Big Apple History . Building the Big Apple . Dial "M" for Manhattan


	Early telephone operators

"The only trouble about this town" Mark Twain noted about New York City in 1867, "is that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it... The distances are too great."

Less than ten years later, a solution to Mark Twain's complaint had been invented -- not in New York, however, but in Boston. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell uttered his famous first telephone words: "Watson, come here. I want you."

But as the capital of finance and industry, it was New York that first put the telephone to use. Just a year after that first telephone call, the American Bell Telephone Company granted its first license in New York.

A year after that, 252 customers subscribed to the city's first telephone exchange. Most were businesses, because, at $150 a year, a telephone was too expensive for private use. The caller turned a crank, lifted the receiver, and asked the operator to connect him or her to the desired person.


Early telephone operators

At first, the telephone companies hired telegraph operators to be phone operators. But this created a problem. Telegraphers were a heavy-drinking, rough-talking bunch. Sometimes, when customers complained about the unreliability of the early phones, operators threatened to beat them up. American Bell Corporation officials got fed up. Nice young ladies, they realized, were raised to be polite; the company would hire them as operators. Soon all operators were "hello girls."

When Bell's patent expired in 1894, telephone prices went down. Soon New York had dozens of phone exchanges and long-distance connections. Technology, competition, and good manners made New York America's communications hub, and the telephone made New York -- and soon all of America -- an easier place to "get around."

Illustrations: Property of AT&T Archives. Reprinted with permission of AT&T.