The Information - James Gleick [93]
At first, customers resented the impersonality of telephone numbers, and engineers doubted whether people could remember a number of more than four or five digits. The Bell Company finally had to insist. The first telephone operators were teenage boys, cheaply hired from the ranks of telegraph messengers, but exchanges everywhere discovered that boys were wild, given to clowning and practical jokes, and more likely to be found wrestling on the floor than sitting on stools to perform the exacting, repetitive work of a switchboard operator.♦ A new source of cheap labor was available, and by 1881 virtually every telephone operator was a woman. In Cincinnati, for example, W. H. Eckert reported hiring sixty-six “young ladies” who were “very much superior” to boys: “They are steadier, do not drink beer, and are always on hand.”♦ He hardly needed to add that the company could pay a woman as little as or less than a teenage boy. It was challenging work that soon required training. Operators had to be quick in distinguishing many different voices and accents, had to maintain a polite equilibrium in the face of impatience and rudeness, as they engaged in long hours of athletic upper-body exercise, wearing headsets like harnesses. Some men thought this was good for them. “The action of stretching her arms up above her head, and to the right and left of her, develops her chest and arms,” said Every Woman’s Encyclopedia, “and turns thin and weedy girls into strong ones. There are no anaemic, unhealthy looking girls in the operating rooms.”♦ Along with another new technology, the typewriter, the telephone switchboard catalyzed the introduction of women into the white-collar workforce, but battalions of human operators could not sustain a network on the scale now arising. Switching would have to be performed automatically.
This meant a mechanical linkage to take from callers not just the sound of their voice but also a number—identifying a person, or at least another telephone. The challenge of converting a number into electrical form still required ingenuity: first push buttons were tried, then an awkward-seeming rotary dial, with ten finger positions for the decimal digits, sending pulses down the line. Then the coded pulses served as an agent of control at the central exchange, where another mechanism selected from an array of circuits and set up a connection. Altogether this made for an unprecedented degree of complexity in the translations between human and machine, number and circuitry. The point was not lost on the company, which liked to promote its automatic switches as “electrical brains.” Having borrowed from telegraphy the electromechanical relay—using one circuit to control another—the telephone companies had reduced it in size and weight to less than four ounces and now manufactured several million each year.
“The telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels,” wrote a historian in 1910—a historian of the telephone, already. “No other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more enswathed in the unknown.”♦ New York City had several hundred thousand listed telephone customers, and Scribner’s Magazine highlighted this astounding fact: “Any two of that large number can, in five seconds, be placed in communication with each other, so well has engineering science kept pace with public needs.”♦ To make the connections, the switchboard had grown to a monster of 2 million soldered parts, 4,000 miles of wire, and 15,000 signal lamps.♦ By 1925, when an assortment of telephone research groups were formally organized into the Bell Telephone