![]() The owner of a telephone would call the exchange, and a switchboard operator would answer. Telephone exchanges made that possible.Įach of the phones in a particular locale would be connected by wire to a central exchange. While that may have seemed like a miracle at the time, it was clear that the telephone would be much more useful if any given phone could communicate with numerous phones. In the telephone’s earliest days, one phone could be connected to another by wire, allowing their two owners to speak. What Did Telephone Operators Do, Exactly? WATCH: Full episodes of The Machines That Built America online now and tune in for all-new episodes Sundays at 9/8c. In 1910, there were 88,000 female telephone operators in the United States. ![]() multiplied, so did the demand for operators. Often that meant going house to house, trying to persuade parents that telephone operator was a respectable job for their daughters.Īs the number of telephones in the U.S. Hoping to find operators who’d be more attentive to their duties and not cuss out the customers, local phone companies began to recruit girls and young women. And “when some other diversion held their attention, they would leave a call unanswered for any length of time, and then return the impatient subscriber’s profanity with a few original oaths,” wrote Marion May Dilts in her 1941 book, The Telephone in a Changing World. It turned out there was a problem with male switchboard operators: The boys, often barely in their teens, couldn’t seem to behave themselves. In many places, operators were closely monitored, subject to strict rules about dress code and behavior, with punishments for talking, laughing or even smiling. READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Alexander Graham Bell Boy Operators Didn’t Last And as their numbers grew they became a powerful force-fighting for the right to join unions, striking for higher wages, even serving overseas in World War I. But by the beginning of the 20 th century, women began dominating the field. That would continue into the early days of the telephone. Boys often worked at telegraph offices, while female telegraph operators were a rarity. That Coy would employ boys to do a job later associated mostly with girls and young women was only natural. Louis Frost, the 17-year-old son of one of Coy’s business partners, was most likely the first operator. But while Coy devised the switchboard for the exchange (improvising some parts using wire from women’s bustles!), he hired two boys to operate it. Today, Coy is often cited as the world’s first telephone operator. Coy, a Civil War veteran who worked in the telegraph business, soon made a deal with Bell to set up the first telephone exchange in the United States, a central switchboard that allowed anyone with a telephone to call or be called by anyone else who had one.Ĭoy’s telephone exchange, in New Haven, Connecticut, opened in 1878, with all of 21 clients, including the local police, post office and a drug store. In it, the famous inventor demonstrated how he could converse with two colleagues-one 27 miles away, the other 38 miles-using a device he’d patented just the year before: the telephone. Coy attended a lecture by Alexander Graham Bell. The idea originated in April 1877, when 40-year-old George W. It was a crucial new service that helped a revolutionary new technology spread widely to the masses. ![]() They needed an intermediary-a telephone operator-to manually relay their call on a central switchboard connected to subscribers’ wires. In the earliest days of the telephone, people couldn’t dial one another directly.
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