Title: Watch The Telephone | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
Headings: Newsletter
The Telephone
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American Experience
Newsletter

Content: Alexander Graham Bell reluctantly presented his new device at America's Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He didn't believe the world would be interested in his invention until he witnessed the startled and astonished reactions of the Exposition scientists and judges, one of whom declared Bell's invention the most amazing thing he had seen in America. Within a year of the centennial exhibition, Bell had installed 230 phones and had established the Bell Telephone Company. Four years after its creation, there were 60,000 phones; by the turn of the century there were two million. Despite its novelty and its rudimentary audio quality, the telephone took a quick and fierce hold on American society, and soon became a necessity. The first telephone operators were boys, who soon earned a reputation for being rude and abusive to each other as well as to the customers. The young women who replaced them did not swear and were said to be faster, and by 1910, New York Telephone had 6,000 women working on its switchboards. While the telephone joined teaching in finally bringing significant numbers of women into the workplace, there were rigid codes of dress and conduct the women had to follow. " You could only use certain phrases — 'Number please' and 'Thank you,'" recalls a former operator, 98-year-old Marie McGrath. "