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The very first “Social Media”

By Dan Harshman

When Farmers Mutual Telephone System first brought telephone service to Edinburg in 1902 the first phones were mounted on the wall in a wooden box and operated with a crank. If you were on a party line, you would ring up someone on that line by cranking longs and shorts, depending on their code. The History of Edinburg tells us that two longs and a short would have gotten you Clems Store in Lantz Mills. Everyone on that particular party line also heard the rings and could listen in on the conversation if they wanted to. What could be more social than that?

However, unlike today when some of us want everyone to see and hear what we are doing; the more people that listened in on the party line, the weaker the voices became until one of the original callers would demand that the others hang up so the original two parties could hear each other. 

Thankfully not every line was a party line. Talking to someone outside your party line required you to crank a long to connect you with an operator. You gave her the number and she would connect you with the person you were calling. In the early days you could just tell the operator the name of the person and she probably knew the correct connection needed.

Did you notice that I referred to the operator as “she”. That wasn’t always the case. George W. Coy opened the first telephone exchange in New Haven Connecticut in 1878 with 21 subscribers. He hired teenage boys to operate the switch-boards. Young men proved to be slightly unruly and undependable which led to the recruiting of young women.

Women were soon considered to be better for operating the switchboards. It was believed that the telephone users (or subscribers as they were called) would more readily accept a female voice on the other end of the line. Also, the slightly higher pitch of a woman’s voice makes it easier to hear. These early telephone operators became known as “Hello Girls”; because their greeting to a caller was “Hello” since numbers had not yet been assigned to subscribers.

The operators sat or stood in front of switchboards and connected the calling party and the person being called through a series of patch cords. Each subscriber was known by the family name. As telephone use increased, numbers were assigned to subscribers and operators began answering the flashing number on the switchboard with a cheery, “Number, Please”. 

The first telephone exchange in Edinburg was at Mrs. Sally Murray’s on Main Street at the corner of what is now Stony Creek Blvd. In the context of early telephone service, a telephone exchange was essentially a switchboard. The switchboard was the actual physical equipment that was housed in a local building. From this location the operators manually connected or “switched” calls by plugging cords into sockets to link two phone customers. Before automated systems, every call required a human operator at a switchboard to manually patch connections.

A pleasant phone voice was a must, especially in small towns; telephone operators became a part of the culture of the community. In the smaller exchanges the operator likely knew each subscriber by name and would often engage in conversation while making the connection. The community knew they could count on their telephone operator to summon help in an emergency, to provide a brief weather forecast, to tell them the correct time, and even the score of last night’s high-school basketball game.

The switchboard in a small exchange was often in the operator’s home. In that case, handling of calls could be a family affair with spouses and even children manning the switchboard at times. Here, the operator might have a long cord attached to her headset to enable her to do household chores while waiting for the next call. An alarm roused her from sleep when there was a late night call.

The History of Edinburg mentions a number of other early exchanges in Edinburg. One was in the front room of Phil Barrick’s house at the bottom of Hopewell’s Hill (around the current Civil War Monument). Another was at Miss Edith Miller’s house on Main Street, one at the first bank building on Piccadilly St. (across from the current Fire Department) and one in the old Bank building on Main Street.

As telephones became more affordable, the number of exchanges and the demand for operators continued to grow. But as early as 1892, in La Porte, Indiana, the nation’s first automated system hinted at the eventual demise of the human operator. Operator numbers increased to about 342,000 in 1950 before beginning to drop off to only 4,600 in 2023. In some states, telephone subscribers can still talk with an operator when they call Directory Assistance in search of a telephone number.

Most of the comparative few remaining operators work at switchboards in medical facilities or in telecommunications. 

If you have never seen a switchboard, you can stop by the Museum at the Edinburg Mill to get a close look at a local switchboard.