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

The Evolution of the Telephone and Operator A few nights ago I was sitting at the dining room table reviewing my research, when my roommate, Lucy, walked in and inquired as to my progress. We started talking a bit about forebodes and telephone operators and she re latishd a point about the telephone in her home township. Lucy is from a small town in Ireland. She clearly remembers when, at the age of four (about twenty eighter from Decatur years ago), her family installed their start-off telephone. To make a call her family would turn the applesauce on their telephone which would then alert Mrs. Murphy at the station office who would connect the call. Everyone in the village, Lucy explained, resisted qualification phone calls on Christmas solar daytime 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 message informing her that her number had been changed. Needless to say, she was greatly surprised.Lucy is not much older than I am we grew up in close to the same period of time, notwithstanding in obviously different worlds. Her story of the telephone recalls memories of the endless episodes of Little House on the Prairie I utilize 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 oer 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 creation 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 both time periods then (before the 1920s) and now (the 1990s). While we will be missing a large chunk of detailed info rmation, what I have set in motion allows us enough to piece together the missing periods.In the first two years after the invention of the telephone, all subscribers in a particular area were linked to each other via a telephone line. When one wished to call another party, s/he would call straightway across the line indicating the desired recipient by the number of go sounded.