Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of “Personal Service” in the Bell System, 1878–1921

Abstract

Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of “Personal Service” in the Bell System, 1878—1921 VENUS GREEN From the beginning, developments in telephone technology have transformed not only the telecommunications business but American industry in general. Despite its history as a pathbreaker, American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) has not always em­ braced new technologies hastily. AT&T remained indecisive about automatic switching for nearly thirty years after the first such system was created. Only after meticulous study followed by extensive exper­ imentation and actual field installations did the Bell System install fully automated switching equipment (“dial”) during the early 1920s.1 This article examines the reasons for Bell’s uncertainty about automa­ tion and its initial reluctance to accept dial. Efforts to explain how different factors shape the creation, applica­ tion, and diffusion of technologies in the workplace usually refer to industrial expansion and/or labor-management issues. Recent busi­ ness histories of the telephone industry’s early years examine the impact of technology on the evolution of corporate structure and the progress of the industry. Concerned with issues of profitability, efficiency, and competition, business historians view technical superiDr . Green is an assistant professor appointed jointly in the Department of History and the Department of Black Studies at the City College of the City University of New York. She wishes to thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Bernadette McCauley, Daryl Scott, Bruce Sinclair, and the Technology and Culture referees for their comments on previous versions of the article. Research for this article was partly funded by a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. lA fully automated system eliminated the need for operators by allowing the sub­ scriber to access the central office equipment which processed the call. In a semiauto­ matic system, subscribers continued to give the operator their requests, and she ac­ cessed the automatic switching equipment to complete the call. Automatic switching is also referred to as “dial” or machine switching. The Bell System refers to AT&T and its associated companies from 1885 to 1984. American Bell Telephone Company (ABT), founded in 1880, was the parent company until AT&T (founded as a long-distance company in 1885) replaced it on December 30, 1899.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3604-0007$01.00 912 The Decline of “Personal Service” in the Bell System 913 ority as a part of AT&T’s larger strategy to construct and control a national telephone system.2 In contrast, historians interested in work­ ers’ issues question management’s motives for introducing new tech­ nologies. In general, these scholars ask if managers seek to gain greater control over workers by using technology to replace them and/or to divide skilled labor into small chores that deprive workers of the opportunity to use their own judgment and initiative.3 Refer­ ring to telephone operators specifically, labor historians have argued that AT&T introduced dial to replace many operators and to intimi­ date those who remained.4 Depending on contemporaneous circum­ stances, business strategy and labor control issues have motivated 2Volumes in theJohns Hopkins University Press/AT&T Series in Telephone History affirm that the Bell System’s pursuit of technological superiority shaped its corporate structure (horizontal and vertical integration), led to the rise and defeat ofindependent competition, affected the demise of regional and local influences on the diffusion of telephones, and facilitated the expansion of telephone usage nationwide. See Neil H. Wasserman, From Invention to Innovation: LongDistance Telephone Transmission at the Turn ofthe Century (Baltimore, 1985); George David Smith, The Anatomy ofa Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric, and the Origins ofthe American Telephone Industry (Baltimore, 1985); Robert W. Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System’s Horizontal Structure, 1876—1909 (Baltimore, 1985); and Kenneth Lipartito, The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877—1920 (Baltimore, 1989). 3 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twenti­ eth Century (New York, 1974), is the seminal point of departure on this topic. Other labor historians have tested Braverman’s thesis in different workplaces and have ar­ rived at similar conclusions; see the essays in Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York, 1979); David Noble, Forces of...