History and society

INFORMATIONAL: This passage is from the book The Board on Tanner Street by Helena Brandvold-Achebe. Table 1 accompanies the passage; its figures come from the telephone company's ledgers as summarized by the author. (Original practice text; the author, the work, the town and the company are fictional.) Line numbers appear in the left margin every 5 lines.

When the telephone exchange opened above the hardware store on Tanner Street in Harlow Bend in 1903, it had forty-one subscribers and a single operator, a nineteen-year-old named Edith Varga, who slept on a cot beside 5 the switchboard so that she could answer calls that came in at night. The town newspaper reported the opening in one short paragraph printed beneath an advertisement for fence wire. Nobody in 1903, it seems, imagined that the room above the hardware store would become one of the centers of the town's 10 life. Early subscribers did not dial numbers. They lifted the receiver and spoke to the operator, who completed the connection by plugging a cord into a jack. Because every call passed through her hands, the operator knew who was calling 15 whom and often why. Company rules forbade listening to conversations, but no rule could stop an operator from noticing that the doctor had been called to the Pruett farm three times in one week, or that the bank's lines were busy all morning on the day the price of grain fell. Residents soon 20 learned that the exchange was the best place to ask where a fire was burning, whether the evening train was late, or which store still had kerosene. By 1925 the exchange employed eleven operators, nearly all of them young unmarried women. For many it was the first paid 25 work they had done outside a family farm or household, and the wages, though modest, allowed some of them to rent rooms in town, buy their own clothes, and in a few cases pay for a year at the teachers' college in the county seat. The company, however, controlled them closely. A supervisor walked behind 30 the row of chairs timing each connection, operators had to ask permission to leave their seats, and a woman who married was expected to resign. "We were trusted with everybody's secrets," the former operator Ruth Kessling recalled in 1971, "and not trusted to get a drink of water." 35 The operators' place in the life of the town was clearest during emergencies. In the flood of 1937, when the river rose over the lower streets, the operators stayed at the board for thirty hours, calling the households on low ground one by one to warn them and relaying messages between the fire brigade 40 and the rescue boats. The town council later presented each of them with a silver pin. Kessling kept hers, she said, not because of the council's speech but because for once "the town saw what we did all day, only faster." Automation arrived gradually, then all at once. Engineers 45 had built dial systems for large cities decades earlier, but for a town the size of Harlow Bend the cost of the equipment long outweighed any savings in wages. After the Second World War, as the number of subscribers climbed and young women found better-paid jobs in the new factories along the highway, 50 the company struggled to hire enough operators. In 1958 it installed dial equipment in a windowless brick building at the edge of town, and on a single night in April the switchboard on Tanner Street went silent. Some residents welcomed the change. Calls went through 55 faster, and, no small matter in a town where everyone knew everyone, no operator could overhear the beginning of a call. Others missed the operators more than they had expected to. A farmer's wife wrote to the newspaper that she had lost "the one person who always knew where the doctor was." When the 60 next flood came, in 1964, there was no room full of people who knew every household on low ground; the fire brigade worked from a printed list and drove through the lower streets with a loudspeaker. Historians of technology sometimes describe the change to 65 dialing simply as the replacement of human workers by more efficient machines. The story of Tanner Street suggests that something harder to measure was replaced as well. The operators had served as a kind of living directory, a store of knowledge about people and places, and the town had come to 70 depend on it without ever deciding to. The new machines could connect any number to any other number. They could not tell anyone which number to call.

Table 1 Harlow Bend Telephone Exchange, selected years