Papers presented by Josh Lauer since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"When Telephone Operators were Accountants"
Josh Lauer, University of New Hampshire
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.