Anytime, Anywhere, to Anyone: A History of the Sparks Telephone Exchange
By Kimberly J. Roberts
Part of the magic of vintage photographs is the historical information they contain, recording the intimate details of daily life that might otherwise be lost. This photograph, labeled Sparks Telephone exchange, c.1923, from the Sparks Museum and Cultural Center’s railroad collection, captures a moment in the history of the telephone that tells a story much larger than the image itself.
Photo/Sparks Telephone exchange, c. 1923, courtesy of the Sparks Museum, Sparks, Nevada.
The room is old and crowded. The surface-mounted wiring indicates it was retrofitted for electricity, and the bulky heater with its pipe stretching across the ceiling points to a lack of central heating, clashing with the modern technology of the switchboard and the fashionable attire of the women seated before it. Their dresses and marcelled bobs date the photograph to the 1920s. The switchboard itself sits awkwardly in front of a covered window, as if crammed into a space not designed to hold it. Scenes such as this were common in the early days of the telephone era, as existing buildings were pressed to accommodate changing technologies. According to Greg Daugherty, the switchboards of small, rural exchanges were often located in the local railroad station or the back of a general store.[i] This particular room is in fact, part of the Sparks Yard Office of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which makes sense, considering that the town of Sparks grew up around the rail yard, and that telegraph offices, located at railroad stations, were the precursors of mass communication to the telephone. In fact, telegraph wires transmitted the first phone calls.
The room also seems too small to hold the equipment and the number of people it contains. This reveals important information about how a telephone exchange was run. Phone calls were manually connected by an operator who would plug the wire of a caller into the switch of the person they wished to speak to. Switchboards were designed to pack the operators in closely, and they were diligently monitored by a supervisor who watched their every move. According to Ellen Sterns and Emily Margolin Gwathmey,
“Focusing straight ahead at her switchboard, and never left or right, she was not allowed to cross her legs or suck a lozenge. She could not even blow her nose or wipe her brow without permission…Such permission could be granted only by the austere female supervisor whose duties included watching, judging, preventing chatter, and plugging in to monitor performance.”[ii]
A strict dress code was enforced, and an operator was expected to be a single, virtuous, respectable woman. While the non-Bell telephone companies that expanded across the country when Bell’s patent expired did not necessarily follow these strict regulations, it is clear the Southern Pacific did, based on the evidence of this photograph, showing the supervisor standing directly behind the operators, who were expected to be respectful, polite, and obedient, no matter how stressful the job became. And apparently, stress was a huge part of the job, with designated rooms set aside for crying at many telephone exchanges.
The sign at the counter also provides important historical context. It reads:
OVER the TELEPHONE
Your voice and personality
Speed instantly---------
Anytime, anywhere to anyone.
Long Distance calls by number
are QUICKER and COST LESS!
As an advertisement, it appeals to the individual’s personality, evidence of the trend that arose in the early 20th century as a new, modern sense of the self as unique replaced Victorian values emphasizing virtue. The reminder to use numbers refers to the fact that early switchboards used the name of the client, which meant operators had to memorize the switchboard; numbers came later as they were more efficient. In the 1930s, direct dialing technology replaced the need for so many operators and the heyday of the phone operator came to a close, and along with it the visibility of the human hand in making these connections. In our contemporary world of instant information, we often forget that it is in fact other people we are connecting with when we use our telephones, even when we use them to search the internet not to make a call. We may not speak to a person, but someone has coded and placed that information there for us, and while there is no longer an operator at a switchboard physically connecting us with wires, there is still human contact that comes from these transactions. Understanding the human touch behind this more indirect communication network is the realm of the humanities, showing why they remain relevant and so important in today’s world.
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[i] https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators
[ii] Ellen Stern and Emily Margolin Gwathmey. Once upon a telephone: an illustrated social history (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 20.
Kimberly J. Roberts grew up all over the American West, mainly in Colorado. She has worked in archives and museums across the country. She studied literature and history at Colorado State University and has a master’s degree in the history of photography, landscape, and science from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she served as the photograph curator in Special Collections for 10 years. Analyzing and researching photographs is her favorite pastime.
Photo by Susan Mantle.