Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms

Following Alexander Graham Bell’s famous exhibition of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, a sprawling telephone network would soon connect people in every corner of the United States.

The telephone quickly became a popular communication tool among merchants and business owners who valued its instantaneous nature, such as John Wanamaker, who first installed telephones in his Philadelphia department stores in 1879. Wanamaker’s was among the first stores to allow customers to order by phone and used thousands of telephones to take orders and communicate between stores.

In the ensuing decades, telephones became more popular for social and personal calls, and by 1917 there were more than 300,000 miles of lines crisscrossing Pennsylvania. The majority of Pennsylvania’s phonelines were operated by Bell Telephone Co. but competing regional phone companies, like Philadelphia’s Keystone Telephone Co. and Erie’s Pennsylvania Telephone Co., and dozens of local telephone exchanges served rural callers across the state.

No matter which company’s lines connected their phones to others, Pennsylvanians could be sure of one thing: When they picked up their receiver they would be greeted by a woman on the other end to connect the call.

At first telephone companies hired men to operate telephone lines but quickly determined that their pool lacked the language skills, patience and etiquette needed for the job. In 1892 The Lancaster Daily Intelligencer reported boys between the ages of 16 and 19 operating telephone exchanges were at first “disturbing, then discouraging, and finally threatened to be destructive to the interests of the company.” Bell Telephone was the first to exclusively hire women operators, and other phone companies in the state quickly followed suit. By 1920, 95 percent of Pennsylvania’s 15,000 telephone operators were women.

Telephone companies preferred to hire young, unmarried white women with good English-speaking skills who demonstrated good character. Until the 1940s, most companies refused to hire Black women and some also barred immigrants and Jewish women from employment as well.

Once hired, these women were rigorously trained in pronunciation, speaking tone, and equipment operation for several weeks. Labor reformer Josephine Goldmark wrote in 1912 that operating telephones demanded a combination of speed and technical complexity. “Measured by these,” she observed, “few trades can equal in their demands upon the human organism.”

Most telephone operators spent their days seated closely together around an “exchange” like the one in this 1930 photograph of a Bell Telephone office in Philadelphia. Each operator was responsible for a section of the exchange’s switchboard that contained a series of jacks that connected to the customers’ telephones and a series of terminals linked to all the telephones in the exchange. By connecting a terminal to a customer’s telephone jack, the caller reached the line they desired.

Each time a caller lifted their receiver, a switchboard light would turn on to notify the operator. “Thus the telephone girl must be continually at the top notch of expectancy,” Goldmark wrote, “watching intently for the flash of the signal lights, responding instantly to the clicking sounds heard whenever impatient subscribers move their hooks up and down, making and severing connections with all the speed she may.”

Even the simplest connections required 10 or more separate processes to complete a call, all expected to be performed with exacting speed and accuracy. Though telephone companies reported an operator could efficiently connect no more than 225 calls per hour during peak calling times, it was common to receive well over 300. “You nearly go crazy with the number of calls,” one Pittsburgh operator moaned in 1909 before heading in for her shift.

Telephone operators frequently worked long shifts — sometimes up to 15 hours a day — with infrequent breaks and few days off. Verbal abuse from impatient callers was routine. Headaches, backaches, arm and eye strain, and nervous breakdowns were so common that Bell Telephone even established several rest homes in the 1910s and ’20s around Philadelphia for ailing operators.

Beginning in the 1920s, telephone companies began to automate the work of the telephone operator. Mechanical switching systems allowed callers to manually dial numbers on their own telephone. This technological advance eliminated the need for human operators and by the late 1970s the profession disappeared altogether.

Materials pertaining to the telephone industry can be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives in MG-219: Philadelphia Commercial Museum Photograph Collection and RG-14: Records of the Department of Internal Affairs.

Tyler Stump is an archivist at the Pennsylvania State Archives.