Progress
I can remember the days when people who had telephones were a very exclusive set. Most ordinary folk wouldn’t have known how to go about having a telephone. Later, when the general population felt entitled to have a telephone if they wanted one badly enough, it was having two telephones that marked you out as being among the elite. No one owned their telephone; they could only rent it from the GPO (General Post Office).In order to acquire a telephone within the foreseeable future, you had to have a damn good reason for wanting it. You had to be a doctor, or belong to some other profession that absolutely necessitated having one; everyone else went onto a waiting list. When your turn eventually came, however, you were granted the choice of having either an ivory or green one.
It was a serious offence to tamper with your telephone; punishable with a heavy fine, or even imprisonment. Once your phone had been installed, that is where it stayed. You couldn’t just plug it in wherever you wanted to, like you can today. Working class families who were brazen enough to apply for a telephone were often quite nervous about using it for anything other than the most justifiable of reasons, like a medical emergency, or their home being on fire.
It was Margaret Thatcher who changed everything; she took telephones away from the Post Office and let the free market have them. Now we can have a phone in every room and one in each pocket if we like, and we don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission. For those of us who grew up with how it used to be it felt like a very radical event when they freed up the telephone; a bit like the first time they let us see a pair of tits on the BBC.
Comments (36)
It also confuses small children.
I don't think it's the first phone we had. It's probably the second, but it was held on to for years to avoid the horror of the 1970's trim phone ring sound.
When we first had a phone, we had a party line with Joan Herridge from No.3. It was cheaper to have a shared line, but it meant only one household could use the phone at any one time. If you picked up the phone and heard Joan talking on the other end, you had to apologise and hang up.
I remember my mum calling the exchange on Christmas Eve to make a connection to Germany. There would be a tense two hour wait until the operator called back and connected the relation sought.
Once the connection was made, I would be privy to half a panicked and gabbled conversation as sisters swapped Christmas greetings and as much news as they could fit into the two minutes call my mum had budgeted for.
Phones were not for chatting. It was expensive, and in the case of a party line, downright rude.
They could walk from one room to another talking on the phone..such a long lead
early 17th century: back-formation from eavesdropper (late Middle English)‘a person who listens from under the eaves’, from the obsolete noun eavesdrop ‘the ground on to which water drips from the eaves’, probably from Old Norse upsardropi, from ups ‘eaves’ + dropi ‘a drop’.Just sayin'.
Dyslexic moment in the extreme.
My best friend's father applied for a second line with a red Princess phone because, he said on the application, he was a doctor but had 2 young daughters who never got off the phone. It was approved immediately
I can still remember both my phone number and that one. Now ask me what my phone number was in Scotland, 3 years ago. NO chance
I barely talk to anyone on the mobile
I could get fibre broadband without having a landline.
I only have basic broadband though as I don't have much use for it
I rather like the idea of people listening in on their neighbours for evening entertainment, though.
I've just remembered, if you had a party line phone there was a rectangular push button that you had to press before dialling to connect your bit of the line. I remember being put through Emergency Services drills as a child.
Unlike my granddaughter who we had to hide the phone from because she managed to give them a sneaky silent call before she could talk. Not realising what she had done, we had the police turn up on our doorstep for a welfare check. They were very good about it given they could have fined me, but instead said they were simply pleased that we were alright.
It's quite a cute word really.
"Party lines provided no privacy in communication. They were frequently used as a source of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of quickly alerting entire neighbourhoods of emergencies such as fires, becoming a cultural fixture of rural areas for many decades."
"Objections about one party monopolizing a multi-party line were a staple of complaints to telephone companies and letters to advice columnists for years and eavesdropping on calls remained an ongoing concern."
Big mistake. The more boys Holmes hired, the more unruly and noisy they became. In the grand tradition of teenagers, they were also rude and, sometimes, profane.
Boy operators were known for their practical jokes and even wrestling matches on the job. They shouted “ahoy!” into the phones with cracking voices. (This was the greeting preferred by Alexander Graham Bell himself which soon fell out of use in favor of “hello.”) Holmes quickly realized that his immature employees might endanger his business. It was fine when they were behind a silent telegraph line, but a phone was something else altogether.
“The thought came one day,” he later wrote. “Why not have girls?”
His friend, Alexander Graham Bell, who licensed the phones to the dispatch company, hired Emma Nutt away from her job as a telegraph operator. She became the first female telephone operator (her sister, Stella, became the second a few hours later).
Unlike her male colleagues, Nutt was patient and polite. Her voice was soothing and cultured, and she navigated the wall of wires and holes with ease. (Eventually, she stopped physically switching calls and relied on a switchman instead.) Because she had relatively few customers, she got to know many of them and became a familiar voice. And she did it all for just $10 a month.
Other companies saw the benefit of a female operator and began to hire women more extensively. “The wisdom of this step has been fully borne out by experience,” wrote a journalist in 1911.
By taking the switchboard job, Nutt had inadvertently created a new profession for women. Around the turn of the 20th century, single women were joining the workforce in larger numbers (married ones were expected to stay at home and most companies, including telephone companies, only hired single women). But though single women cost less to hire and were considered motivated, hardworking employees, few fields were open to women.
Telephone work was an attractive alternative to a job in a factory or sweatshop, and for many women it was a way to achieve class mobility. However, the profession had its downsides. Technical advancements soon made standing switchboards moot and gave companies an excuse to hire less skilled, non-union workers they could pay even less. “Very quickly,” writes, telecommunications historian Jean Guy-Rens, “the telephone companies abandoned male labor, both teenage and adult, and opted for women’s work.”
Despite a public that swooned over the smooth voices of the “hello girls,” not everyone was allowed into the profession. Telephone companies discriminated against immigrants and black people, and early operators had to be a certain height to make sure they could operate the switchboard. As the voice became more and more important, and operators were often offered diction lessons and elocution classes to make sure they were more poised on the phone. If you had an accent of any kind, you likely wouldn’t get a job as an operator.
Today, telephone switchboards are long gone, and the closest thing the 21st century has to an Emma Nutt is the voice on the other side of operator assistance. But Nutt’s influence remains—and the company she helped succeed eventually became the Bell Phone Company, which evolved over time into AT&T. As for Nutt, she held her job for over 30 years. She set the tone for what was to come—one friendly call at a time."
The mechanical precursor to the telephone was a series of tubes on a ship which connected the bridge to the engine room. There was a removable whistle at each end of the apparatus: by blowing down one end the whistle could be sound at the other, attracting attention. Likewise, communication involved yelling down one end of the pipe, an ear pressed to the other.
There will no formal exams this year due to the coronavirus. Final grades will be based upon coursework and predicted grades, but there could be spot tests issued online when you least expect it.