The Evolution of the Telephone and Operator :: Communication Technology Papers

The Evolution of the Tele call in and Operator A few nights ago I was sitting at the dining room instrument panel reviewing my research, when my roommate, Lucy, walked in and inquired as to my progress. We started talking a bit about telephones and telephone operators and she related a story about the telephone in her hometown. Lucy is from a pure town in Ireland. She clearly remembers when, at the age of four (about twenty eight years ago), her family installed their first telephone. To make a call her family would turn the testy on their telephone which would then alert Mrs. Murphy at the post office who would connect the call. Everyone in the village, Lucy explained, resisted making phone calls on Christmas Day in order to give Mr. Murphy break for the holiday. It was not until Lucy was in her teens that her town phone switched to automatic. She remembers calling home from school one day and receiving a pre-recorded substance informing her that her number had been changed. Ne edless to say, she was greatly surprised.Lucy is not much older than I am we grew up in virtually the same period of time, nevertheless in obviously different worlds. Her story of the telephone recalls memories of the endless episodes of Little House on the Prairie I used to watch where Mrs. Nelson would nosily listen into a phone call after making a connection. Lucys story is an abbreviated version of that of Americas. What occurred in her town over a period of ten or twelve years, transpired over the late 19th and a good part of the 20th centuries in the United States. While the technology of the telephone has transformed considerably since its public in the late 1870s, the basic job and job-related stresses of the telephone operator have changed significantly, but to a lesser degree. Most of my data falls within two time periods then (before the 1920s) and now (the 1990s). While we will be missing a large chunk of detailed information, what I have found allows us enough to pie ce together the missing periods.In the first two years after the invention of the telephone, all subscribers in a particular nation were linked to each other via a telephone line. When one wished to call another party, s/he would call directly across the line indicating the want recipient by the number of rings sounded.