History of the telephone in the United States

The telephone played a major communications role in American history from its invention in the 1880s by Alexander Graham Bell onwards. In the 20th century ATT dominated the market until it was broken up and replaced by competition. Originally targeted at business users and upscale families, by the 1920s the "phone" became widely popular in the general population. Ordinary people either had their own phone, or used a telephone in the neighborhood, or a public phone. Ordinary Americans contacted businesses, friends, and relatives. Long distance pricing was quite expensive until the early 21st century. Business to business communication was important, and increasingly displaced telegrams.

The technology steadily advanced. The dial phone allowed users to place their own calls without going through an operator. The arrival of the smartphone in the early 21st century provided every user a powerful telephone, camera, and access to the internet especially using apps—all in a pocket sized device that could go anywhere. It could easily send text messages, which tended to displace voice calls.

AT&T and the Bell System

Main articles: AT&T and Bell System

According to historian Robert W Garnet, in the six years after Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876, his new company managed to increase its capital from a small amount to $10 million. Furthermore, the company struck a deal with Western Union,the giant telegram company, preventing them from entering the telephone market. It acquired a controlling interest in Western Electric manufacturing firm in order to make its own gear, and it invested in local exchanges throughout the country which led to standardization and more business for Western Electric. This dramatic transformation was primarily due to the backing of New England financiers, who not only supplied essential cash, but also recruited experienced managers like Theodore Newton Vail to construct and manage a nationwide system. Vail, for example, had been superintendent of the Post Office's Railway Mail Service, which was in charge of intercity movement of the mail.

In 1881 President William Hathaway Forbes of the newly renamed "American Bell Telephone Company" issued the first annual report indicating that the 1880 profits were over $200,000, and it now operated 133,692 telephones -, They were only nine cities left in the United States with populations over 10,000 that did not yet have a telephone exchange. The young company spent heavily on lawsuits over patents, which it usually won. It reported profits of over $500,000 in 1881 and nearly $1 million in 1882. typical charges for businesses were $150 for a thousand messages; pay stations were being set up around the business district, charging 15 cents per call. American Bell would send a team to make a pitch to business leaders in a city about starting a branch. They had advantages: Bell's national prestige guaranteed an attentive audience. Bell would provide the expertise and equipment--it manufactured the gear and sold only to affiliates. A Bell setup meant good local service and the very good long distance service, which was otherwise unavailable in that city. Small local independent companies provided service in rural areas, but they did not offer long-distance.

National Bell wall phone, 1907

In 1900 the Bell system plant was worth $181 million; operating revenue included $32 million from local calls and $12 million from long-distance calls. The net income was $13.4 million. There were 37,000 employees. By 1920, assets were $1.4 billion; local revenue was $301 million; long-distance revenue was $142 million; profit was $48 million, and there were 231,000 employees. By 1950 assets had climbed to $10.3 billion; local call revenue was $2.0 billion and toll revenue was $1.2 billion, with a profit of $367 million. There were 535,000 employees. Inflation measured by the price index was 24.3 in 1900, 65.4 in 1920, and 80.2 in 1950, For the year 1927, the number of calls in the U.S. was 29 billion, or 5.4 calls per phone per day.

AT&T was a successor of the original Bell Telephone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1877. The American Bell Telephone Company formed the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) subsidiary in 1885. Its role was long-distance service. In 1899, AT&T became the parent company after the American Bell Telephone Company sold its assets to its subsidiary.During most of the 20th century, AT&T had a monopoly on phone service in the United States and was usually the largest company in the U.S. in terms of assets.

Targeting an audience

The Bell company manufactured its own phone gear in the Western Electric subsidiary founded in 1869. Large local businesses and upscale customers were the first target, in an era when a dollar a day was good pay for a worker. In one of the first newspaper ads for the new telephone, the Bell Telephone Association stated: "The terms for leasing two telephones for social purposes connecting a dwelling house with any other building will be $20 a year; for business purposes $40 a year, payable semi-annually in advance."

Theodore Vail, President of ATT (1907-1919) and his successors Harry Bates Thayer (1919–1925) and Walter Sherman Gifford (1925–1948) gave heavy emphasis and large budgets to advanced engineering innovation, as shown by the upgrading of the Western Electric Engineering Department to the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925. This work often led to opportunities for increased automation. In particular the proposed dial phones would sharply reduce payroll expenses. However, company executives were worried about the negative effects of depersonalization and the possibility of labor strikes. Vail and his inner circle exhibited great caution and hesitancy in adopting the new Bell dial telephone system. They cited multiple reasons involving societal, cultural, economic, technical, and labor concerns. One key reason was their awareness that telephone users were pleased that the switchboard operators acted as personal assistants, and this supposed role helped increase demand across all segments of the working population.

Initially, telephone companies had designed their product with a primary focus on emergency situations and business needs. They ignored its potential for social interaction. However, ATT President Vail recognized the importance of educating the public about the social opportunities created by the telephone. To achieve this, he hired J. D. Ellsworth to create a nationwide advertising campaign. By the 1930s, telephone companies were promoting this aspect of their service with the slogan, "Reach out, reach out and touch someone!".

The telephone booth, where one could use a coin to make a call, was introduced in the 1890s by William Gray. By 2000 there were 2 million phone booths. Only 300,000 pay phones remained in service by 2014, mostly in New York City, and they were nearly all gone by 2020.

Breakup of AT&T in 1982

In the 1982 United States v. AT&T antitrust lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department and AT&T reached a compromise that included the divestiture of AT&T's ("Ma Bell") local operating subsidiaries. They regrouped into seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), commonly referred to as "Baby Bells", resulting in seven independent companies. Critics were divided on whether the decision was good for the economy.

Smartphone

Main articles: Smartphone and History of the iPhone

Smartphones became popular in the early 2000s, when BlackBerry and Nokia introduced their smartphones. BlackBerry was particularly successful in the business market, thanks to its push email technology. Meanwhile, Nokia was popular among consumers due to its user-friendly interface and sleek design. In 2007, Apple revolutionized the smartphone industry with the introduction of the History of the iPhoneiPhone. The iPhone's touch screen interface, sleek design, and extensive app store quickly made it the most popular smartphone on the market. Android, a mobile operating system developed by Google, was introduced in 2008 and quickly became the second most popular operating system for smartphones. Since then, smartphones have continued to evolve, with advancements in technology Today, billions of people around the world rely on them for communication, entertainment, and productivity. In India, they have replaces currency, checks and credit cards.

Personnel

Hawthorne studies

Main article: Hawthorne effect

Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant near Chicago was the scene of famous studies into worker behavior. AT&T had a deep commitment to research, and now became innovative in applying research methodology to personnel problems. AT&T wanted the technically best best products, but it also wanted the most efficient workers. Starting in 1924 it brought in the National Research Council to run experiments that used test rooms to measure the effects of brighter or dimmer overhead lighting. Brighter and dimmer lights both improved productivity, but productivity fell when the experiment stopped. The conclusion was that being part of an experiment increased productivity temporarily. Management now brought in Harvard Business School Professor Elton Mayo who brought in a team of psychologists who interviewed workers in depth to see how social relations affected productivity. Did workers became more productive when supervisors were more informal and friendly, or when they were more strict? Mayo concluded that a happy workplace and higher productivity resulted when supervisors treated workers like patients, to discover their grievances and treating their problems with diplomacy and tact, while maintaining the upper hand. However another researcher, anthropologist Lloyd Warner argued the experiments proved something different: supervisors must understand the culture of the shop floor, and create incentive systems that were congruent with that culture.

Switchboard and operators

Main article: Switchboard operator

Before the 1960s, the telephone exchange with telephone switchboards and operators played a crucial role in connecting phone calls. A telephone switchboard is a device that allows telephone lines to be interconnected, enabling the routing of calls between different phones or phone networks. The switchboard operator was a person who manually connected calls by plugging and unplugging cords on the switchboard. The role of the switchboard and operator was important because they were responsible for connecting callers with the correct party and ensuring that calls were completed correctly. They also provided assistance with making long-distance calls, directory assistance, and other services related to the use of the telephone network. Switchboards and operators were an integral part of the telecommunications system until the introduction of electronic switching systems in the mid-20th century. While many of the functions of the switchboard and operator have been automated, telephone operators still play a role in some contexts, such as in emergency services or customer support centers. Thus according to a 1995 study by Muller et al., the operators who provide directory assistance, "serve as experts in a variety of domains of relevance to their customers' lives, helping them to navigate through government agencies, complex business hierarchies, partially remembered geographies, and dynamic changes in their customers' worlds."

Labor force

More women began to replace men within this sector of the workforce for several reasons. The companies observed that women were generally more courteous to callers, and women's labor was cheap in comparison to men's. Specifically, women were paid from one half to one quarter of a man's salary. In the United States, any switchboard operator employed by an independently owned public telephone company which had not more than seven hundred and fifty stations was excluded from the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Julia O'Connor, a former telephone operator, led the Telephone Operators' Strike of 1919 and the Telephone Operators' Strike of 1923 against New England Telephone Company on behalf of the IBEW Telephone Operators' Department for better wages and working conditions. In the 1919 strike, after five days, Postmaster General Burleson agreed to negotiate an agreement between the union and the telephone company, resulting in an increase in pay for the operators and recognition of the right to bargain collectively. However, the 1923 strike was called off after less than a month without achieving any of its goals.

Women of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, American bilingual female switchboard operators in World War I, were known colloquially as Hello Girls and were not formally recognized for their military service until 1978.

Users

9-1-1

Main articles: 9-1-1 and Emergency telephone number

The 911 emergency call service started in the late 1960s in as a way for people to quickly and easily obtain emergency services. Until then people had to find the number for a nearby police or fire station or hospital, and speak directly to an operator not trained to handle emergencies. By 1979 about 800 local systems were operational. In terms of population coverage, by 1979, 26% of the U.S. population could dial the number. This increased to 50% by 1987, 93% by 2000; as of March 2022, 98.9% had access. The cost is paid by a fee on the monthly bill of telephone subscribers.

Gender and culture roles

Private conversation, 1910

The telephone was instrumental to modernization. It aided in the development of suburbs and the separation of homes and businesses, but also became a reason for the separation between women occupying the private sphere and men in the public sphere. Both historically and currently, women are predominantly responsible for the telephone calls that bridge the public and private sphere, such as calls regarding doctor's appointments and meetings.

However, studies have shown that there may be some differences in how men and women use telephones. For example, research suggests that women tend to use their phones more for social interaction and maintaining relationships with friends and family, while men use their phones more for work-related purposes and entertainment. There are differences in the types of apps and features that men and women use on their phones. Women use social media apps more frequently than men, while men are more likely to use gaming or sports apps. Historian John Brooks argues that the telephone created "a new habit of mind--a habit of tenseness and alertness, of demanding and expecting immediate results, whether in business, love or other forms of social intercourse" He also notes that during the social unrest of the late 1960s there was a sharply increased rate abusive, obscene, and threatening calls.

See also

• Telephone
  • Timeline of the telephone
  • History of the telephone
  • Smartphone
    • Nokia
    • History of the iPhone
    • Mobile app
  • Index of telephone-related articles
• Bell System
  • AT&T
  • Bell Telephone Company
  • Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing branch
  • Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research division.
  • List of telephone operating companies
  • Independent telephone company
• History of mobile phones
• History of telecommunication
• Party line (telephony)
• Plain old telephone service (POTS), analog system used until 1988 when replaced by Integrated Services Digital Network ISDN) digital transmission
• Private branch exchange
• Telegraph in United States history
• Telephone exchange

Further reading

• Adams, Stephen B., and Orville R. Butler. Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Agar, Jon. Constant touch: A global history of the mobile phone (Icon Books, 2013) online.
• Brooks, John. Telephone: The first hundred years (Harper & Row, 1976). online, wide-ranging popular history.
• Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz. From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry (Harvard University Press, 2015)
• Coll, Steve. The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986)
• Danielian, N.R. A.T.&T. The Story of Industrial Conquest (Vanguard Press, 1939) ISBN 9780405060380.
• Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992), a major scholarly history.
• Frissen, Valerie. "Gender is calling: Some reflections on past, present and future uses of the telephone." in The gender-technology relation (Taylor & Francis, 2018) pp. 79–94.
• Galambos, Louis. "Theodore N. Vail and the role of innovation in the modern Bell System." Business History Review 66.1 (1992): 95–126. online
• Garnet, Robert W. The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System's Horizontal Structure, 1876–1909 (Johns Hopkins/At&T Series in Telephone History.) (1985), a major scholarly hisotry.
• Green, Venus. “Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of ‘Personal Service’ in the Bell System, 1878–1921.” Technology and Culture 36#4 (1995), pp. 912–49. online
• Hochfelder, David. "Constructing an Industrial Divide: Western Union, AT&T, and the Federal Government, 1876-1971"Business History Review (2002) 76#4 (2002), pp. 705–732 online
• Israel, Paul. From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920 (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992).
• John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Harvard UP, 2010) excerpt\
• Kern, Stephen. The culture of time and space, 1880–1918 (2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 2003).
• Klemens, Guy. The Cellphone: The History and Technology of the Gadget That Changed the World (McFarland, 2010).
• Kramarae, Cheris and Lana F. Rakow, eds. Technology and women's voices: keeping in touch (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988)
• Lipartito, Kenneth. “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920.” American Historical Review 99#4 (1994) pp. 1074–111. ONLINE
• MacDougall, Robert. "Long lines: AT&T's long-distance network as an organizational and political strategy." Business History Review 80.2 (2006): 297–327.
• Mueller, Milton. "The switchboard problem: scale, signaling, and organization in manual telephone switching, 1877-1897." Technology and Culture 30.3 (1989): 534–560. online
• Muller, Michael J., et al. "Telephone operators as knowledge workers: Consultants who meet customer needs." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (1995).
• Pier, Arthur Stanwood. Forbes: Telephone Pioneer (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953).
• Reid, Alan J. "A brief history of the smartphone." in Reid, The Smartphone Paradox: Our Ruinous Dependency in the Device Age (2018) pp: 35–66 online.
• Smith, George David. The Anatomy of a Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric, and the Origins of the American Telephone Industry (Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), scholarly history.
• Smoreda, Zbigniew, and Christian Licoppe. "Gender-specific use of the domestic telephone." Social psychology quarterly (2000): 238–252.
• Tarullo, Patsy Ronald. “American Telephone and Telegraph company: survey of its development through basic strategy and structure” ( PhD dissertation,  University of Pittsburgh ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1976. 7703043).
• Ward, Robert C. "The chaos of convergence: A study of the process of decay, change, and transformation within the telephone policy subsystem of the United States" (PhD dissertation, . Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1998) online.
• Wheen, Andrew. Dot-Dash to Dot.Com: How Modern Telecommunications Evolved from the Telegraph to the Internet (Springer Praxis, 2010) excerpt
• Willey, Malcolm M., and Stuart A. Rice. "The agencies of communication." in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (McGraw-Hill, 1933) pp. 167–217. online
• Winston, Brian. Media, Technology and Society A History From the Telegraph to the Internet (Routledge, 1998), ch. 3.

External links

• Bell Telephone Magazine