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Two or three million people
- The scope of the Bell System being what it is today, this history touches the lives of two or three million people who work for the System directly or are employed by companies with whom this business contracts for work.
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Even during the period from 1956 to 1984, the Bell System's dominant reach into all forms of communications was pervasive within the United States and influential in telecommunication standardization throughout the industrialized world.
- Boy Operators Didn’T Last
- What Did Telephone Operators Do, exactly?
- Operators Were Subject to Strict Rules
- The Operators Rebel
- The End of The Line?
It turned out there was a problem with male switchboard operators: The boys, often barely in their teens, couldn’t seem to behave themselves. They had a tendency to roughhouse. And “when some other diversion held their attention, they would leave a call unanswered for any length of time, and then return the impatient subscriber’s profanity with a f...
In the telephone’s earliest days, one phone could be connected to another by wire, allowing their two owners to speak. While that may have seemed like a miracle at the time, it was clear that the telephone would be much more useful if any given phone could communicate with numerous phones. Telephone exchanges made that possible. Each of the phones ...
At the busier boards, work could be frantic. Some operators took to wearing roller skatesto get around. Otherwise, the dress code tended to be strict—long black dresses and no jewelry, for example. Operators were subject to numerous other rules, and spies sometimes monitored their calls on a device called a listening board. In 1899, when a 25-year-...
The pace of the work and the repressive rules that operators often had to put up with eventually led to dissension in the ranks. Phone companies discovered that their supposedly docile female workforces could only be pushed so far. In April 1919, for example, some 8,000 operators walked off the job at the New England Telephone Company, all but shut...
With the coming of the 1930s, technology that allowed telephone users simply to dial another phone without the aid of an operator had become widespread. Phone companies took advantage of the moment to slash their workforces, and thousands of operators lost their jobs. By 1940, there were fewer than 200,000 in all. In 2021, the Bureau of Labor Stati...
- Greg Daugherty
Jan 24, 2022 · Regardless of its long-term effects, the results of the January 8, 1982, settlement forever changed the way that we communicate in the United States and how we view the modern tech monopoly. Learn more about AT&T’s monopoly case history and the breakup of the Bell System below.
The scope of the Bell System being what it is today, this history touches the lives of two or three million people who work for the System directly or are employed by companies with whom this business contracts for work.
The Bell System found payrolls were the easiest place to save money, and its work force plunged 40% from 1929 to 1933. By 1930 the Bell System had converted a third of its telephones to dials, and dropped 70,000 operator jobs.
By the time of its breakup nearly 108 years later, the Bell System would have assets of $150 billion and more than one million employees — becoming the largest private business enterprise in the world.
The Bell System (AT&T and the various other companies it owned) had become the dominant phone service provider in the United States long before the 1920s; in fact, it had a monopoly on phone service even then.
