This 1950s Switchboard is on display in The May-Stringer Museum (Heritage Museum) Brooksville Florida. Starring- Mary Frances Griffith Recorded and edited by Jesse Lisk
My grandmother was a southern bell, she absolutely loved the job and retired from there and has stayed with AT&T since then. She recounts always hating mother's day because of how overwhelmed the lines would become with people moaning and complaining to be connected faster. To these people she said she said "Well, why did you just need to wait until a holiday to tell your momma you loved her?".
@@drunk_by_noon9231 Right. But can you say it like that? If he worked for GM could you say that your grandfather was a general motors? I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that should have been "belle".
My grandma is 102 years old and is a retired switchboard operator. She retired in the 1980s. And that's the type of equipment that she started out on in the 1940s
@@someguy9778 living in extremely good life. I actually knew my great-grandparents also they lived to be close to 100 themselves. Nana will be 103 in a few months. I live a block away so I see her everyday lol. She still lives at home, by herself, she still Cooks and cleans. She just doesn't do laundry anymore.
@@zeektm1762 huh? People *today* already realize how much damage has been done, that's why so many younger people are in favor of things like mixed-use zoning, public transit, and generally making things more sustainable in the long run.
My Dad was a hotel manager and I started “working” the switchboard when I was 13. Anytime I had some free time, I would go to the front desk and let the switchboard operator have a break. When I graduated from high school, my first job was switchboard and desk clerk at a hotel. It was the MOST fun job ever!! I’m 75 years old. ❤
_It's so fascinating how there was an actual human element to the technology we see automated today._ I completely agree. My career was "workflow automation." The secret was to WATCH how things are ACTUALLY DONE before making any proposals of how to automate with computers and programming. [edit: fix typo]
This is the most simple and concise explanation of what a switchboard is used for and generally how it is operated that I've been able to find. Thank you!
Thank you so much for the explanation. I’m really fascinated by the telephone bygone era and how intricate it was. Operators literally connected the people around the country/world
I can remember meeting a switchboard operator in the seventies when I was a teenager; she was in her sixties and the space between her thumb and first finger was permanently red from so many years of pulling and pushing plugs. Amazing women.
In the 90s, I worked with an older woman who had worked as an operator for the British GPO in the 50s and 60s. They were extremely strict about etiquette, diction, and required telephonists to minimise their regional accents. There were strict dress codes, even though the operators couldn't be seen by customers. She still had a beautiful, formal telephone manner 40 years later.
True, it was a very respectful job,I worked at the GPO in the 70's,no smoking there long before it was banned from the workplaces. The older supervisors were strict !💯
I'm glad she's keeping this switchboard intact and on display. It's hard to appreciate things in life if you weren't there experiencing their lesser forms. Kids that are born with cell phones in their hands have no reference to how convenient that is because they never had to use a rotary phone or call the operator to find out the time and temp.
Yep, that's basically how it was. I sat in front of a switchboard exactly like this one back in 1978 in Dallas Texas. I was the long distance operator for many small towns in North Texas that still, in the late 70s, did not have direct dial. That told us that we were working at the last operating switchboard in the state of Texas. I was also the Dallas Mobile operator for people who had phones in their cars, long before cell phones. It was sort of fun, in a way, except that the Southwestern Bell supervisors were very strict, walking back and forth behind us to keep us on the ball.
That’s great information. That job must have been high pace and long distance calls was not cheap then. So when you connect the calls do you stay on the line the entire time the call is active? The way she describe it sounds like you stay on the line through the call until they hang up. Do we even have operators these days?
@@Jupe367 No, it was strictly prohibited that we listen in on the calls, although, just like she showed in the video, there was a little lever that we had to close once we made connection to whom they where calling. It would have been easy enough, to silently lift up the lever and listen in. We knew they had hung up when the light when out, and so we disconnected the cords. I will never forget one time when a man called in saying his neighbors house was on fire, and while I was waiting for the fire company to answer their phone, I had to stay on the line, and this man was all excited, yelling at people to keep filling up some buckets of water to throw on the fire. It really made me feel that I was right there!
@@RishayanPorMexico I love to hear stories like this, it makes my mind think about what it was like back during the good ole days. If there is such thing as a Time Machine, I will be the first to volunteer.
@@Jupe367 I retired after 33 years in 1999. I Started out as a Local & Long Distance on the Cord Board at SWBT in 1966 (as they called it then) after graduating high school. One call I’ll always remember is trying to connect a Person to Person call to Walt Disney but he was in the hospital…
I worked at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base (NORAD) in the mid-1980's. While waiting for my security clearance to go through (3 months or so) I worked at the switchboard. This is the exact model of switchboard we used there. We had three positions side-by-side, and actually used these to coordinate world wide Space Shuttle Launch Conference Calls using these.
My aunt was a operator in Jacksonville Fl till she retired . She always said the supervisors were always listening in while they worked. I remember calling Jacksonville Beach from Orange Park Fl and I heard hear voice on the line when she said operator . thanks for doing this video .
We learnt in Engineering College why ultimately these switch boards became obsolete. There was an undertaker (Funeral event manager) by the name of A B Strowger whose clients were rerouted to another Undertaker who was the operator's husband. When Strowger found out, he was determined to find a solution, to automate or digitalize switching altogether. His hard work paid off. His invention was patented and sold to Bell, & AT & T. Which eventually paved the way to digital telephone exchanges we see today.
A.B. Strowger indeed built the first device for customers to select who they wanted to call, but his dial device took several years to be perfected before it was sold to Bell Laboratories. Amazing invention that was created due to unfair business practices, thank you for mentioning this little know factum.
@@spankyharland9845 My father's last job as a technician in charge of a telephone exchange was at one of the last step-by-step exchanges serving a rural town in Australia. I grew up being taken into these sorts of exchanges on after hours call-outs, and I think I will never forget the sound of a step-by-step exchange.
That is fascinating. To think that a corrupt operator stealing customers for her husband was the driving force to innovate modern communications, and would eventually make her job obsolete. Karma, baby.
I remember youse guys. People would call the Operator or Information (not called Directory Assistance then), get a male voice and panic. Usually hanging up.
I heard a story when someone got a male operator, the person on the other end of the phone started cracking up laughing. The operator thought it was all good fun, and just waited for them to stop laughing.
The way I heard it, actually, was that way back around the turn of the century, the operators were men. But the phone company replaced them with women, who, it became apparent, were more polite to callers and more tolerant of drudgery.
The company I worked for in the mid '70s still had rotary phones. There was an upcharge for touch-tone. The owner said he'd run the lower-cost dial phones. "Someday, they'll have to switch to touch tone, and they'll upgrade us for free." I wonder if he lived long enough to see that. Pulse dialing was supported for DECADES after that.
In 1967 the city of Irving, Texas was served by, if I remember correctly, General Telephone. Long after Dallas had direct dialing for long distance, we in Irving still had to call an operator to complete a long distance call.
Same in Phoenix that far back. We only had 420,000 back then (the metro area has over 4 million now) and almost all the outer towns were still long distance.
@@theaccidentalhousewife Dedication and commitment to do the work they were hired to do. Today it wouldn't stand a chance, people now don't even look up, their heads are buried in their smartphones. I worked as a telephone operator for twenty years not once did I make a mistake and I'm proud of myself, never was I acknowledged by my employer. Cheers ! Here in New York City.
@@billgreen1861 I'm curious, did your employer have very strict quotas for how fast you helped customers and have a mandatory number of interactions per hour back then? I tried working in a call center 10 years ago and the strict quotas and management getting angry when people failing to meet the required number of interactions, all on top of every other customer cussing and harassing you because something went wrong on their end, made it difficult to be dedicated and committed to doing the job. If telephone operator employers were like that back then, it seems like the job would be miserable trying to keep up with all the plugs and what goes to where. They probably trained you properly though. Nowadays employers will have you watch a video or read a few things on a computer then send you out to work with little hands on training.
My dad’s sis had polio and was a switchboard operator in Amarillo at the VA hospital. As a kid in the 1950s-it is what I wanted to be when I “grew up”…
I remember when, in a small town in Illinois, we had a telephone without dials; you would lift the receiver and use a crank to connect to the operator. You would then tell the operator the name of person you wanted to call and she would connect you on the switchboard.
As a kid I grew up on a rural property. Our nearest town had a manual telephone exchange. But for our telephone, they went one step further - we and all our neighbours along our road from town were on a party line. So someone calling us would ask to be connected to 8279W, for example. The operator would select our party line, then press the button for "W" which would cause all the phones on the line to go ring-riiiiiinnnnnng-riiiiiinnnnng - one short and two long rings, which is Morse code for "W". You could hear your phone ringing from out in the paddock, and know whether it was for us or not: "One short, two longs and a short, that's P, the new people about 2 miles back towards town ... a long, two shorts and a long, that's X, the neighbours to the north ... a short and two longs, that's W which is us, better get to the house!". The operators knew they were dealing with people who might take a minute to get to the phone, so they would let the phone ring for a while to give us enough time. And people on the line could -and sometimes did - quietly lift the handset and listen in on conversations, so it wasn't very private. 😊
We had those switchboards in our small town in Central California. I got to be friends (on the phone) with a younger operator who had the night shift and boredom made us chatty cathys late at night., we got to be good enough friends that she would connect me to calls in progress with my side being muted so i got to listen in. One neighbor who wasn't very honest had some interesting late night calls!!! It was a fun time in the old days with several neighbors around our ranch on party lines!! A local museum has a couple of these great old switchboards, one from a smaller private phone company eventually forced to go with Ma Bell.....when my mother and aunt would fly their balsa wood airplanes on the main highway, the on duty operator would come out of the office and tell them their mother (my grandmother) said to come home for dinner!! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
A few decades back, I used to work the switchboard for our high school for the semester. Got so efficient at it after a few weeks, callers were often surprised at how fast I got them patched to whom they want.
Had a customer and friend up in Cheyenne Wyoming that I did tech support for him , His company was Home telephone Co , When he passed away at the age of 87 , he put me in his will and his daughter called me and asked me to come up and pick out what I wanted out of his collection of Nortel equip. and antiques , there was 2 of these switchboards in his storage , one of them was still wrapped in oil plastic , never opened ! I couldn`t find a way to get it to Denver because of it`s weight , we ended giving it to the Wyoming telephone museum . Jus a little history I wanted to share . RIP Bill Boyd , you were loved by many !
I had the pleasure of working on a very old switchboard at CFB Gagetown. No lights, just ivory balls that would flip white or black if I remember correctly. It was around 1980. We used the modern (for the time) version that used electronic cards in the field between HQ and the different units.
This was absolutely fascinating. I loved how the plugs were designed to pull back into their sockets when the operator let go of them; very pleasing. Also I was amused how the "ticket" didn't quite go into the slot too easily; it's a good reminder that life has always been filled with little annoyances, and rarely do things always go just way they are 'supposed to'. Thank you for sharing this.
I worked on a switchboard like that for an answering service in the 70's and she is not stressing that those keys on the board have to stay in open position to hear the callers, then closed when handled, and we also had connectors that would match the 2 lines with a single cross connect inserted in the bottom of the board and would connect the 2 people so if you left the switch open you could listen in, closed your didn't hear. We used to listen in when bored.
I was born in 1982, so live operators (like this blessed woman) were no longer needed because it was all automated by computers at that point. (Obviously _there are still_ live telephone operators today, but _their_ jobs are nowhere near what _this_ was!) So I never got the chance to use a telephone this way; wasn't taught it in school or with any toys I had. That being said, I have a question: Since I am strictly of the rotary/push-button phone generation, *_how_** would I make a call to any distant location **_without me specifically_** dialing in a number?* Was it strictly ring-up an operator, and _they_ would direct the call to the specific receiver? Or did the sender (me) need to know the receiving number beforehand?
When I enlisted in 1975 as a Tech Controller, we worked with patch panels, and jack fields like this. When I was overseas we had the trunks from the Base Operators going through our facility and could listen to the calls back to the States. One night we heard our Squadron Commander, a Lt. Colonel, a real loser, talking to someone about his Executive Officer, saying how goofy and clueless he was. He was right about his XO though. When I was in the Orderly Room processing out to go back to the CONUS, the XO came in the door and said "Sergeant, welcome to Lajes, I think you'll enjoy it here. I just said, Sir, I have been here two years and I'm processing out to get on a plane now. It was Jimmy Carter's Air Force then...
That was the best job ever! So much fun talking to a variety of people daily. Having to figure out overtime with the coin pay phones really helped keep your brain sharp. No calculator. lol. Southern New England Telephone Co.
Kind of off topic, but when I was a teen, even the counter people at McDonalds used paper order sheets and pencils. They had to add the prices up, look at the tax table taped to the counter, add that manually. Now, they just push the picture of a hamburger; everything else is done for them. Making change? fuggadaboutit.
That is amazing seeing all that went into making a phone call. I’ve seen switchboards in museums but never had the method of operation explained like in this video.
Imagine calling someone and before talking to the person you called you HAVE TO talk to a stranger. But if you call that person a lot, the person you have to talk to before talking to the person you want to talk to, actually becomes an acquaintance and maybe even a friend in time.
I got hired on as a secretary at a place in California in the 70s, and they had 1 of those old switchboards. I was watching the really really old secretary do it every chance I could because I was totally fascinated with it.1 day she was out sick and she called in and then said she didn't know what she was going to do because there would be no way 19 year old was going to be able to learn how to do what she had been doing all her life comment and probably took all her life to learn. Come to find out I was 1,000 times faster than she was at it. Nobody needed to train me
She was out a couple of weeks, and when she came back, the immediately took her off the phone and put me on there. She was crabby anyway, but I did feel very sorry for her. Before I left that job , they switched to a modern type of Phone system. I was so disappointed. I loved that switchboard so very much ! It was really fun to work it!
This makes me think of the Andy Griffith show. Sarah ran the switch board. Her character was never shown. I can hear it now “ Sarah I need to call aunt bee”
In the mid 60’s I was in high school and worked part time at Northwest Bell. I saved all but $5 a week. I was able to pay for my nursing school. Was great place to work.
Direct dial long distance began being phased in during the 1950s. But first the newly invented Area Codes codes had to be assigned to each area and two more digits had to be added to phone numbers.
There is a video from a Bell Telephone movie short about long distance calling being tested in the 1950s. It's somewhere on RUclips. The second half demonstrates how the billing worked. The machinery punched holes on a tape for the start and stop of the call. That would be transferred to punch cards like the woman in the video showed.
I've worked in paging/message taking and directory assistance, but only in the computer era. My supervisor when I started in 2000 still called taking calls being "on the boards"; she had worked in the era of plugs and switches. It's fascinating to see this old-school analogue equipment. The thought that every long-distance call record was manually handled is incredible. And the thought that every number for directory assistance was available in 20 or 30 pages is amazing.
This is so cool!! How did the operators feel about losing their jobs when the operator equipment was phased out because of improved technology? Did they have as much of a fuss as some people make about self-checkout becoming more common?
Back in the 1960s I was a technician at a central office that had 3cl toll operator switchboards (about 50 switchboards). It wasn't my job to fix them; however, those little lights would burn out so I replaced the bulbs. Sometimes the operator would miss the jack and push the 310 plug into the light and break it. I fixed the broken calculagraphs (they recored the answer and disconnect time of a toll call {revenue}).
My mother-in-law was one of the first operators in The Kingdom of The Netherlands after reorganization just after WWII; she said that working at the phone company at that time was barely organized chaos.
Unfortunately Mrs. Mary Francis Griffith has died on September 1st 2024. She was born on December 19th, 1935 in Worthington, West Virginia. At 28 years old, I will always say that her generation is so much better than mine. Today, less and less people from that amazing time period are still living. 😞
We moved to a small country town in 1977 where we all had those phones that you turned the knob for the operator to answer then we gave her the number to put us through Our phone number was 2 we had the hotel number 1 was the butcher shop in town lol One night after my dad hung up switchboard lady rang him back n said "While you're in mudgee tomorrow can you grab me something" We laughed obviously she listened to phone calls She was the gossip lady of the town and we finally knew how she knew all the gossip from then on we spoke in code to each other lol
Thank you for this. I always wondered how those switchboards worked. My mom was an operator for the phone company in Louisville, Kentucky when she was in college and first married to my dad. She said the operators all had to take diction classes to remove any trace of a Southern accent. I wish she were still with us so I could have showed her this and heard her stories about those days.
It's not actually as many as it looks. On the wall, there are pairs of ports and lights. Each one is a phone line, either a customer line or a line to another switchboard. The light is on when the other side is ringing you. On the desk, there's a number of connections, side by side. Each connection has 2 plugs, 2 lights, two switches to mute the lines, a switch to ring the phone, and a switch to connect the headset to that connection. As she showed, when a light on the wall lights up, i.e. the customer is ringing you, you select one of the free connections in front of you and plug its "incoming" plug into the ringing line. You then flip the "connect headset" switch on that connection to talk to the customer. You then mute the incoming line. Next you plug the "outgoing" plug into another phone line and push the "ring" switch. Once the other side answers, you unmute the incoming line and flip the "connect headset" switch off to give the people talking some privacy. The 2 lights on the connection tell you if the sides of the connection have hung up or not without having to listen in. It's not that hard to keep that organised, as at any point in time you only work with one connection block of 2 plugs and 4 switches. And between calls, you watch the wall for any light to light up, or your connections for a pair of lights to go out. There's even a slot for the billing card next to each connection, so you don't have to think about those.
It is a great treasure to have an actual operator explain how the system worked. People took pride in their jobs then too. Great video! Thanks very much! ~
My grandmother was a southern bell, she absolutely loved the job and retired from there and has stayed with AT&T since then. She recounts always hating mother's day because of how overwhelmed the lines would become with people moaning and complaining to be connected faster. To these people she said she said "Well, why did you just need to wait until a holiday to tell your momma you loved her?".
She’s right though you know if you’re mama is truly something special you cherish her and tell her how much you love her every day
A bell, eh?
@@mikeymcmikeface5599 Southern Bell was a telephone company
@@drunk_by_noon9231 Right. But can you say it like that? If he worked for GM could you say that your grandfather was a general motors? I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that should have been "belle".
@@mikeymcmikeface5599 I just assumed him calling her a "Southern Bell" was kinda a pun/slang for someone who worked for Southern Bell.
My grandma is 102 years old and is a retired switchboard operator. She retired in the 1980s. And that's the type of equipment that she started out on in the 1940s
What has she been doing the last 40 years?
@@someguy9778 living in extremely good life. I actually knew my great-grandparents also they lived to be close to 100 themselves. Nana will be 103 in a few months. I live a block away so I see her everyday lol. She still lives at home, by herself, she still Cooks and cleans. She just doesn't do laundry anymore.
My great grandma was a switchboard operator in Asheville, NC she started working on the first telephone switchboard in our city.
My mom and my grandmother did this job, and they both have fond memories from working the switchboard.
Wishing many more years to your grandma 😊
It is great that older technologies like this is saved, to show future generations and show today's generations how things were done
That if most of the future generations still retain what's left of their current attention spans.
@@Osteoja that's quite rude
wish the pyramid makers did the same thing
@@rexjolles but its true, I hope that the generation after gen alpha will realize how much damage has been done
@@zeektm1762 huh? People *today* already realize how much damage has been done, that's why so many younger people are in favor of things like mixed-use zoning, public transit, and generally making things more sustainable in the long run.
My Dad was a hotel manager and I started “working” the switchboard when I was 13. Anytime I had some free time, I would go to the front desk and let the switchboard operator have a break. When I graduated from high school, my first job was switchboard and desk clerk at a hotel. It was the MOST fun job ever!! I’m 75 years old. ❤
THIS. IS. AWESOME. It's so fascinating how there was an actual human element to the technology we see automated today.
@tiredofpc K I'm glad you added 'almost'. House building and making paper was invented by animals ;)
_It's so fascinating how there was an actual human element to the technology we see automated today._
I completely agree. My career was "workflow automation." The secret was to WATCH how things are ACTUALLY DONE before making any proposals of how to automate with computers and programming.
[edit: fix typo]
This is the most simple and concise explanation of what a switchboard is used for and generally how it is operated that I've been able to find. Thank you!
Thank you so much for the explanation. I’m really fascinated by the telephone bygone era and how intricate it was. Operators literally connected the people around the country/world
Yes, we did.
I certainly miss hearing, "Operator, how may I help you?" And responding with something like, "I'd like to make a long-distance call, please!"
everything was manual before it was automated! We take so much for granted these days its actually insane.
I can remember meeting a switchboard operator in the seventies when I was a teenager; she was in her sixties and the space between her thumb and first finger was permanently red from so many years of pulling and pushing plugs. Amazing women.
My great-aunt became deaf from the clicking headsets...
In the 90s, I worked with an older woman who had worked as an operator for the British GPO in the 50s and 60s. They were extremely strict about etiquette, diction, and required telephonists to minimise their regional accents. There were strict dress codes, even though the operators couldn't be seen by customers. She still had a beautiful, formal telephone manner 40 years later.
True, it was a very respectful job,I worked at the GPO in the 70's,no smoking there long before it was banned from the workplaces. The older supervisors were strict !💯
I'm glad she's keeping this switchboard intact and on display. It's hard to appreciate things in life if you weren't there experiencing their lesser forms. Kids that are born with cell phones in their hands have no reference to how convenient that is because they never had to use a rotary phone or call the operator to find out the time and temp.
Yep, that's basically how it was. I sat in front of a switchboard exactly like this one back in 1978 in Dallas Texas. I was the long distance operator for many small towns in North Texas that still, in the late 70s, did not have direct dial. That told us that we were working at the last operating switchboard in the state of Texas. I was also the Dallas Mobile operator for people who had phones in their cars, long before cell phones. It was sort of fun, in a way, except that the Southwestern Bell supervisors were very strict, walking back and forth behind us to keep us on the ball.
That’s great information. That job must have been high pace and long distance calls was not cheap then. So when you connect the calls do you stay on the line the entire time the call is active? The way she describe it sounds like you stay on the line through the call until they hang up. Do we even have operators these days?
@@Jupe367 No, it was strictly prohibited that we listen in on the calls, although, just like she showed in the video, there was a little lever that we had to close once we made connection to whom they where calling. It would have been easy enough, to silently lift up the lever and listen in. We knew they had hung up when the light when out, and so we disconnected the cords. I will never forget one time when a man called in saying his neighbors house was on fire, and while I was waiting for the fire company to answer their phone, I had to stay on the line, and this man was all excited, yelling at people to keep filling up some buckets of water to throw on the fire. It really made me feel that I was right there!
@@RishayanPorMexico I love to hear stories like this, it makes my mind think about what it was like back during the good ole days. If there is such thing as a Time Machine, I will be the first to volunteer.
@@Jupe367 I retired after 33 years in 1999. I Started out as a Local & Long Distance on the Cord Board at SWBT in 1966 (as they called it then) after graduating high school. One call I’ll always remember is trying to connect a Person to Person call to Walt Disney but he was in the hospital…
Thanks for sharing this
I worked at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base (NORAD) in the mid-1980's. While waiting for my security clearance to go through (3 months or so) I worked at the switchboard. This is the exact model of switchboard we used there. We had three positions side-by-side, and actually used these to coordinate world wide Space Shuttle Launch Conference Calls using these.
Super interesting !
I bet you were a Tech Controller, right? I was a 30770, mate but never as heavy as that assignment.
It’s fascinating knowing that equipment was used in the 1980’s.
My aunt was a operator in Jacksonville Fl till she retired . She always said the supervisors were always listening in while they worked. I remember calling Jacksonville Beach from Orange Park Fl and I heard hear voice on the line when she said operator . thanks for doing this video .
We learnt in Engineering College why ultimately these switch boards became obsolete. There was an undertaker (Funeral event manager) by the name of A B Strowger whose clients were rerouted to another Undertaker who was the operator's husband. When Strowger found out, he was determined to find a solution, to automate or digitalize switching altogether. His hard work paid off. His invention was patented and sold to Bell, & AT & T. Which eventually paved the way to digital telephone exchanges we see today.
A.B. Strowger indeed built the first device for customers to select who they wanted to call, but his dial device took several years to be perfected before it was sold to Bell Laboratories. Amazing invention that was created due to unfair business practices, thank you for mentioning this little know factum.
@@spankyharland9845 My father's last job as a technician in charge of a telephone exchange was at one of the last step-by-step exchanges serving a rural town in Australia. I grew up being taken into these sorts of exchanges on after hours call-outs, and I think I will never forget the sound of a step-by-step exchange.
That is fascinating. To think that a corrupt operator stealing customers for her husband was the driving force to innovate modern communications, and would eventually make her job obsolete. Karma, baby.
Kansas City has another claim to fame
Plot twist: the operator was offing people on the side to drive even more business for her husband
THANK YOU MS MARY FRANCESS GRIFFITH
In the early 1970’s, I was one of the first male operators at Illinois Bell, in north side Chicago! Good memories!
I remember youse guys. People would call the Operator or Information (not called Directory Assistance then), get a male voice and panic. Usually hanging up.
I heard a story when someone got a male operator, the person on the other end of the phone started cracking up laughing. The operator thought it was all good fun, and just waited for them to stop laughing.
The way I heard it, actually, was that way back around the turn of the century, the operators were men. But the phone company replaced them with women, who, it became apparent, were more polite to callers and more tolerant of drudgery.
I had a touch tone phone in 1973, moved to a small town in Texas and was shocked to find touch tone wouldn't be available for 3 more years!!
The company I worked for in the mid '70s still had rotary phones.
There was an upcharge for touch-tone. The owner said he'd run the lower-cost dial phones. "Someday, they'll have to switch to touch tone, and they'll upgrade us for free."
I wonder if he lived long enough to see that. Pulse dialing was supported for DECADES after that.
don't mess w/ Texas.
😊 My grandma was a switchboard operator. Thank you for this!
The complexity of the switchboards is astounding and was incredible technology for its day.
In 1967 the city of Irving, Texas was served by, if I remember correctly, General Telephone. Long after Dallas had direct dialing for long distance, we in Irving still had to call an operator to complete a long distance call.
Same in Phoenix that far back. We only had 420,000 back then (the metro area has over 4 million now) and almost all the outer towns were still long distance.
In Houston Texas it was SWBT. Southwestern Bell
I give these ladies credit I saw one of these at our local museum yesterday and the amount of plugs was just mind blowing
Like how did they keep all that straight?
@@theaccidentalhousewife
Dedication and commitment to do the work they were hired to do. Today it wouldn't stand a chance, people now don't even look up, their heads are buried in their smartphones. I worked as a telephone operator for twenty years not once did I make a mistake and I'm proud of myself, never was I acknowledged by my employer. Cheers ! Here in New York City.
@@billgreen1861 You amaze me, sir! Cheers!
@@theaccidentalhousewife
Thank you, Catherine McDonald !
@@billgreen1861 I'm curious, did your employer have very strict quotas for how fast you helped customers and have a mandatory number of interactions per hour back then? I tried working in a call center 10 years ago and the strict quotas and management getting angry when people failing to meet the required number of interactions, all on top of every other customer cussing and harassing you because something went wrong on their end, made it difficult to be dedicated and committed to doing the job. If telephone operator employers were like that back then, it seems like the job would be miserable trying to keep up with all the plugs and what goes to where. They probably trained you properly though. Nowadays employers will have you watch a video or read a few things on a computer then send you out to work with little hands on training.
My dad’s sis had polio and was a switchboard operator in Amarillo at the VA hospital. As a kid in the 1950s-it is what I wanted to be when I “grew up”…
It's wild to think about all of the stuff we take for granted not knowing what goes on behind the scenes.
💯 correct on that. There's LOTS of interesting stories about how _mundane_ things are handled.
probably more so for people born after 2000...
@@asanokatana _You know, phone calls aren’t really switched like this anymore, right?_
Do Tell!
Wow! Incredibly demanding job,well explained. Looks like a busy flight deck area.
I remember when, in a small town in Illinois, we had a telephone without dials; you would lift the receiver and use a crank to connect to the operator. You would then tell the operator the name of person you wanted to call and she would connect you on the switchboard.
Very Andy Griffith!
Much respect to positions gone past but thank God! for modern technology!!!!
As a kid I grew up on a rural property. Our nearest town had a manual telephone exchange. But for our telephone, they went one step further - we and all our neighbours along our road from town were on a party line. So someone calling us would ask to be connected to 8279W, for example. The operator would select our party line, then press the button for "W" which would cause all the phones on the line to go ring-riiiiiinnnnnng-riiiiiinnnnng - one short and two long rings, which is Morse code for "W".
You could hear your phone ringing from out in the paddock, and know whether it was for us or not: "One short, two longs and a short, that's P, the new people about 2 miles back towards town ... a long, two shorts and a long, that's X, the neighbours to the north ... a short and two longs, that's W which is us, better get to the house!". The operators knew they were dealing with people who might take a minute to get to the phone, so they would let the phone ring for a while to give us enough time.
And people on the line could -and sometimes did - quietly lift the handset and listen in on conversations, so it wasn't very private. 😊
This is a very important history documentation. Thanks!!!
We had those switchboards in our small town in Central California. I got to be friends (on the phone) with a younger operator who had the night shift and boredom made us chatty cathys late at night., we got to be good enough friends that she would connect me to calls in progress with my side being muted so i got to listen in. One neighbor who wasn't very honest had some interesting late night calls!!! It was a fun time in the old days with several neighbors around our ranch on party lines!! A local museum has a couple of these great old switchboards, one from a smaller private phone company eventually forced to go with Ma Bell.....when my mother and aunt would fly their balsa wood airplanes on the main highway, the on duty operator would come out of the office and tell them their mother (my grandmother) said to come home for dinner!! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Priceless to hear from someone who actually worked one of those.
What an absolute treasure, thank you for sharing this.
Amazing complicated analogue technology and the people that knew how to work them with ease.
A few decades back, I used to work the switchboard for our high school for the semester. Got so efficient at it after a few weeks, callers were often surprised at how fast I got them patched to whom they want.
Heres the kicker.. We still do this.. But on another level..
its always so interesting seeing old tech and how stuff were handled back then
May god bless Mary Frances. She is just a sweet human being.
This is awesome. Thank you for the peek into the past!
So fascinating how things used to work. Technology has come such a long way. Great video!
I've seen this in action when I was maybe in first grade. My mom had a friend who was a switchboard operator. I was born in the 70s.
This was really helpful. I'm in a musical about WW1 switchboard operators. We have scene where we pretend to use these. It's called Hello Girls.
Had a customer and friend up in Cheyenne Wyoming that I did tech support for him , His company was Home telephone Co , When he passed away at the age of 87 , he put me in his will and his daughter called me and asked me to come up and pick out what I wanted out of his collection of Nortel equip. and antiques , there was 2 of these switchboards in his storage , one of them was still wrapped in oil plastic , never opened ! I couldn`t find a way to get it to Denver because of it`s weight , we ended giving it to the Wyoming telephone museum . Jus a little history I wanted to share . RIP Bill Boyd , you were loved by many !
OH man how did they ever make phones calls lol wow we have come a long way ... Excellent explanation and demonstration
My Mum was a PBX Operator at the Home Office in London so this looks familiar. Happy Christmas and New Year from New Zealand 🙏
I had the pleasure of working on a very old switchboard at CFB Gagetown. No lights, just ivory balls that would flip white or black if I remember correctly. It was around 1980. We used the modern (for the time) version that used electronic cards in the field between HQ and the different units.
This was absolutely fascinating. I loved how the plugs were designed to pull back into their sockets when the operator let go of them; very pleasing. Also I was amused how the "ticket" didn't quite go into the slot too easily; it's a good reminder that life has always been filled with little annoyances, and rarely do things always go just way they are 'supposed to'. Thank you for sharing this.
I always wondered how they worked. Super interesting. Thank you.
This is cool like AM radio was. Real people helping others.
My Mom was a switch board operator back in the late 40s and early 50s. Pennsylvania Bell.
I worked on a switchboard like that for an answering service in the 70's and she is not stressing that those keys on the board have to stay in open position to hear the callers, then closed when handled, and we also had connectors that would match the 2 lines with a single cross connect inserted in the bottom of the board and would connect the 2 people so if you left the switch open you could listen in, closed your didn't hear. We used to listen in when bored.
Fascinating. I bet that could get become quite stressful at times.
That all looks dreadfully complicated. I think flying an aircraft is simpler.
when I was a kid I got to see a switchboard be for it went out of service. I love ttseein it
Whoa! And I thought working as a receptionist in a doctor's office with 5 lines was tough.
I was born in 1982, so live operators (like this blessed woman) were no longer needed because it was all automated by computers at that point. (Obviously _there are still_ live telephone operators today, but _their_ jobs are nowhere near what _this_ was!) So I never got the chance to use a telephone this way; wasn't taught it in school or with any toys I had.
That being said, I have a question: Since I am strictly of the rotary/push-button phone generation, *_how_** would I make a call to any distant location **_without me specifically_** dialing in a number?* Was it strictly ring-up an operator, and _they_ would direct the call to the specific receiver? Or did the sender (me) need to know the receiving number beforehand?
When I enlisted in 1975 as a Tech Controller, we worked with patch panels, and jack fields like this.
When I was overseas we had the trunks from the Base Operators going through our facility and could listen to the calls back to the States. One night we heard our Squadron Commander, a Lt. Colonel, a real loser, talking to someone about his Executive Officer, saying how goofy and clueless he was. He was right about his XO though. When I was in the Orderly Room processing out to go back to the CONUS, the XO came in the door and said "Sergeant, welcome to Lajes, I think you'll enjoy it here. I just said, Sir, I have been here two years and I'm processing out to get on a plane now. It was Jimmy Carter's Air Force then...
I love this job. Must have done this in my past life. Hope to follow my dreams in this life too
oh my goodness. It's basically a daisy chain of wires to the eventual person you're calling. It seem like a miracle that it worked so well.
That was the best job ever! So much fun talking to a variety of people daily. Having to figure out overtime with the coin pay phones really helped keep your brain sharp. No calculator. lol. Southern New England Telephone Co.
Kind of off topic, but when I was a teen, even the counter people at McDonalds used paper order sheets and pencils. They had to add the prices up, look at the tax table taped to the counter, add that manually.
Now, they just push the picture of a hamburger; everything else is done for them.
Making change? fuggadaboutit.
This was one of the few jobs women were "allowed" to work at. School teacher, nurse, secretary, telephone operator...
This is. Amazing
Very cool. My mom was a telephone operator, back in the early 50's. Interesting to see the technology of that day.
that was awesome thank you for sharing!
I worked one of these in the 1970s in Jr
High. I disconnected a lot of calls
These devices are super interesting, if i had the money i would have one in my own home!
Amazing tech back then!
imagine how much geography you’d need to know for this
That is amazing seeing all that went into making a phone call. I’ve seen switchboards in museums but never had the method of operation explained like in this video.
Imagine calling someone and before talking to the person you called you HAVE TO talk to a stranger. But if you call that person a lot, the person you have to talk to before talking to the person you want to talk to, actually becomes an acquaintance and maybe even a friend in time.
"Hello operator, I want to make a prank call. Just put me through to someone random please"
Great description of how things worked. Makes sense why it used to cost so much money!
Vintage tech is always fascinating but also highlights examples of when technology replaces human jobs
I got hired on as a secretary at a place in California in the 70s, and they had 1 of those old switchboards. I was watching the really really old secretary do it every chance I could because I was totally fascinated with it.1 day she was out sick and she called in and then said she didn't know what she was going to do because there would be no way 19 year old was going to be able to learn how to do what she had been doing all her life comment and probably took all her life to learn. Come to find out I was 1,000 times faster than she was at it. Nobody needed to train me
She was out a couple of weeks, and when she came back, the immediately took her off the phone and put me on there. She was crabby anyway, but I did feel very sorry for her. Before I left that job , they switched to a modern type of Phone system. I was so disappointed. I loved that switchboard so very much ! It was really fun to work it!
My grandma was a switchboard operator when she was young
Time to flip the switch tho .. don't get bored ... 😘
This makes me think of the Andy Griffith show. Sarah ran the switch board. Her character was never shown. I can hear it now “ Sarah I need to call aunt bee”
I grew up in Lee’s Summit MO
They had one of the big switchboards there. My dad worked at the plant to maintain the equipment
here after watching the 2nd episode of "taxi" ..I did not know having to call operators were a thing. ming blowing.
Very interesting. Thank you so much for sharing.
Basically she was a human router ))
In the mid 60’s I was in high school and worked part time at Northwest Bell. I saved all but $5 a week. I was able to pay for my nursing school. Was great place to work.
Direct dial long distance began being phased in during the 1950s. But first the newly invented Area Codes codes had to be assigned to each area and two more digits had to be added to phone numbers.
There is a video from a Bell Telephone movie short about long distance calling being tested in the 1950s. It's somewhere on RUclips. The second half demonstrates how the billing worked. The machinery punched holes on a tape for the start and stop of the call. That would be transferred to punch cards like the woman in the video showed.
Fascinating
That was fascinating
I've worked in paging/message taking and directory assistance, but only in the computer era. My supervisor when I started in 2000 still called taking calls being "on the boards"; she had worked in the era of plugs and switches.
It's fascinating to see this old-school analogue equipment. The thought that every long-distance call record was manually handled is incredible. And the thought that every number for directory assistance was available in 20 or 30 pages is amazing.
This is so cool!! How did the operators feel about losing their jobs when the operator equipment was phased out because of improved technology? Did they have as much of a fuss as some people make about self-checkout becoming more common?
My mother was a PBX switchboard operator in the 50's in Houston!😲😲
As it was. As it should still be.
Back in the 1960s I was a technician at a central office that had 3cl toll operator switchboards (about 50 switchboards). It wasn't my job to fix them; however, those little lights would burn out so I replaced the bulbs. Sometimes the operator would miss the jack and push the 310 plug into the light and break it. I fixed the broken calculagraphs (they recored the answer and disconnect time of a toll call {revenue}).
wow, sounds like you always had workorders on your hands. thanks for your service.
my mom worked for AT&T back in the early 60s, she told me it was a crazy time and a challenging job.
That brings back memories. In 1973 I worked a similar board as the first male operator in Pompton Lakes, NJ.
My mom was a telephone operator 1954. Spring Valley ny. Exchange was SPring Valley 6.
My mother-in-law was one of the first operators in The Kingdom of The Netherlands after reorganization just after WWII; she said that working at the phone company at that time was barely organized chaos.
Unfortunately Mrs. Mary Francis Griffith has died on September 1st 2024. She was born on December 19th, 1935 in Worthington, West Virginia. At 28 years old, I will always say that her generation is so much better than mine. Today, less and less people from that amazing time period are still living. 😞
My mother did this as a job, I would have eavesdrop the fk out of those calls lol 😅
That music in the start was kind of fire.
We moved to a small country town in 1977 where we all had those phones that you turned the knob for the operator to answer then we gave her the number to put us through
Our phone number was 2 we had the hotel number 1 was the butcher shop in town lol
One night after my dad hung up switchboard lady rang him back n said
"While you're in mudgee tomorrow can you grab me something"
We laughed obviously she listened to phone calls
She was the gossip lady of the town and we finally knew how she knew all the gossip from then on we spoke in code to each other lol
very cool information
Thank you for this. I always wondered how those switchboards worked. My mom was an operator for the phone company in Louisville, Kentucky when she was in college and first married to my dad. She said the operators all had to take diction classes to remove any trace of a Southern accent. I wish she were still with us so I could have showed her this and heard her stories about those days.
How in the world do you keep organized with a system like that? So many plugs & lights. It seems so confusing!
It's not actually as many as it looks.
On the wall, there are pairs of ports and lights. Each one is a phone line, either a customer line or a line to another switchboard. The light is on when the other side is ringing you.
On the desk, there's a number of connections, side by side. Each connection has 2 plugs, 2 lights, two switches to mute the lines, a switch to ring the phone, and a switch to connect the headset to that connection.
As she showed, when a light on the wall lights up, i.e. the customer is ringing you, you select one of the free connections in front of you and plug its "incoming" plug into the ringing line. You then flip the "connect headset" switch on that connection to talk to the customer. You then mute the incoming line. Next you plug the "outgoing" plug into another phone line and push the "ring" switch. Once the other side answers, you unmute the incoming line and flip the "connect headset" switch off to give the people talking some privacy. The 2 lights on the connection tell you if the sides of the connection have hung up or not without having to listen in.
It's not that hard to keep that organised, as at any point in time you only work with one connection block of 2 plugs and 4 switches. And between calls, you watch the wall for any light to light up, or your connections for a pair of lights to go out. There's even a slot for the billing card next to each connection, so you don't have to think about those.
It is a great treasure to have an actual operator explain how the system worked. People took pride in their jobs then too. Great video! Thanks very much! ~