Josh Lauer

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of telephone operators in the United States, mostly young women, performed the frenzied, repetitive manual labor of connecting telephone calls. The physical and emotional labor of telephone operators has been well documented by historians of technology and business. In addition to handling complex switchboards and speaking with callers, however, many telephone operators performed a third form of labor: documenting calls for the purpose of billing. Telephone operators were not only human “switches,” as Kenneth Lipartito memorably observed; they were also accountants. This paper addresses the historical development of telephone recordkeeping and metering practices in the United States during the early decades of commercial telephony. While the telephone’s technological achievement inspired fascination, early public interest in the telephone, as Richard R. John has noted, often revolved around a more prosaic issue: its cost. Unlike most products and services, whose costs are reduced by economies of scale, the cost of telephone calls increased as the number of connections grew exponentially, requiring more operators and more elaborate switching equipment to complete them. While many telephone companies charged subscribers a flat fee for local calling, non-local, long-distance, and pay station calls involved tolls. To collect tolls, operators had to identify callers, document the time, date, and destination of calls, record their duration, and apply appropriate rate schedules. This, in turn, entailed complex recordkeeping practices. Drawing upon early industry accounts and archival sources in AT&T and Southern New England Telephone Company records, this paper examines the work of accounting for telephone talk prior to its semi-automation. While documenting these procedures, this paper considers the larger historical and cultural implications of commodifying an elemental form of human interaction: talk.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Americans used telephones for the first time. Telephone talk was neither intuitive nor self-explanatory. Telephone users had to be taught how to speak through the telephone and how to interact with other telephone users. They had to be trained to follow new technical and social protocols to make telephone communication “work.” While the surveillance and discipline of early telephone operators has received considerable scholarly attention, the disciplining of telephone users has not. The telephone’s main selling point was its convenience: instant, direct voice communication at a distance. Such convenience not only depended upon the efficiency of telephone operators, but also the efficiency of telephone users. Telephone users that failed to follow the telephone company’s rules and protocols – e.g., inarticulate, incompetent, inconsiderate – introduced costly friction into the system. Though scholars such as Claude Fischer have described the education of telephone users in terms of “etiquette,” this framing does not capture its broader implications. By equating telephone talk with efficiency, early telephone companies promoted an instrumental vision of human interaction, one that imagined ideal communication in terms of speed, economy, and individual control. This commercial vision of personal communication would shape future understandings of the telephone as a technology of personal convenience. This paper examines early telephone industry efforts to produce efficient telephone users. Though many telephone users flouted or ignored industry rules and recommendations, which some scholars have interpreted as evidence of user agency, the cumulative effects of industry advertising, instructional texts, and corrective interventions administered by operators largely succeeded. By the 1920s Americans were habituated to the sociotechnical imperatives of telephone communication. They were attuned to its ring, answered promptly, followed discursive scripts when speaking, and performed the work of telephone talk with predictable efficiency.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia