These telephone girls are the human part of a great communication machine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into a new pattern every minute. How many possible combinations there are with the five million telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage of conversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever has once seen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of the switchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse of the city's life.
In 1902 the New York Telephone Company started a school, the first of its kind in the world, for the education of these telephone girls. This school is hidden amid ranges of skyscrapers, but seventeen thousand girls discover it in the course of the year. It is a most particular and exclusive school. It accepts fewer than two thousand of these girls, and rejects over fifteen thousand.
Not more than one girl in every eight can measure up to its standards; and it cheerfully refuses as many students in a year as would make three Yales or Harvards.
This school is unique, too, in the fact that it charges no fees, pays every student five dollars a week, and then provides her with a job when she graduates. But it demands that every girl shall be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced, and with a certain poise and alertness of manner.
Presence of mind, which, in Herbert Spencer's opinion, ought to be taught in every university, is in various ways drilled into the temperament of the telephone girl. She is also taught the knack of concentration, so that she may carry the switchboard situation in her head, as a chess-player carries in his head the arrangement of the chess-men. And she is much more welcome at this strange school if she is young and has never worked in other trades, where less speed and vigilance are required.
No matter how many millions of dollars may be spent upon cables and switchboards, the quality of telephone service depends upon the girl at the exchange end of the wire. It is she who meets the public at every point. She is the de-spatcher of all the talk trains; she is the ruler of the wire highways; and she is expected to give every passenger-voice an instantaneous express to its destination. More is demanded from her than from any other servant of the public. Her clients refuse to stand in line and quietly wait their turn, as they are quite willing to do in stores and theatres and barber shops and railway stations and everywhere else. They do not see her at work and they do not know what her work is. They do not notice that she answers a call in an average time of three and a half seconds.
They are in a hurry, or they would not be at the telephone; and each second is a minute long.
Any delay is a direct personal affront that makes a vivid impression upon their minds. And they are not apt to remember that most of the delays and blunders are being made, not by the expert girls, but by the careless people who persist in calling wrong numbers and in ignoring the niceties of telephone etiquette.
The truth about the American telephone girl is that she has become so highly efficient that we now expect her to be a paragon of perfection.
To give the young lady her due, we must acknowledge that she has done more than any other person to introduce courtesy into the business world. She has done most to abolish the old-time roughness and vulgarity. She has made big business to run more smoothly than little business did, half a century ago. She has shown us how to take the friction out of conversation, and taught us refinements of politeness which were rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days. Who, for instance, until the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciated the difference between "Who are you?" and "Who is this?" Or who else has so impressed upon us the value of the rising inflection, as a gentler habit of speech? This propaganda of politeness has gone so far that to-day the man who is profane or abusive at the telephone, is cut off from the use of it. He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-using community.
And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone apparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and 40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877.
The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. None had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the Western Electric agreed to make its telephones.
Three years later, when the brief spasm of competition was ended, the Western Electric was taken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the great workshop of the telephone.
