To connect a call, an operator at a switching office would take a request from a caller and physically plug one line into another.īell and other telephone exchanges spread throughout the Northeast. Physicians, police, banks and the post office were some of the first subscribers. It was designed to handle business communication, not social calls between local residents. The first telephone exchange took place in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Satellite SOS wars: Qualcomm to help Android phones compete with Apple The FCC estimated then that 71 million calls annually were placed to 411. “411 usage is not insignificant,” the FCC said in a 2019 report. In 2021, there were fewer than 4,000 telephone operators, down from a peak of around 420,000 in the 1970s, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.īut there are still people who call the operator and request directory help. The advance of technology like the internet and smartphones, the deregulation of the telecomms industry in the 1980s, and other factors have left human operators virtually extinct. Three decades later, a Bell company said a customer called to ask the operator if he was a mammal, “like a whale,” while a woman wanted to know how to get a squirrel out of her house, according to Goodmann. On Halloween eve in 1938, during Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” New Jersey residents believed Martians were invading and frantically phoned the operator for information on the invasion and to connect them with loved ones before the world ended. “Telephone users interpreted her as an efficient way to locate any information,” wrote Emma Goodmann, an assistant professor of communication at Clarke University, in her 2019 paper on the history of telephone operators. Well into the 20th century, AT&T offered weather, bus schedules, sports scores, time and date, election results and other information requests. The job came to be occupied mostly by single, middle-class White women, often known as “Hello Girls.” The Bell System, known as Ma Bell, advertised its mostly female ranks of operators as servile and attentive - “The Voice with a Smile” - to attract and maintain customers. The operator became the early face of the telephone, a human behind an emerging and complex technology. The operator was the essential link in the dominant Bell System, owned by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), telecommunications network. Operator services were a selling point to customers during the late 1800s and early 1900s. There’s a wonderful circularity there,” said Josh Lauer, an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire who is writing a book on the cultural history of the telephone. “The operator was the internet before the internet.
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