CHAPTER 5Necessary Accessories
When my childhood home first had telephone service, we would pick up a receiver handset and an operator 3 miles away would see an indicator light up on a matrix of jacks at a switchboard. The human operator, Gladys, would plug her headset into the jack below our light and say, “Number please?” We’d give Gladys the number (or even the person’s name), and she would plug in our line into the jack associated with the number we needed, while applying the ring voltage to the appropriate line pair.
If the recipient of your call was home and answered the phone, you would be “connected” for the duration of the call. In those days, it was difficult to not get caught calling the corner grocery store to ask whether they had ...
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