Victorian call centres

Victorians had qualities which mark them out even to this day: thrift, hard work, a practical nature, a mentality of self-help.  Such qualities, I believe, are borne out of the nature of their society; there was no social security network, for example, to go to when they fell on hard times.  If there was no family to help, then people in distress would have to rely on their own resources.

Widows were especially vulnerable.  Losing a husband meant they had to become the breadwinner overnight.  For women of the lower classes, going out to work was not so remarkable and it was relatively easy to earn money.  The major forms of employment were domestic service or factory work.  For the middle class woman, however, paid employment was simply not an option.  The most she could hope for was a position as governess or companion to old ladies.  Both meant living in and a drop in social status.  And the money earned would have been peanuts.

One highly practical solution for such widows was the practice of giving them a sewing machine as a present.  This was not charity and allowed the widow to become self-sufficient.  Working from home, the widow maintains respectability, and performs a task considered appropriate for women.  She could receive orders for new garments or domestic textiles, or take in alterations.

But why bother with a sewing machine?  Close needlework ruins your eyesight (remember, they only had gas or oil lamps then) and you get a hump back bending over your work.  Some projects would take days or weeks to finish.  A much better alternative to the donated sewing machine is – wait for it – a telephone. 

A writer identifying herself (I think we can safely assume the writer is female) as “Self Help” sent in a suggestion to an 1884 periodical,[1] saying that the gift of a telephone connection to the central exchange is an inordinately better income generator than a sewing machine.  Here are some of the ways the widow can exploit her telephone (and simultaneously exploit her friends):

1. Send out flyers to her lady friends that she can now order goods on their behalf from local traders, who are also connected by telephone.  They might order the following: flowers, fish, theatre tickets, coal, wine.  The writer believes that traders would be willing to pay the widow 10% commission for all orders she puts their way.
2. She could allow merchants and their employees to use her telephone for business purposes.  They pay a few pennies to the widow and telephone the office to say they would be an hour late. 

Given a choice, I would opt for the telephone.  It’s much easier than labouring over a sewing machine that’s not even electric.  Turning your front parlour into a one-woman call centre has a lot going for it – intense networking with friends and local business people; no commuting every day; being at home to look after children.

This idea surfaced during the telephone's first decade in Britain.  It shows amazing entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking on how to put a new technology to good use.

I still maintain that the technological practices and gadgets that we consider ultra modern and super digital are not in the slightest bit new or original – they are merely faster/bigger/cheaper versions of what the Victorians did before us.

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[1] Work and leisure: a magazine devoted to the interests of women.  London: F. Kirby, 1884.

Sex discrimination, in the opposite direction

“There are now 120 women in the Berlin telephone exchanges.  It has been decided to use only women in the future, as it has been found that their voices are much more audible than men’s, owing to the higher pitch.”

The American Magazine, 1891

… and, of course, you don’t have to pay a woman such high wages, as you would a man.

Just a copper wire

New York, 1888

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
     tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
     me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
     shine drying,
               A copper wire.

Carl Sandburg composed this short poem in 1916.  In just a few brief lines, he manages to capture the pure simplicity of telephony - one single copper wire strung up in the street, which carries all of human experience: life and death, love and hate.  Conveying human speech, the wire itself speaks with its (his? her?) own voice in the first person to us directly.

And what a refreshing change to read something from this era that talks of "men and women" and not the bland, generic "Mankind" or "Man."  Of course, when contemporaries wrote of mankind, especially in the context of telecommunications, they usually inferred men, excluding women.  Sandburg redresses the balance by including women as telephone users.

Incidentally, his mention of wires being exposed to the elements brings to mind those epic old photographs of telephone wires collapsing in snow storms.  Derricks perched on rooftops throughout urban centres were easily felled when the wind was strong.  They were loaded with wires (one for each subscriber) and engineers had to start from scratch when the whole structure came down.
 

"Selling Talk"

I came across another little gem in the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company publication, "Telephone Facts" of 1915.  Remember, this is a journal the company sent out to its business customers (telephone companies) who were in the market for telephones, switchboards, and sundry accessories.

Strategically positioned on the first inside page is a short sales pitch that salesmen can use to market the telephone to potential subscribers.  What is interesting is that the piece does not focus at all on the technical aspects of the telephone apparatus, its durability, technological features, innovation and such like.  Instead, the only selling point the salesman should emphasise is talk.  This is the commodity that the telephone man deals in.  Even more surprising (to me, at least) is the fact that the writer mentions that it doesn't matter if the talk is important or trivial, it is still significant.

Ads such as these link to Claude Fischer's discussion about how American telephone companies suddenly discovered sociability and how, surprise surprise, encouraging people to be sociable was good for business.  We then see a gradual turnaround in telephone companies' attitudes: they ceased promoting the telephone purely for 'serious' business use and stopped berating women who insisted on abusing the telephone for mere trivia.  Now gossip was good.

Everyone involved in the telephone business, from lineman, contract man to operator, was reminded: "you sell talk."

This is all well and good and highly interesting, but what happened in Britain?  It is well known that the telephone service in Britain was grossly under-developed (and dare I even say, backward?) in comparison.  Certainly, in 1915 there was no massive, national advertising campaign undertaken by the General Post Office.  War concerns were more pressing, but even after the war, it would be a long time before any concerted efforts were made to promote the service.  


How the GPO promoted the telephone service is one huge area still awaiting intensive research.  I can't wait to get started!!

 

"Has the telephone killed the old-fashioned love letter?"

Apparently, yes.  The 1915 American trade magazine Telephone Facts hosted an article which counts the costs of telephony for courting couples.  The anonymous author acknowledges that a young lady may appreciate the conveniences of a domestic telephone connection, but this comes at a price, the price being a packet of letters from her beau, tied with a ribbon (perhaps with dried flowers), stashed at the back of her drawer.  

An ephemeral telephone call leaves no trace, moods are misinterpreted, details of the conversation may be forgotten.  A tangible letter, however, with visible signs left by its creator, can be re-read, touched, smelled.

A telephone call is easy for the boy: he can just ring up for a chat on an impulse, but sitting down to compose a letter requires time and effort.  And he'd much rather hear his beloved's voice over the "talking wire" than receive a dozen letters from her.  The same cannot be said for the girl.  She too would love to hear his voice but there are disadvantages: crossed lines, eavesdroppers, a hundred pairs of curious ears listening in on the party line.  (Admittedly, the writer's sexist bias is showing through; the same arguments are, of course, valid if the roles are reversed.)

The article was obviously penned by an agony aunt or an arbiter of public manners.  Those few etiquette manuals that devoted space to telephone use, relegated its use to informal circles.  Certainly where courtship is concerned, a visit or an outing could be chaperoned, but not so a telephone call.

I think there is a grain of truth in the writer's assertions.  A phone call from a loved one is always welcome, but a letter or card, however brief and simple, requires so much more effort on the writer's part.  Aside from the difficulty in choosing the right words, you have to find writing paper, pen, envelope, a stamp, and then go out and find a postbox (if it's the butler's day off).  It is this extra effort that makes the letter so valuable to the receiver, even though it is not consciously thought about.

It is for these reasons that I treasure all the letters I've received from friends and family and store them safe with my photographs.  I don't think we can say the same for messages of endearment sent by SMS.

“Fass dich kurz!”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the price we pay for each telephone call we make determines the quality of the call and its contents.  And by ‘quality’ I don’t mean whether the connection is successful or if the line is scratchy.

Let me elaborate by drawing a comparison.

Then

In the old days, when domestic telephones used to be situated in hallways and before multiplexing made its appearance, telephone users were more cautious about making a call.  If they did eventually decide that, yes, the call was necessary, they made sure they got off the line as quickly as possible.  By today’s standards, the cost of making phone calls then was much more expensive.  With charges determined by call duration and geographical destination, short local calls were cheaper.  And if you had a lot to say to someone who lived on another continent, then write a letter.

In my first job I worked in an office where every telephone was plastered with stickers reminding people to ring after 1.00 p.m. when off-peak calls were cheaper.  You were only justified in making morning calls in life-or-death situations.  Mornings were always blissfully quiet, but the afternoons erupted as all the telephones went crazy and rang non-stop.  Try telling your office workers today not to make calls during morning hours.

My supervisor remembers making telephone calls as a teenager (again in her home’s hallway) and having her father shout at her to be brief.  Anecdotal evidence shows that this is by no means an unusual experience in the early twentieth century.  In those days, time really was money.

Now that I think about it, making phone calls in the earlier decades must have been very much like using Twitter: you had to be short and succinct to get your message across in as few words as possible.  No waffling on for hours on end.

Now

Most people choose to pay a flat rate for their telephone connection, mobile or landline.  Quite often they get the whole package – telephone, internet, television. 

When you’re talking on the telephone, your mind is free of the torment of the ticking clock.  You can talk for two minutes or two hours, the price is the same. 

You no longer have to think twice about whether the call is really essential or not.  You can ring someone up to be purely sociable, to catch up on gossip, or just because you’ve got absolutely nothing better to do and want to ease the boredom of a long train journey (and have no reading material to hand).  Those bores that use their mobiles to drone on in public places about their inane existence are well known examples.

The comparison

Now I come to my point about call quality.  If the cost of the telephone call is cheap, you don’t give a second thought to lifting up the receiver.  It doesn’t seem such a waste then to use the telephone for trivial reasons.  With timed, expensive calls, on the other hand, you really question the necessity of making that call.  Anyone who has ever had to make an important call from a public phone box with just one 10p coin will understand the implications.

Perhaps there is an element of technological determinism here.  The nature of our telephone network (and its pricing structure) shapes not only our communications practices but also our attitudes towards that network.

I’ll finish off with a salutary lesson for ardent telephone users.  Last month Amtrak officials threw a woman off a night train after passengers complained that she had been speaking loudly on her phone, for 15 hours.  I’m left wondering – what on earth did this woman find to talk about for 15 hours?

Franz Göll’s cultural capital

Reading an account of Berliner Franz Göll’s life (1899-1984), I imagine him as a bit of a dandy.  He was quite a clothes horse; he bought fedora hats (nine of them in the space of seven years), gloves, bow ties and all the accoutrements of the middle class lifestyle that he aspired to.  But it is not Göll’s sartorial elegance that impresses me – he was after all a bachelor and could indulge himself as he pleased – but rather his trips to the cinema.  The numbers are impressive.  Beginning in 1919 he went to the cinema 19 times (once every 2.7 weeks).  Over the years this increased until 1926, when he made 74 visits to the cinema, once and sometimes twice a week!  Another diarist of the Weimar era (Klemperer) reports that every day 2 million Germans visited the cinema.

I tried to imagine myself doing what Göll did; visiting the cinema at least once, maybe twice a week.  Without a television at home and perhaps no radio, the cinema would be my only source of entertainment and information.  News reels, of course, would have lent an air of currency to a visit.  Did they change the programme so frequently that I could see a different film every time?  Even by visiting cinemas in other neighbourhoods?  And were the films so good that I would be prepared to fork out for an evening’s entertainment something from my modest wage?  

In comparison, today’s cinematic offerings are not that appetizing and the complexes throughout the city all show more or less the same films.  (If you’re lucky, you might find an alternative, non-Hollywood picture house tucked away in some back alley that shows European productions, but this would be an exception.)  

I can only think that Göll was trying to increase his share of cultural capital.  When he wasn't visiting the cinema, he attended concerts, operettas, and theatre - comedy and heavier stuff.  I don't think he spent many evenings at home after work. 

Would I want to go to the cinema every week, or even twice a week?  I don’t think so, even if the films shown were Oscar-winning material and my favourite genre.  I couldn’t keep it up for a whole year and would give up after a month.  What was it that kept Göll motivated?  It might have been a novelty in the beginning but surely not after seven years.  Göll kept a film diary but sadly this has disappeared; we’ll never know which films he saw and what his impressions were.  

A postscript - Göll died in 1984 but stopped writing his journals in 1982.  Why did he give up his writing, something that he had been doing for sixty-six years?  One possible reason could be the colour television be bought a couple of years earlier.  Could be coincidental, but I think not.

Fritzsche, Peter.  The Turbulent World of Franz Göll.  An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century.  Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011.