"Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too buys bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone." – Steven Spielberg
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The amazing device we all depend on today, for so many tasks – the telephone, was no less important in the 19th century, albeit in a much different way.
Phones of yesteryear required a switchboard to operator, and operators – human beings who were hired to help make your telephone connections.
According to the display in Lakeport's Courthouse Museum: “In 1878, the first manual telephone switching board was introduced in New Haven, Connecticut. This allowed many phones to be connected through a single exchange. With this invention, exchanges opened up rapidly all over the country. The first operators were teenage boys, who turned out to be impatient, rude, (often swearing at subscribers), and full of pranks, including disconnecting customers and misdirecting their calls. When bored, they would whittle away at the wooden switchboards.... Within a few years the boys were completely replaced by women, who proved to be calm and gracious with the subscribers. Their quiet voices, deft fingers and patient courtesy and attentiveness were precisely what the telephone company required in its attendants."
Telephone exchange service for the public came about, as many inventions do, in a roundabout way.
It happened that a man in Boston called E.T. Holmes (Could that be where the phrase originated in the movies, "E.T. phone home"?), whose father was an inventor who designed protection for property that utilized electric wires. Holmes decided to connect telephones to a wire inside the alarm office, then, later discovered that he could connect six telephones all in a row, which then led to the home telephone service.
In the time around the 1890s a device called a drop magneto switchboard was in use.
Drop magneto boards did not allow for much in the way of a private telephone call, since the operators often knew people by their voices, and sometimes even knew your schedule and whether or not you were home!
Then, the wooden wall phone was cranked by turning the crank on the magneto and a current that ran the distance of the line would ring and drop a small metal plate that identified the caller and her telephone number.
After the small plate fell, an operator would then plug a cord into the jack for that specific person.
Next, the operator would ring the phone, and after it was answered, the conversation could commence.
It wasn't long before “the telephone story” carried on and on with many different styles of telephones over the decades, leading eventually to your pocket cell phone that can do everything but wash the dishes!
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also formerly wrote for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.