J., et al. "Telephone operators as knowledge workers: Consultants who meet customer needs." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (1995).
  • Munn, Luke. "Subordinated to Oneself: The Switchboard Operator as Early Self Manager." Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities 4.2 (2019). online
  • Rakow, Lana F. "Women and the telephone: the gendering of a communications technology." in Technology and women’s voices: Keeping in touch (1988) pp: 171–199. online
  • Schmitt, K. M. (1930, July 12). “I was your old hello girl.” Saturday Evening Post, p. 19.
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  • Media related to Telephone operators at Wikimedia Commons
  • AT&T Archives: Operator! (1938) on YouTube
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