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O -D -O -O dot com. welcome to stuff you should know a production of iheart radio hey and welcome to the podcast i'm josh there's chuck ring ring there's jerry and this is stuff you should know that's right this is a kyle joint so a little british factor too in here because kyle likes to throw those in because that's
That's where he lives.
Yeah. He keeps mentioning fish and chips every, like, few paragraphs.
Yeah. What's a chippy?
That's right. We are going to be talking about telephone switchboards, some overlap with a couple of other episodes we've done.
But this is all about the, you know, the advancement of the telephone system in the United States and abroad and how the telephone switchboard was a crucial, crucial part of that.
Yeah. First, I want to give a shout out.
If you ever find yourself in the town of Maitland, Florida, go to the Maitland, I think, well, it's the telephone museum.
There's probably not more than one telephone museum in Maitland, even though I can't remember the name of it.
Just ask somebody for directions there and they will tell you or ask your app.
Regardless, it's really cute.
It's not the biggest museum you'll ever find, but it's a very dedicated museum.
I love old telephones.
I would like to check that out.
Oh, you'd love this.
There's a bank of wall telephones from the 70s probably.
And each one's a different color.
It's very pretty. Oh, my God.
Yeah, you would like this place, Chuck.
It reminded me that something that was just such an integral part of our life is a completely obsolete, outdated, antique technology.
There's basically no reason for it to exist any longer.
And it may not as far as I know.
Yeah. I think you still have to have it to connect some home alarm systems maybe.
But that's the only application I know of anymore.
Actually, you know what?
We had that for a landline for that reason for a while, but no longer.
I mean, I just don't think that there's any reason for it to exist any longer.
I'm sure I'm wrong, but that's the best I can come up with is home alarm systems.
I guess nostalgia is not a good enough reason, huh?
To keep this amazing network of technology still around?
Oh, yeah, man. I mean, lots of – it's dumb.
It's just my – our Gen X selves, like, looking back with joy about walking around your bedroom with a long phone cord.
Yeah. Or your mom literally being able to go to every point in the kitchen with, like, a 25 -foot stretchy phone cord that you're ducking under and it's knocking things over.
That's right. There goes the flower.
Wireless is better, I know.
I don't think it's just nostalgia.
I think there is some real value or it's not pointless to look at the telephone system that was created over the decades in the 20th century and just be impressed.
Like it wasn't a marvelous technology and it did some amazing stuff while it was around.
It's just we've moved on technology wise.
But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.
Yeah. I wonder if they're safer for like government systems, you know, because you literally have to tap the wire physically.
It's not just in the airwaves.
True that. So, I don't know.
I don't know either.
But that's a great point.
I'm curious. Surely someone knows.
But let's talk about Alexander Graham Bell because he is the OG.
He's the guy that invented, well, patented the telephone at least.
Right. Right. And from Boston in 1876, where he was not trying to invent a telephone.
He was trying to work out the problem with the electrical telegraph, which was it was just getting bunched up.
Too many people are sending too many, you know, telegraphs and it's a problem.
So there's too much traffic.
So all of a sudden, Bell, who was a sound guy anyway, realized that you could send tones.
and once he realized you could send a tone along a wire, he was like, oh, forget the telegraph.
I'm going to come up with the harmonic telegraph and one day I'm going to speak to somebody on the other end of a wire.
Yeah, not dots and dashes, but haze and how are yas.
Or ahoyes. Yeah, right.
So he did this in 1876, right?
He set out to figure out the telegraph clogging and invented the phone pretty quickly.
The next year he found a Bell Telephone Company.
And the first permanent telephone wires were in Boston, I think that same year, right?
So we had telephone service set up within a year of him inventing the telephone.
One of the other things too is he helped kind of spread telephone technology by giving lectures that people would come see and then go off and like build their own versions that would work.
But initially, when you were talking to somebody on a telephone, your telephone was physically connected to their telephone, which made a lot of sense initially.
But if you want to talk to more than one friend in town, you need another wire to connect your phone to somebody else's telephone and so on and so forth.
And if you just kind of follow that logical path, you very quickly realize like, man, we're going to need a lot of wires to connect one person to everybody else and everybody else to that one person.
It's just that's the definition of exponential growth.
And so they figured out they needed a different way rather than connecting each telephone physically.
And that's where they came up with the concept of the switchboard.
That's right. What if all of the calls went into a central location, and there was a human being there that would connect those two wires?
It's a very elegant, very simple sort of system.
It's, you know, it's literally connecting two calls by, you know, by connecting them, by plugging them into the same, what would you even call that?
Switchboard? Jack? Yeah, the same jack.
The first switchboard commercially was in 1878, so only, geez, like a year after the Bell Telephone Company was founded.
This is in New Haven, Connecticut, and it connected 21 different subscribers in this case.
And this is a very old -fashioned, primitive thing.
Before long, they were like, why don't we wrap these cords in cloth?
It's like insulated.
And why don't we make the, you know, the board look a little nicer?
and we'll call them a cord board, but everyone's still going to call them a switchboard.
Yes. One thing really quick too, when some of these first commercial switchboards popped up in towns, like the one in New Haven that I guess George Coy was the inventor of, they would publish phone books.
And the first phone books would be like one page with like 50 people's names on them.
Because when you called, you would call and your call would be connected by an operator.
So you'd pick up your phone and the only person it would go to is the operator of switchboard and you would say, I want to talk to Chuck Bryant, please.
And the operator would look up where your jack was that went to your house and then now connected the call, right?
So they would plug my phone cord into your phone jack and connect our call.
But first they would plug in themselves to you and say, Josh Clark calling for Charles Bryant and you would say tell him I'm in the shower I'll accept the call they would plug back into mine and be like he's in the shower he can't talk right now and I would say tell him that I know he's not in the shower
and hang up angrily you're not too far off that is if my Jack is on that board if it was a big enough community that switchboard operator might say I don't have Chuck on this board but he's on another board so I'm going to contact that switchboard and, you know, patch it in that way.
But first they'd spend 10 minutes going down each check, like Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.
Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.
Well, early on they just knew, you know, in a 21 -person situation, they just knew everybody.
In fact, for a little while they weren't even saying phone numbers.
They were just like Chuck Bryant.
Right. Exactly. And one of the other things about a central switchboard, too, is there's a phone company employee connecting calls, and so now you can track things more easily and hence bill people more accurately, too.
Yeah, because this is when making a call costs money.
And up until, I mean, not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, making a long -distance call costs extra money.
So you had to bill people, and it was pretty ingenious.
Things started growing, growing, growing.
You said the word exponentially, and that is the truth, because between 1880 and just 13 years later, we went from 60 ,000 phones to 260, And then just another 10 years later, there were 3 million phones in the United States only.
Kyle points out that in the U .K., they were a little bit behind us.
In 1914, there were fewer than two telephones per 100 people compared to 10 in the U .S., but they eventually caught up too, and everyone had phones.
That's right. I'm sure there's some listeners like, I didn't have a phone when I was a kid.
Well, maybe. So, as more and more people had phones, more and more jacks were required in switchboards.
So, you're getting bigger switchboards, more switchboards.
It became kind of a mess in and of itself, as we'll see.
That was known as the switchboard problem, right?
Yeah. But then finally, they figured out, okay, there's a few tweaks we can do here that are going to allow us to just support this growth.
Because the phone companies weren't like, whoa, we're good at 10 ,000 subscribers.
Let's just hold here.
They wanted everybody to have a phone so they could bill everybody for using those phones.
And also America or the United States or the world, I think, was like, we really want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to people.
It was a huge, enormous technology that completely changed how humans interact with one another.
So everybody wanted a phone.
The phone company wanted to give people phones.
the big sticking point was how you can connect that many people in an efficient way and not just keep adding switchboard after switchboard after switchboard.
Yeah. And, you know, something else we should point out, too, is this is a time where the phone company controlled the phones themselves.
So you can just go to a store and buy some cool looking Mickey Mouse phone or a Garfield phone, man, or what I have a phone from Sports Illustrated.
I had to get that for free, actually, but those are always garbage.
Those are the ones that look like push button, but when you hit it, it dialed.
Oh, really? Do you remember those?
You know, it had the keypad, but when you hit nine, it went.
No, I don't remember that.
It was a big bait and switch.
But you rented your phone at the time.
I guess if you had, or maybe they didn't sell them at all at first, but I know for a long time they rented phones to people like.
Into the 70s, right?
Yeah. I mean, like you used to rent your some people still probably rent their modem from their uh cable or whatever their wi -fi provider you're saying all the wrong words no i think you got it provider yeah our internet is internet service provider isp that's okay uh but yeah anyway they were they
were controlling the flow of money in more ways than just the bill uh they wanted as many people to have phones as possible because they were renting those phones and eventually i guess selling those phones yeah Yeah, I remember Yumi has a story from when she was a kid of going to the phone store with her
dad and renting a princess phone.
I remember it. It's so weird.
It is weird. It's just weird to think of.
But like you said, that was a way for them to control revenue even more.
And also, I think it made it more available to more people because I think even into the 60s, the 70s, phones were still kind of expensive to make.
And so they were expensive to buy.
So you could lease them.
But I think ultimately it was it was really the phone companies.
And they were able to get away from this, as we'll see, because for years and years and years, there was essentially a monopoly on the phone in the United States.
That's right. But I got us a little off track.
You were talking about some new techniques because these switchboards all of a sudden were getting just more and more ubiquitous.
And they started to get a little clunky and like how long it would take to connect calls.
So one of the things they did is came up with a concept of what's called the divided exchange, which is really just an organizational structural thing where people got more specialized.
You might have operators just answering the phone.
You might have people just connecting instead of the person going, oh, hey, Josh, let me see if Chuck's available.
Like, all of that was really streamlined eventually until they came up with what was called the express system that had a lot of letter B boards that converged on a letter A board, and there was an operator linking between those two.
Right. Yeah. So the A person, the person at the A board would be like, oh, yeah, Josh is on B board 72.
But Chuck is on B board three.
So I need I need to be the one that connects B board 72 and B board three for this call.
These are human beings doing this and expected to do it really fast, too, as we'll see.
Yeah. They also just improved the signals like signal strength.
All of a sudden, operators weren't, like, yelling at each other, you know, which can cause just chaos in a room with a bunch of switchboard operators.
What's the number for dominoes?
Yeah, exactly. So just improving the signal really optimized how those things function, such, you know, even just making the little signal lamps, the little lights brighter.
Right. Responding to the current in the line.
Like, everything just got a little better.
Yeah, and the current in the line was a huge thing, too.
Not only would it light up the little light above your jack showing the operator like, oh, this guy's trying to call right now, but it also allowed for telephones to carry a little bit of a current, which was how the voice was broadcast anyway.
But it was one more thing that they controlled.
They powered everything, which made the whole thing more efficient.
Rather than having a bunch of batteries out by the lines, there was a central group of batteries and power generation that came from the main office, too.
So when you put all this stuff together, they got really good at analyzing traffic, too, to kind of put resources, you know, where it needed in any given time.
You put all this together for the next four or five decades, the phone system just kept expanding and expanding and expanding.
But there was always a frontier.
There was – these were individual cities, individual towns.
And if the town or the city was close enough to another town or city, they would probably be able to connect.
But for the most part, these phone systems are growing intra, well, internally.
Let's just say that.
I almost got really fancy for a second, but I'm just going to say they were internal into each town, growing and growing and growing, connecting subscribers.
But each town was kind of like its own isolated island of telephony.
Yeah. And so obviously the next thing to conquer would be the LD, long distance.
At the time, if you wanted to pick up a phone in New York City and call San Francisco, you couldn't do it.
No, but I say we take a break, leave this as a cliffhanger.
And when we come back, we'll say whether or not they were eventually able to do it.
Stuxnet. Who? Stuxnet.
Say it one more time.
Stuxnet. I don't know.
You know what Stuxnet is.
Is that in this? Stuxnet.
Stuxnet. It's a great name.
Yeah, I could say Stuxnet.
That's the name of it.
I know. It's a great name.
All right. Stuxnet with an X.
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