Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck ring Ring, there's Jerry and this is Stuff you should Know.
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.
Yeah, he keeps mentioning fish and chips every few paragraphs.
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.
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 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.
I leveled telephones. I would like to check that out.
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 It reminded me that something that was just such an integral part of our life is a completely obsolete, outdated antique technology.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 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.
Actually, you know what, that's We had that for that landline for that reason for a while, but no longer.
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.
I guess nostalgia's not a good enough reason.
Huh keeps this amazing network of technology still around?
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 and it's knocking things over.
And that's right, there goes the flower.
Wireless is better.
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 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.
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.
I don't know either, but that's a great point.
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 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, 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.
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 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
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. 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 concept of the switchboard.
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 that board?
Jack?
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 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.
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
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
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.
They would plug back.
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.
Really, you're not too far off.
Uh.
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.
So but first thing, spend ten minutes going down east Jack like Chuck Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck Chuck Chuck.
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.
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.
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 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 up to and everyone had phones.
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 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 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 an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after switchboard after switchboard.
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. Those are the ones that look like push button but when you hit it, it dialed.
Oh really, do.
You remember those who you know it had the keypad, but when you hit nine, it.
Went No, I don't remember that.
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.
No, I think you got it provider, yeah, or internet is Internet Service provider ISP.
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.
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.
Like I remember it, it's so weird.
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 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.
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 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 B boards that converged on a letter A board and there was an operator linking between those two.
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.
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.
What's the number for dominos?
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.
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,
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 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 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.
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.
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.
You know what, Stucks.
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 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.
Tacoma, Washington, Okay, two great tee towns.
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 wrong way Munchie in the Indiana Is it Muncie?
Yeah?
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 all these towns from switchboard to switchboard. You to your friend Tacoma, who wasn't even home.
That you were using the Miles Davis rebreathing technique.
Oh yeah, yeah.
You're breathing through your nose so you don't have to stop talking.
I just didn't breathe.
Oh okay, that's the dizzy Gillespian message.
Speaking of dizzy.
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.
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 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.
Watson. That's so Watson.
It totally is Watson.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 good in some ways, but in others. Monopolies typically overall, are not good for the health of an economy.
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 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.
Huge, huge point.
Yeah, can we talk about phone numbers real quick?
Yeah? I think we should talk about phone numbers.
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. 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.
No, I want to say seven, okay, your.
Phone number seven, mine's eleven.
Okay.
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.
Give me klondike five six thousand exactly.
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.
That's five to five.
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 kept taking away letters and adding numbers. The bigger and bigger your city.
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, 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 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.
Yeah, which I was told recently in a script I wrote to take that out.
Oh really, did you tell them to go to hell?
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.
You or did you not tell them to go to hell with their script?
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.
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.
Yeah, Okay.
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 big step in the direction of eventually phasing out switchboard operators.
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.
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.
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.
That was me. I grew up with an area code.
Oh really, yeah, from the moment you could remember, No, you're right.
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.
Two numbers called each other like in some weird portal opened.
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.
Adam Curry?
Wait, wait which one?
Oh, Adam Curry dressed as a gnome?
Okay, thank you?
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.
We went long before the first break, So keep going.
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 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, 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.
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 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.
Yeah, it took everything I had not to make a nut job joke.
Can we hear it?
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.
That was good? Sorry, you got me.
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 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 a reference of moral character from their clergyman.
Wow, this is to get a job as a switchboard operator.
Yeah. What about in the UK, because that's pretty fun too.
You were required to speak the King's English and not in a Cockney way or a Northern way.
Yeah.
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 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,
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 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 how ridiculously old he is.
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.
Did you write it in nail polish?
No? No, no, it was typed out, and you know, instead of like Chuck's phone or something.
Oh okay, I never had a phone that had any feature like that.
Yeah, well, you know these were early flip phones.
I thought you actually wrote it on the screen.
No, no, no, no, it was typed letters.
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 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
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 operators were for decades and that was just part of the job.
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.
I didn't, but I worked for another company. I have this story about that.
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
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.
Yeah. They could not do that. They would get in trouble and possibly fired for that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
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 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.
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?
Or does this shirt make me look fat?
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.
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.
You'd safron.
Yeah, right, that was the safe word.
Yeah.
The supervisor come in and be like, hey, hey, what are you saying?
Well, if they got asked them in a recipe and maybe they can only say five things, really hymns them in So.
Are you allowed to leave? If not? Say saffron.
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 and sometimes giving like really important direct orders about you know, bombings and raids and things like that.
Well, they would pass them along. I don't know if they were making up the orders.
And do you think anybody would have thought that I did? You thought that's what I was saying.
No, but it was still hilarious to hear you say it exactly.
But this is the cool part. After sixty years, Finally, nineteen seventy nine these women were recognized as veterans.
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.
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.
That sucks. It's a great name.
Yeah, that's the name of it.
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 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 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 the automated switches that were eventually invented to start paying attention and start dialing some numbers here because I just sent some electrical impulses.
That's right. I think you mean pulses, don't you.
What did I say plus impulses? Did I?
Yeah, it's a.
Little late in the day and my brain's mush from all the engineering week we've been doing.
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?
No, hey, you got me back for the operators giving direction.
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 what was being quantified and pulsed?
Do you think it was the dial up? Like when you got.
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.
Know if I knew that either, though it seems new to me, so if I did explain it before, it didn't stick.
It's pretty cool, though, ton't. I mean, this is just a fun little fact for anyone who still understands what those are.
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 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 came up with the first automated switch. And it is impressive.
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.
Or difference, Actually, it's really fascinating.
Well, let's hear it. We got one minute, all.
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 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 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.
Wow, that's pretty cool.
Yeah, it's really amazing. This guy came up with this in eighteen ninety.
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, 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, 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.
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 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 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.
What happens when you dial zero today from a landline? Is there an operator?
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 some like pockets of switchboards that were still around, right, that held on long beyond the time it was necessary.
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 old movies. There's a box on the wall and you go, you crank a thing.
Give me Kondike five six thousand exactly.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, all the not even the final one. All of their operators were bilingual.
Oh is that right?
Yeah?
Oh, very nice.
I think that was their specialty.
No, serious, that's what they said at the company picnic, that's our I.
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.
I mean, I don't know why you're getting them that. I don't believe you. I believe what you're.
Saying, because he keeps laughing at it, going that's funny.
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.
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 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.
Dad, they said it wrong, but Dead's gonna sue you.
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 it was thiseman heard it from the man's own mouth. And that's from Karen and Gil Pennington.
Very nice, appreciate that big time.
Who was it, Karen, Karen Pennington, Thank.
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.
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