Stuff You Should Know - Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

The telephone switchboard was a real wonder of technology and laid the groundwork for the next generation of connectivity. Learn how these things worked today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey Will, do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Constantly. I'm like, ah, there's so much science, I can't keep track of it all. Then it's a good thing our podcast, Part-Time Geniuses, is counting down the 25 greatest science ideas from the past 25 years. That's right, Mango. We're talking animals. In a paper called, quote, chickens prefer beautiful humans.

Right. This was actually the title of the paper. I like this. They all discovered that that much like humans, chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces. We're talking medical miracles. He's an endocrinologist who found a way to stimulate insulin producing cells using,

wait for it, the saliva of a Gila monster. There's no way to make that not sound crazy. We even talked to some of the experts behind these breakthroughs. It's a week full of fact-packed stories you won't want to miss. So listen to the part-time genius countdown of the 25 greatest science ideas of the past 25 years, starting Monday, March 3rd on the iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Ring, ring. There's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. This is a Kyle joint.

So a little British factor too in here because Kyle likes to throw those in because that's where he lives. Yeah, he keeps mentioning fish and chips every few paragraphs. Yeah, what's a chippy? We are going to be talking about telephone switchboards. Some overlap with a couple of other episodes we've done, but this is all about the advancement of the telephone system in the United States and abroad and how the telephone switchboard was a crucial, crucial part of that.

Yeah. First, I want to give a shout out. If you ever find yourself in the town of Maitland, Florida, go to the Maitland, I think, well, it's the Telephone Museum. There's probably not more than one telephone museum in Maitland, even though I can't remember the name of it. Just ask somebody for directions there and they will tell you, or ask your app.

Regardless, it's really cute. It's not the biggest museum you'll ever find, but it's a very dedicated museum. I love old telephones. I would like to check that out. Oh, you'd love this. There's a bank of wall telephones from the 70s probably. And each one's a different color.

It's very pretty. Oh my God. Yeah, you would like this place, Chuck. It reminded me that something that was just such an integral part of our life is a completely obsolete, outdated, antique technology. It does, there's basically no reason for it to exist any longer, and it may not, as far as I know.

Yeah. I think you still have to have it to connect some home alarm systems, maybe, but that's the only application I know of anymore. Actually, you know what, that's, we had that, for that landline for that reason for a while, but no longer. I mean, I just don't think that there's any reason

for them to exist anymore. I'm sure I'm wrong, but that's the best I can come up with is home alarm systems. I guess nostalgia's not a good enough reason, huh? To keep this amazing network of technology still around? Oh yeah, man. I mean, lots of, it's dumb. It's just my, our GenX selves, like,

looking back with joy about walking around your bedroom with a long phone cord and, or your mom literally being able to go to every point in the kitchen with like a 25 foot stretchy phone cord that you're ducking under and it's knocking things over. That's right. There goes the flower. Wireless is better, I know.

I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think there is some real value or, it's not pointless to look at the telephone system that was created over the decades in the 20th century and just be impressed. Like it wasn't a marvelous technology and it did some amazing stuff while it was around. It's just we've moved on technology-wise. But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.

Yeah, I wonder if they're safer for like government systems, you know, because you literally have to tap the wire physically, it's not just in the airwaves. True that. So, I don't know. I don't know either, but that's a great point. I'm curious, surely someone knows, but let's talk about Alexander Graham Bell,

because he is the OG, he's the guy that invented, well, patented the telephone at least. Right. And from Boston in 1876 where he was not trying to invent a telephone, he was trying to work out the problem with the electrical telegraph which was it was just getting bunched up too many people or sending too many, you know, telegraphs and it's a problem. So there's too much traffic.

So all of a sudden, Bell, who was a sound guy anyway, realized that you could send tones. And once he realized you could send a tone along a wire, he was like, oh, forget the telegraph. I'm gonna come up with the harmonic telegraph. And one day I'm gonna speak to somebody on the other end of a wire. Yeah, not dots and dashes but heys and how are yous.

Or ahoys. Yeah, right. So he did this in 1876, right? He set out to figure out the telegraph clogging and invented the phone pretty quickly. The next year he founded a Bell Telephone company and the first permanent telephone wires were in Boston, I think that same year, right? So we had telephone service set up

within a year of him inventing the telephone. One of the other things too is he helped kind of spread telephone technology by giving lectures that people would come see and then go off and like build their own versions that would work. But initially when you were talking to somebody on a telephone, your telephone was physically connected to their telephone, which made a lot of sense initially,

but if you wanna talk to more than one friend in town, you need another wire to connect your phone to somebody else's telephone and so on and so forth, and if you just kind of follow that logical path, you very quickly realize like, man, we're gonna need a lot of wires to connect one person to everybody else, and everybody else to that one person, it just, that's the definition of exponential growth. And so they figured out they needed a different way

rather than connecting each telephone physically. And that's where they came up with the concept of the switchboard. That's right. What if all of the calls went into a central location, and there was a human being there that would connect those two wires? It's a very elegant, very simple sort of system.

It's literally connecting two calls by connecting them, by plugging them into the same, what would you even call that? Switchboard? Jack? Yeah, the same jack. The first switchboard commercially was in 1878, so only, geez, like a year after the Bell Telephone Company was founded. This is in New Haven, Connecticut,

and it connected 21 different subscribers in this case. And this is a very old-fashioned, primitive thing. Before long, they were like, why don't we wrap these cords in cloth that's like insulated and why don't we make the board look a little nicer and we'll call them a cord board but everyone's still going to call them a switchboard. Yes, one thing really quick too, when some of these first commercial switchboards popped up in towns like the one in New Haven that I guess George Coy was the inventor of, they would publish phone books.

And the first phone books would be like one page with like 50 people's names on. Because when you called, you would call and your call would be connected by an operator. So you'd pick up your phone and the only person it would go to is the operator at a switchboard and you would say, I wanna talk to Chuck Bryant, please. And the operator would look up where your jack was

that went to your house and then now connected the call. So they would plug my phone cord into your phone jack and connect our call. But first, they would, right, first they would plug in themselves to you and say, Josh Clark calling for Charles Bryant, and you would say, tell him I'm in the shower. I was skeptical.

They would plug back into mine and be like, he's in the shower, he can't talk right now. And I would say, tell him that I know he's not in the shower and hang up angrily. You're not too far off. That is if my Jack is on that board. If it was a big enough community, that switchboard operator might say, I don't have Chuck on this board, but he's on another board, so I'm going to contact that switchboard and

patch it in that way. But first they'd spend 10 minutes going down each jack like, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Well, early on, they just knew, in a 21 person situation, they just knew everybody. In fact, for a little while, they weren't even saying phone numbers. They were just like, Chuck Bryant.

Right, exactly. And one of the other things about a central switchboard too is there's a phone company employee connecting calls. And so now you can track things more easily, and hence bill people more accurately too. Yeah, because this is when making a call cost money, and up until, I mean, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things,

making a long distance call cost extra money. So you had to bill people, and it was pretty ingenious. Things started growing, growing, growing. You know, you said the word exponentially and that is the truth because between 1880 and just 13 years later, we went from 60,000 phones to 260. And then just another 10 years later, there were 3 million phones in the United States only.

Kyle points out in the UK they were a little bit behind us. In 1914 there were fewer than two telephones per 100 people compared to 10 in the US but they eventually caught up to and everyone had phones. I'm sure there's some listeners like I didn't have a phone when I was a kid. Well maybe. So as more and more people had phones, more and more jacks were required in switchboards. So you're getting bigger switchboards, more switchboards.

It became kind of a mess in and of itself, as we'll see. That was known as the switchboard problem, right? Yeah. But then finally, they figured out, OK, there's a few tweaks we can do here that are gonna allow us to just, to support this growth. Because the phone companies weren't like, whoa, we're good at 10,000 subscribers, let's just hold here.

They wanted everybody to have a phone so they could bill everybody for using those phones. And also America, or the United States or the world, I think was like, we really wanna be able to pick up the phone and talk to people it was a huge enormous technology that completely changed how humans interact with one another so everybody wanted a phone phone company wanted to give people phones the big sticking point was how you can connect that many people in an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after switchboard

after switchboard. Yeah, and something else we should point out too is this is a time where the phone company controlled the phones themselves. So you can just go to a store and buy some cool looking Mickey Mouse phone or a Garfield phone. Or what I have ahead of.

Football phone from Sports Illustrated. I had, I did get that for free actually, but those were always garbage. Those were the ones that looked like push button, but when you hit it, it dialed. Oh really? Do you remember those? You know, it had the keypad,

but when you hit nine, it went, No, I don't remember that. It was a big bait and switch. But you rented your phone at the time. I guess you had a, or maybe they didn't sell them at all at first, but I know for a long time they rented phones to people like. Into the 70s, right?

Yeah, I mean like you used to rent your, some people still probably rent their modem from their cable or whatever, their WiFi provider. Am I saying all the wrong words? No, I think you got it. Provider. Or internet, internet service provider, ISP. That's what it was.

Okay. But yeah, anyway, they were controlling the flow of money in more ways than just the bill. They wanted as many people to have phones as possible because they were renting those phones and eventually, I guess, selling those phones. Yeah, I remember Yumi has a story from when she was a kid of going to the phone store with her dad

and renting a princess phone. Like a princess phone. I remember it. It's so weird. It is weird. It's just weird to think of. But like you said, that was a way for them to control revenue even more.

And also I think it made it more available to more people because I think even into the 60s, the 70s, phones were still kind of expensive to make and so they were expensive to buy, so you could lease them, but I think ultimately it was really the phone companies. And they were able to get away from this, as we'll see, because for years and years and years, there was essentially a monopoly on the phone

in the United States. That's right. But I got us a little off track. You were talking about some new techniques, because these switchboards all of a sudden were getting just more and more ubiquitous, and they started to get a little clunky in, like, how long it would take to connect calls.

So one of the things they did is came up with a concept of what's called the divided exchange, which is really just an organizational structural thing where people got more specialized. You might have operators just answering the phone. You might have people just connecting instead of the person going, oh, hey, Josh, let me see if Chuck's available. Like all of that was really streamlined eventually until they came up with was called the Express System that had a lot of letter B boards that converged on a letter A board and there was an operator linking between those two. Right. Yeah, so the A person, the person at the A board would be like, oh, yeah, Josh is on B board 72

but Chuck is on B board 3 so I need to be the one that connects B board 72 and B board 3 for this call. These are human beings doing this and expected to do it really fast too as we'll see. Yeah, they also just improved the signals like signal strength. All of a sudden operators weren't like yelling

at each other and which can cause just chaos in a room with a bunch of switchboard operators. What's the number for dominoes? Yeah, exactly. So just improving the signal really optimized how those things function, even just making the little signal lamps, the little lights brighter, responding to the current in the line. Everything just got a little better. Yeah, and the current in the line was a huge thing too. Not only would it light up the little light above your jack showing the operator like,

oh, this guy's trying to call right now, but it also allowed for telephones to carry a little bit of a current, which was how the voice was broadcast anyway, but it was one more thing that they controlled. They powered everything, which made the whole thing more efficient, rather than having a bunch of batteries out by the lines, there was a central group of batteries and power generation that came from the main office too. So when you put all this stuff together,

they got really good at analyzing traffic too, to kind of put resources where it needed in any given time. They put all this together for the next four or five decades, the phone system just kept expanding and expanding and expanding. But there was always a frontier. These were individual cities, individual towns. And if the town or the city was close enough

to another town or city, they would probably be able to connect. But for the most part, these phone systems are growing intra, well, internally. Let's just say that. I almost got really fancy for a second, but I'm just gonna say they were internal into each town, growing and growing and growing, connecting subscribers, but each town was kind of like

its own isolated island of telephony. Yeah, and so obviously the next thing to conquer would be the LD, long distance. At the time, if you wanted to pick up a phone in New York City and call San Francisco, you couldn't do it. No, but I say we take a break, leave this as a cliffhanger, and when we come back, we'll say whether or not they were eventually able to do it

Hey Will, do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Hey Will, do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Constantly. I'm like, ah, there's so much science, I can't keep track of it all. Then it's a good thing our podcast, Part-Time Geniuses, is counting down the 25 greatest science ideas from the past 25 years. That's right, Mango. We're talking animals. In a paper called, quote, chickens prefer beautiful humans.

Right. This was actually the title of the paper. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are beautiful humans. Right. This was actually the title of the paper. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces. Got it. We're talking medical miracles. He's an endocrinologist who found a way to stimulate insulin producing cells using,

wait for it, the saliva of a Gila monster. There's no way to make that not sound crazy. We even talked to some of the experts behind these breakthroughs. It's a week full of fact-packed stories you won't want to miss. So listen to the part-time genius countdown of the 25 greatest science ideas of the past 25 years, starting Monday, March 3rd on the Okay, so when they finally did start connecting towns, they would use switchboards, right? So your town would be connected to another town by a switchboard. They use trunk lines.

These were like these longer, stronger lines that people would use to connect one town to another. And let's say that you were in Topeka and you wanted to talk to Tacoma, Washington. Okay, two great tea towns. Sure. When you picked up the phone in Topeka and said, give me Tacoma, this would set off

a chain reaction of connections carried out by human operators who would connect to this switchboard and this switchboard connected to, I don't know, Kansas City. And then that switchboard connected to Erie, Pennsylvania. That'd be going the wrong way. Munchy in the Indiana, is it Munchy? Munchy? Yeah.

Boy, this is going terribly. But I think it really illustrates how kludgy the whole thing was. And then it would go from Munchy slash Munchy to Garee, Indiana. And then to, I don't know, onwards and upwards until finally, switchboard after switchboard after switchboard after switchboard,

town to town to town, it would finally connect all the way through all these towns, from switchboard to switchboard, you to your friend in Tacoma who wasn't even home. You were using the Miles Davis rebreathing technique? Oh yeah? Yeah. It's like you're breathing through your nose

so you don't have to stop talking. I just didn't breathe. Oh okay, that's the Dizzy Gillespie method. Speaking of Dizzy. Yes, it's amazing. I guess we'll spoil it and say eventually New York was able to talk to San Francisco. And in fact, I think that was,

well no, the first long line was between New York and Philly in 1885. New York to San Francisco finally came around, finally I say, in 1915, which is incredible. You know, for that call, they brought Alexander Graham Bell out of retirement because he'd left a super big, fat, rich man by this time, and had him talk to Watson.

Remember the first phone call was room to room between him and Watson. He said, Watson, come here. I need you. And on this huge, monumental, historical phone call from New York to San Francisco, Bell said, Watson, come here. I need you again. And Watson said, I will, but it's going to take me a week to get there.

Watson, that's so Watson. It totally is Watson. Classic Watson. You know, it didn't just work with like magic. You can't send something that's used to going like a mile or let's say 100 miles, all of a sudden sending it, you know, close to 3000 miles. So they had boosters, they had loading coils, which are electromagnets that would boost

the transmission. They had these vacuum tubes that would regenerate a weak signal. Those were called repeaters. So it needed help along the way to finally get across country. But the fact that they were able to do that by 1915 is remarkable. While this is happening, I mean, I think you said that he was, Bell was an old fat rich guy by this point. That is because through even the late 1800s, Bell consistently swatted away rivals with lawsuits, with shutting people down, with saying like, no, you know, I have a patent here until 1894.

So like, there are people out there building in their own phones and even their own switchboards, but like, I'm gonna go after them as fast as they can build them. Yeah, they had detectives that would go bust down doors and confiscate bogus phones, which were phones that weren't part of the Bell network, which again held a patent.

Then even after the patent expired, they would just sue anybody and everybody. They would bribe officials to keep new phone companies from being allowed to develop or found themselves. It was really ruthless, and one of the reasons it was ruthless is because J.P. Morgan by this time was the head of either AT&T or Bell's

board of directors and Bell eventually bought AT&T and just consolidated consolidated consolidated. They would either following JP Morgan's typical example they would either buy up the competition or crush them out of existence if the competition didn't want to sell at AT&T Bell's price. So this is just how it was. I don't remember what year the US government finally stepped in and broke up Bell into smaller versions of itself.

But it was a monopoly, a government sanctioned monopoly for decades. And in some ways this was good, because in other cases where local phone companies were allowed to compete, it was super kludgy. Sometimes you had to subscribe to two different companies to be able to call two different friends, depending on who they were subscribed to.

The rates were all over the place. There was very little regulation. So having this monopoly was good in some ways, but in others, monopolies typically overall are not good for the health of an economy. Yeah, and AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph, we should point out that they were approached before that patent expired. And the reason they were initially approached was, I mean it was part of the plan just to snap up other companies, but part of it was, hey, I need AT&T to help me build these long distance lines because that's the future. If we control long distance and

no one else has it, then we can, even if new companies pop up after this patent expires, if we're the only ones doing long distance, then we can lease those to other companies or not lease them to other companies. Huge, huge point. Yeah. Can we talk about phone numbers real quick? Yeah, I think we should talk about phone numbers. Because I don't have a complete handle on... Because how phone numbers expanded was, you know, it wasn't just one exact uniform way in every place. It kind of depended on how big the city was,

as far as how many digits they were using and stuff like that. So what I've gathered is that from the beginning, it was two to four numbers, depending on how big your community was. So you could literally be living in a community and your phone number was? Seven.

Yeah, it could be oh seven I guess. Well I don't know if zero counts, but let's just say 11. No, I wanna say seven. Okay, your phone number's seven, mine's 11. Okay, we should get together and make a convenience store. But as things started to expand and grow, obviously you needed more and more numbers. And I remembered seeing in like,

even like happy days and stuff and TV shows, like into the 60s and 70s when they would say, you know, a word followed by numbers. Give me Klondike five, six thousand. Exactly. And so from this how I understand it is and if you found something different, let me know. But Klondike would have been the either the the switchboard or the central hub for that town. And then whatever the numbers you said would be the actual number. That's 55. Yeah. As that got busier, cities started using what they called 2L and 4N format. So two letter, four number. So it would still be Klondike, 5555 or whatever, but it would be KL, and then you would use the four numbers.

And then eventually it was, I think, 2L5N. They just kept taking away letters and adding numbers the bigger and bigger your city got. Right, and the reason why, like if you have four numbers, you can accommodate up to 10,000 subscribers, but as you add more and more numbers or even letters, then you can add more and more people. And so I think that the numbers or the letters eventually or initially were like, that went to this particular switchboard station.

And that was this one group of people in town whose connections were all coming out of this one station. So if you asked for Klondike 5555, it took you to this one switchboard, and then that switchboard operator would find subscriber 5555 and connect it. And the reason also I keep going to Klondike 5 is because that's the original 555 fake number in movies. Like if you watch movies, they ask for Klondike 5 all the time, like that's the phone number because apparently the phone company set aside the 555 exchange for use by movies.

Yeah, which I was told recently in a script I wrote to take that out. Oh really? Did you tell'm gonna go to hell. Well, I mean Any kind of script note is just there is no right answer But this person said yeah It just I don't it bugs me because it always takes me out and makes me feel like I'm watching a movie So I was like, no, okay. So did you or did you not tell them to go to hell with their script? No, I did not I got a lot of good notes from this person, so.

All right. I was on their side. Is this a bad actor? No, it's a good writer. Okay. There's a big difference. So to get a little further, to wrap that up, so those letters were eventually overtaken by numbers because again, if you, or I don't even know if I said it and we edited it out, but if you look at an old phone,

I think even a new phone still. You said it, yeah. Okay, the numbers are associated with specific letters. So two is associated with ABC, three is associated with DEF and so on. So if it was Klondike, that's KL, both of those are on the five, so eventually it just became 555,

whatever the rest of the thing is. And when we went to all numbers, that was a big step in the direction of eventually phasing out switchboard operators. Yeah, then you went seven digits, and then eventually, in most places, you needed the area code as well, and we went to 10 digits. Yeah, but area codes weren't around for a while.

I think it was... Oh, no. Oh, I don't remember exactly when it was, but I'm looking. That's why I'm still kind of talking a little bit. I mean, we've talked about this before because we both have our phone numbers memorized growing up and there was definitely not an area code. 9819919. That was me. I grew up with an area code. 9819019. That was me.

I grew up with an area code. Oh really? Yeah. From the moment you could remember there was a 10 digit? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There was just an exchange. It wasn't, yes you're right. Mine was 3829040. What if those two numbers called each other like then some weird portal opened? That would be pretty awesome. What would be through the portal? Either gnomes or robots.

It's got to be one of the two. Really earthy or really futuristic? Adam Curry? Wait, wait, which one? Oh, Adam Curry. Dressed as a gnome. Okay, thank you. Okay.

I knew you weren't going to be satisfied until I picked one of your two. Should we talk a little bit about who the switchboard operators were? All right, or should we take our break? I feel like we went long before the first break, so let's keep going. All right, well, most of these switchboard operators were women. Initially, they tried teenage boys,

but I love this little factoid Kyle dug up. Apparently, there was a quote that said, unfortunately, they matched insult for insult for Canadian boys that were operators. So if like, and as we'll see, people call up and be surly or in a bad mood or if it didn't work right, they'd be cussing. These teenage boys will give it right back to them. And so customer service is suffering in the 1880s because all these, you know, wise mouth kids.

So they started hiring mostly women. In the early 20th century, I think 80% of all operators were women. Here and abroad, they were called hello girls. Ironic since apparently they weren't even allowed to say hello, we'll get to that in a second. And Emma Nutt was the first phone operator, switchboard operator hired by AGB in 1878

at a whopping wage of about a nickel an hour. Yeah, which is even adjusted for inflation. That's only $1.50 an hour today. Pretty meager. But she was a pioneer. And probably one of the reasons why she kept her job was eventually it had a lot of prestige to it. It was one of the more respected jobs a woman can have, but it was also one of the very few jobs a woman could have. So women proved to be a fairly docile workforce because they had so few choices, other choices for work.

And so they were exploited to the bone as phone operators sadly as it turned out. Yeah it took everything I had not to make a nut job joke. Can we hear it? But I guess I sort of just did. Yeah. Well don't know. Her name was Emma Nutt and everyone's like, I want a nut job. That was good. Sorry. You got me. So, here's the deal though. It was very specific criteria.

You couldn't just waltz in there and get this job because, like you said, there wasn't a lot of choice for women in the workplace. And eventually they would pay them, you know, okay, not as much as their male counterparts, of course, because that's just how things worked, very sadly, but it was known as a pretty good job to get. In the US, you had to be well-spoken, you had to be a high school graduate. In Canada, they sought women with good eyesight, no cough.

You had to be of sufficient height and were physically fit in order to tackle the exacting work at the switchboard, and also, and this is in Canada, also a reference of moral character from their clergyman. Well, this is to get a job as a switchboard operator. Yeah, what about in the UK? Because that's pretty fun too.

You're required to speak the King's English, and not in a cockney way or a Northern way. And so women would accept these positions. Again, these were coveted positions. In some cases, they paid them and gave them financial freedom. They were looked upon with respect by their community. To make it as an operator, even be hired as an operator,

it's told the rest of society, this one's a good egg, because we only hire the best eggs. One of the things though, like you said, was that there were really strict rules on their behavior, how they comported themselves when speaking to customers, and then just how they even like sat and positioned themselves at their switchboard. There's a 1910 booklet that the Bell Company wrote that Kyle found where they were saying like, do not answer these calls with hello.

They said, would you rush into an office or up to the door of a residence and blurt out, hello, hello, who am I talking to? When they put it like that, it's actually a reasonable thing. But what's funny also is there was a big debate initially when phones were invented between whether the proper way to answer a call was hello or hoi hoi, and Alexander Graham Bell was a hoi hoi boy,

and Thomas Edison, who was his big rival in founding phone companies, he was a hello guy. And that's why you'll hear Mr. Burns say hoi hoi when he answers the phone. It's just going to show how ridiculously old he is. Yeah, we talked about this on one episode. It was a long time ago, but I used to have a hoi hoi written on my first

flip phone when you opened it up, the little home screen, because before they had pictures and graphics just said Ahoy Ahoy. Written, did you write it in nail polish? No, no, no, it was typed out and, you know, instead of like Chuck's phone or something. Oh, okay. I never had a phone that had any feature like that. Yeah, well, you know, these were early flip phones. I thought you actually wrote it on the screen.

No, no, no, no. It was typed letters. So, oh, there were a couple of things that I saw that were really harsh. There was an interview that I found, I think American Experience, they did a documentary on the telephone, and they were interviewing like some of these original operators,

and one of them was like, so they used Taylorism. So there was like five supervisors to every single switchboard operator, and they would just hover over you like a hawk. They would constantly be like, "'Come on, girls, faster, faster,' that kind of stuff. And this woman was like, "'If you even lifted your head up

from your switchboard, not even looked around, not even talked, like you just lifted your head up, four supervisors would be on you being like, what do you need, what's going on? There was another one that I think was on history.com, they were writing about telephone operators, and they quoted from a woman who was like one of the original ones who

said, I had to work 10 unpaid hours as punishment for a single giggle. Like that's how just regulated the women operators were for decades and decades. That was just part of the job. Yeah. I never did telemarketing in college, but that was a big, Dial America was a big job in Athens. I'm sure you remember, you probably worked for Dial America. I didn't, but I worked for another company.

I have a story about that. Yeah, it was a big, easy job to get in Athens, and I'm sure many colleges, but the central benefit of any job like this is being able to put your hand over the receiver and roll your eyes to the person next to you and go, oh my god, you've got to get a load of this guy or you should hear this lady's voice. Like if you deny your worker that, then you're not going to have a happy workforce.

That's the one perk you get when you're not on a, right in front of someone is that you can say something quietly and have a quick laugh. Yeah, they could not do that. They would get in trouble and possibly fired for that kind of stuff. So actually one of the cool things is they figured out that, okay, wait, there's thousands of us in this workforce, let's form a union. And they were told, no, they can't form a union. So they said, okay, we're going on strike. And I think in 1919,

New England telephone operators walked out and just crippled the phone network for basically half of New England. And the company was very quick to be like, okay, why did you say you wanted to begin? And they went back to work. So that was pretty cool. But for the most part, they were treated rather poorly.

They were, and they, in the face of, like I said, some people would call in cursing. There were men who would use foul language. Sometimes they would get charged extra for their call. They would, sometimes people would call and say like, hey, do you know what time it is? Or do you know what goes in this recipe? Or do you know what time the train runs from the station?

Or does this shirt make me look fat? Yeah, exactly. And they're acting like information basically rather than just connecting calls. I guess they weren't being as reined in everywhere because, or maybe they were taught the customer is always right, I don't know. They were, and there were like five things

you could say to a customer, no matter what they said to you, no matter how abusive they were, anything like that you could say like thank you, or something like that you could not. Saffron. Yeah, right, that was the safe word. The supervisor would come over and be like,

hey, hey, what are you saying? Well, if they got asked something in a recipe and they can only say five things, it really hems them in, so. Are you allowed to leave if not say Saffron? Here's one fun little thing. In World War I, there were 223 American women who served in Europe as switchboard operators because France's phone system was wrecked. So the US Army Signal Corps literally built its own phone system and had bilingual American

switchboard operators working there and sometimes giving like really important direct orders about bombings and raids and things like that. Well, they would pass them along. I don't know if they were making up the orders themselves. Do you think anybody would have thought that? I did. You thought that's what I was saying? No, but it was still hilarious to hear you say it.

Exactly. But this is the cool part. After 60 years, finally in 1979, these women were recognized as veterans. I know. That was very cool. It's sad that it took that long, but at least they finally got there. I'm sorry, I keep imagining the whole cadre of operators just making up orders for bombings.

This lady just said to storm the beach. It's just chaos. All right, now we're gonna take our break. We're running a bit long, so we're gonna come back and finish up on how it all ended with automation right after this. Stuxnet. Who?

Stuxnet. I don't know what that is. You know what Stuxnet is. Is that in this? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. You got to put the name Stuxnet.

That's the name of it. I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. Hey, Will. Do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Constantly.

I'm like, ah, there's so much science, I can't keep track of it all. Then it's a good thing our podcast, Part-Time Geniuses, is counting down the 25 greatest science ideas from the past 25 years. That's right, Mango. We're talking animals. In a paper called, quote, chickens prefer beautiful humans. Right. This was actually the title of the paper.

I like this. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are beautiful humans. Right. This was actually the title of the paper. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces. Got it. We're talking medical miracles. He's an endocrinologist who found a way to stimulate insulin producing cells using, wait for it, the saliva of a Gila monster. There's no way to make that not sound crazy.

We even talked to some of the experts behind these breakthroughs. It's a week full of fact-packed stories you won't want to miss. So listen to the part-time genius countdown of the 25 greatest science ideas of the past 25 years, starting Monday, March 3rd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. tests. Okay, Chuck. So I think I said before that once they started going to all numeric, well, numbers, that was like a huge first step toward automating the system and eventually phasing out human operators.

One of the reasons why is because you can take numbers and you can quantify them essentially. And that's what those original phones, the rotary phones, then apparently the fake keypad phones would do. When you dialed a number, your finger would eventually hit a stop. For like a three, the stop was closer. For the zero, the stop was in eternity away, because once you hit the stop, the dial would go back to the original position, and as it did, it would put out three impulses,

say three electrical impulses, when you dialed a three. And what that did was it told the automated switches that were eventually invented to start paying attention and start dialing some numbers here because I just sent some electrical impulses. That's right. I think you mean pulses, don't you? What did I say? Pluses?

Impulses? Did I? Yeah. It's a little late in the day, and my brain is mush from all the engineering week we've been doing. Hey, I'm not just sitting here as correct you guy. I think it's kind of funny. Somebody would have written in and was like,

why are these phones having impulses? No, hey, you got me back for the operators giving directions. Here is where my mind exploded because I didn't learn this yesterday. Are you still liking that one? I didn't learn this yesterday, but I learned it, I think the last time you explained this, because we explained that in another episode about-

Phone freaking. Oh yeah, how you dial a rotary phone. I did not know that it was the retreat of that dial back to its original position was what was being quantified and pulsed. You think it was the dial up, like when you dialed it? Yeah, you put your finger in it and you dialed the four over.

You know, as a kid, you just think, well, like, yep, I'm hitting the four. And I just take it out and it goes back to its place. It going back to its place is the key. Yeah. Which I just. I don't know if I knew that either though. It seems new to me.

So if I did explain it before, it didn't stick. It's pretty cool though. I mean, that's just a fun little fact for anyone who still understands what those are. One thing I do think we talked about in the phone freaking episode was the invention of the Strouger switch which was invented by an undertaker named Almond Brown Strouger and the reason that he can't like an undertaker in Kansas City invented the

automated phone switchboard because as legend has it he was losing business to a rival undertaker whose wife was the town operator. So when people call up and said, undertaker please, she would just route him to her husband's business and leave Stroudger's business out. And he's like, you know what, I want to get rid of the operator. So he went and invented one of the more sophisticated pieces of technology that was around at the time. And this is in 1890 that he came up with the first automated switch, and it is impressive.

Yeah, I mean, that's the one that led to the rotary switch that we're talking about though, right? Yes. Do you know how his worked specifically or what the difference was? I do, actually. It's really fascinating. Well, let's hear it.

We got one minute. All right. So let's say that you dial that three, right? That first number, those three impulses, I think in slang it's just called pulses. Sure. They went down the line and they hit the first switch. And they told the first switch, okay, we're going to three.

And so that would narrow down the number of subscribers to this telephone switchboard whose number started with three. And then the next number would come in, five. Five impulses of electricity would come to the second switch and it would tell that switch, okay, now we're just trying to get to the people whose first two numbers are three, five, and so on and so on until finally all,

what, eight, no, yeah, seven numbers were dialed. And so it led to the only person whose phone line could possibly be connected to this specific circuit of seven numbers, and then it would connect the call from the caller to the callee. Wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really amazing. This guy came up with this in 1890.

Yeah, and you know, we didn't even really mention. It seems obvious, but I guess we should say the reason they were looking to phase out and go into automation is kind of like every reason always, is money, you know, less overhead. As more and more switchboards grew, you had, well, A, the switchboards cost a lot of money. They cost, you know, you had to have land and a building and you had to have people

to operate them. And they just couldn't keep hiring more and more people. I think at one point they said, you know, we need a million switchboard operators. And that just wasn't even a possibility at the time. So automation was always on the horizon. Interestingly, along those lines, long distance switching took a lot longer. Like, it was into the late 1960s and even some places in the 70s where you still had operators that had to connect long distance lines because it was, as Kyle said,

it was just no alternative to human intelligence. It was too complex at the time, but eventually, you know, they figured all that out. But that meant that there were humans who were walking around knowing how to connect to Pica to Tacoma. They knew the combination of switches to connect, or the number of levers to pull, the number of, like, wishes to make. I don't know. So cool. And they knew how to connect to call like that and not just to peak it to coma.

Like whatever city to whatever city, they just knew how to do it. And I mean that's impressive. Yeah, that's just an overlooked part of history that there were people walking around who knew how to do these complex algorithms basically and they were all different depending on what city was calling what city so that kept operators around for much longer than they would have been had long-distance not existed

because they got phased out at the local level but for long-distance calling they were just too valuable to get rid of at the time. What happens when you dial zero today from a landline? Is there an operator? Well, number one, there's no landlines. There's just, you get like an alarm, somebody's house alarm, I think, maybe. And then number two, there's no zero anymore. Gen Z got rid of it.

All right, good deal. So I think by the 70s, the whole thing was digitized. There was no corded switchboards any longer. But there were some pockets of switchboards that were still around, right? That held on long beyond the time it was necessary. Yeah, there's a couple of competing last switchboard, last operators.

One that you'll see a lot online is widely recognized. In 1983, Bryant Pond, Maine. I think the specification here is it was the last hand-cranked telephone system and switchboard. Like you know, like you see in the old movies, there's a box on the wall and you go, you crank a thing. Give me Klondike five, six thousand.

Exactly. And Susan Glines was the last operator there. London's, thank you, Kyle, was at Enfield. And this was 1960, I think, when it was retired. But the last caretaker telephone operator in the UK retired in 84. But then you found one in California that was 91. And as best I could tell, that was a private, a sort of very small customer-based private phone company.

In Kerman, and what was sweet was I saw one of the reasons that the owner of the company held on to human operators for so long was because there were so many migrants who lived in town that the phone operator was bilingual. He could help connect calls between people who spoke two different languages. Yeah, not even the final one,

all of their operators were bilingual. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Oh, very nice. I think that was their specialty. No, I'm serious. That's what they said at the company picnic. That's our specialty.

I think that's honestly, they had, most of their customer base were people with family in Mexico, and so they just had a niche for what I understand. I mean, I don't know why you're getting the impression that I don't believe you. I believe what you're saying. Right.

Because you keep laughing at it, going, that's funny. I'm still thinking about the operators telling everybody to bomb Rue-Anne or something. You got anything else? No. Big thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one. It was very technical and complicated. And since I said technical and complicated, it's time for listener mail. Here's our Joe Thiesman follow-up. We got quite a few emails, in fact, a few from people

whose parents went to school with Joe Thiesman, the former quarterback of the former Washington Redskins football team. Now the commanders. Hey guys, I used to freelance for a video company that did a lot of conferences, and one time, Joe Thiesman was the keynote speaker The way he told the story about his last name as it follows

Growing up his dad was very firm that their last name was pronounced these men Apparently his dad would get quite cross when folks would pronounce it wrong people often said it wrong So Joe would call his dad and have him correct them Dad they said it wrong. My dad's gonna sue you. He snapped my leg. According to Joe's story when he was a candidate for the Heisman Trophy his college coaches thought it would be better if it was pronounced Thiesman to rhyme obviously so again Joe called his dad to ask him and his dad responded I've told you it's Thiesman. So it sounds like Joe has made kind of a fun little

apocryphal story about this but it seems confirmed it was Thiesman. So it sounds like Joe has made kind of a fun little apocryphal story about this but it seems confirmed it was Thiesman. Heard it from the man's own mouth and that's from Karen and Gil Pennington. Very nice. Appreciate that big time. Who was it? Karen Gil Pennington. Thank you very much Karen. I'm just gonna call him Karen. Sure. If you want to get in touch with us like Karen did and give us a great story that kind of sums up, ties up, circles up, a story that we talked about, we love that kind of thing, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the Hey, Will. Do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days?

Constantly. I'm like, ah, there's so much science, I can't keep track of it all. Then it's a good thing our podcast, Part-Time Geniuses, counting down the 25 greatest science ideas from the past 25 years. That's right, Mango. We're talking animals. In a paper called, quote, chickens prefer beautiful humans. Right.

This was actually the title of the paper. I like this. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces. Got it. We're talking medical miracles. He's an endocrinologist who found a way to stimulate insulin-producing cells using, wait for it, the saliva of a Gila monster. There's no way to make that not sound crazy.

We even talked to some of the experts behind these breakthroughs. It's a week full of fact-packed stories you won't want to miss. So listen to the part-time genius countdown of the 25 greatest science ideas of the past 25 years. Starting Monday, March 3rd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.