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Gillian Slade
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An official three-page Bell Telephone
Directory was printed in March, 1907 for its 40 subscribers in
Medicine Hat.
Within a year — 1908, 100 years ago
exactly — Alberta Government Telephones bought the Medicine
Hat telephone exchange and all of Bell Telephone Company's local
assets.
Tony Cashman, author of Singing Wires
— The Telephone in Alberta, mentions figures of $32 for
businesses and $25 for residences, per year, to be connected to the
telephone exchange.
A telephone "switchboard", often housed in
an "exchange" building, was a device used by an "operator" to
manually connect telephones to one another, says Wikipedia.
The operator sat in front of a "shallow
desk" made up of columns of keys, signal lights, cords and various
switches. Each column had a front cord and a rear cord making up a
circuit. On the "wall" (high-back panel) ahead, there were rows of
female jacks, each designated and wired as a local extension of the
switchboard.
The operator was alerted to an incoming
call when a lamp lit up on the back panel. The rear cord was
inserted in the jack and the front key pulled forward. This allowed
the operator to converse with the caller and hear who they wished
to be connected with.
The operator then placed the front cord in
the correct jack and pushed the front key backwards, which would
ring the called party. Once the phone was answered, the operator
would leave both cords in their jacks, and put the key in the
middle position so that the parties could converse. When the call
was over, a light would alert her to the termination of the
conversation and she would remove the cords from the jacks.
Joyce Werre of Medicine Hat joined AGT in
1962 as an operator. "It was a really good company to work
for,” she said. “They provided training and there was a
certain prestige in the community in being an operator," says
Werre.
There were 50 or 60 operators in Medicine
Hat when Werre joined AGT and she remembers a strict protocol.
"When we arrived each morning there were cards which stated
precisely when our breaks would be. At the time of your coffee
break someone would arrive to take over the switchboard from you,"
she said.
Before automatic exchanges, an operator's
assistance was required for anything other than calling telephones
across a shared party line. Direct dial systems were developed in
the 1920s to reduce labour costs as usage increased and to ensure
privacy to the customer as operators were in the unique position of
being able to listen in on calls — considered inappropriate,
of course
Werre spent some of her early days as an
operator in small communities where the local switchboard was
installed in a resident's home. "There were three of us who worked
shifts to cover that switchboard and we got to know everyone in the
community. Often we even knew where they were if there was no reply
from their home phone number," says Werre.
Operators developed an acute sense of
hearing and came to recognize voices of regular callers instantly.
"We also exercised our memories. There are still telephone numbers
I can remember," says Werre.
Cashman says there was such a friendly
relationship with operators that they became friends in the
community. One day a lady who was making candy phoned the operator
in Lacombe and said, "Jennie, will you ring me in exactly five
minutes? My candy has just come to a rolling boil and it's
supposed to boil for five minutes." Requests were also made for
operators to phone and wake people up in time to catch a train.
In the days prior to 9-1-1 the operator
was the first person the public called in case of emergency and
remained on line with the distraught caller until the ambulance
service, police or fire department were dispatched.
Some of the more delightful calls to take
were children asking to be put through to Santa Claus.
By 1910 Medicine Hat was connected for
long distance calling and only four years later an automatic dial
service was introduced which was also when the new Telephone
Exchange was built.
Medicine Hat had reached a milestone by
1925 when they could talk to almost any point in North America as
AGT connected with AT&T. |
