You thought your job was monotonous? This needed to be automated. (Courtesy Telecommunications History Group)īut watches still didn't set themselves, so in the 1920s Amstein says some phone companies "began experimenting with a live time-of-day service," where a live operator would read the time to a revolving queue of callers at a set pace, multiple times a minute. "The phone company," says Amstein, "started putting notices in the newspapers telling people the operators would no longer answer questions like what time it was, because they needed them to concentrate fully on connecting people's phone calls." The kind of schedule a live time and date operator would have followed to accurately deliver the time multiple times a minute. In 1918, the Spanish flu spread across the country, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. And certainly if the operators weren't too busy and had time, they would answer all sorts of questions for people," like the weather and the current, correct time. Though never an official service, Amstein says, "The phone company wanted to be friendly and helpful. "It's impossible for us to know exactly when someone first called the operator to ask her what time it was," says Amstein, "but surely that happened in the very earliest days of the (phone) system." You needed to start with the accurate time when setting and winding your watch, or clock, which would then maintain the correct time. Watches and clocks weren't set automatically like they are today. You could find these accurate clocks in railroad stations and at the phone company. "Starting in 1870, Western Union, the telegraph company, offered a nationwide, highly accurate time service, where they would install a clock in your business that was controlled centrally by their master clock in New York City and represented super accurate time for the day," explains Peter Amstein of the Telecommunications History Group. Operators had access to something the average person didn't in those days: the correct time. NPR One or your favorite podcast platform. The telephone began to spread across the country those earliest phones were connected by live operators who would manually connect your call.īay Curious is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area. The answer begins at the very origins of the telephone in 1876, when just two years after Alexander Graham Bell famously invented the technology, phone service went commercial. That service went dark back in 2007, and Bay Curious listener George wants to know why. For decades there was a phone service in Northern California that would read you the time and date if you dialed POP-CORN, the letters that represented 767-2676. Here is a throwback to an earlier era some of you may remember.
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