A friendly voice from the other end of the line

With the invention of the telephone, the ethnic territory of Slovenia as well witnessed the rapid development of telephony. At first, telephones were directly connected, but later, with the increasing number of subscribers, this became impractical and expensive. Hence telephone exchanges emerged in which operators manually established the connection between individual subscribers. The public manual telephone exchanges were connected to telephone subscribers or small home telephone exchanges used, for example, in hotels or factories.

The first manual telephone exchange in Slovenia was installed on 16 October 1897 in the new postal headquarters in Ljubljana. It was connected to 89 subscribers and one public telephone booth. That same day, the Slovene newspaper Slovenec published an article saying that ringing and dialling would escalate in Ljubljana. Two months later, the switchboard in Maribor began operating, with 19 subscribers and one public telephone booth connected. Both exchanges were included in the Vienna-Graz-Maribor-Ljubljana-Trieste long-distance telephone link, covering a distance of 505 kilometres.

Primarily due to economic and social situation, at the end of the 19th century, telegraph offices began to employ mainly female telegraph and telephone operators. Not only were women more adept and accurate in this job, but their speech was more understandable due to high-pitched voices, and the subscribers preferred to hear a friendly female operator on the other end of the line. The occupations of telegraph and telephone operators became typical and almost exclusively female professions.

Work in manual telephone exchanges was demanding and responsible. They connected up to 300 calls a day, monitored conversations at all times, and ensured the lines were optimally used. The international telephone operators spoke several languages and worked day and night due to the time differences.

After WWI, the Slovene postal administration heavily invested in expanding telephone services. Women became increasingly important in the phone business and gradually won more rights and better salaries. Before entering the service, candidates had to take courses. Moreover, they constantly improved their skills and participated in competitions. After WWII, blind and visually impaired people began to be trained for working in telephone exchanges, initially in courses, until a dedicated School for Telephone Operators was established in Škofja Loka in 1962.

The modernisation of telegraph services, the gradual full automation of telephone traffic, and the prevalence of new technologies prompted the decline of the telephone and telegraph operater professions. Nevertheless, manual telephone exchanges were still in use in Slovenia in the second half of the 20th century. By 1985, eight were still included in the national telephone network. The last ceased operation in September 1987 at the post office in Jakobski Dol in northeast Slovenia, from where it was moved to the Museum of Post and Telecommunications.

One of the most documented professions that illustrates the evolution of telecommunications in Portugal is that of the women telephone operators. The women who worked at the telephone exchanges as telephone operators were also known as “telephone girls”.

In 1882, there were around nine telephone operators in Portugal. In 1900 there were 15 telephone operators in Porto and 20 in Lisbon, with monthly salaries between three and ten thousand reis for an eight-hour day. The service was provided 24 hours a day. The night shifts, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., were performed by men who had other professional activities during the day.

However, not all women could be admitted as telephone operators; a set of requirements was demanded of them. They had to be between 16 and 20 years of age and single, justified by the weekend work they were subjected to and not acceptable in marriage. In addition, they had to be at least 1.50 tall, have good hearing, a clear voice and excellent diction. For these professionals, as for mechanics, line guards and bulletin clerks, the minimum qualification to enter the career was primary school education. After an exhaustive medical examination, the operator entered the Technical School for a two-month course during which she learned the operator codes and the telephone system, call handling and Company regulations. Discretion, efficiency, dedication and effort were required at all times when dealing with the public. When telephone operators were hired at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a one-month practice period, which could last up to three months, for which they were not paid.

According to records, a telephone operator named Odília Guimarães Seixas entered the Picaria central office in the north of Portugal in 1929. Her first salary was 180 escudos. Having completed two years of intermediate education (8^th grade), Odília made a reasonable living by knitting shawls. Still, she preferred to become an operator for the type of work and status it held. She took great satisfaction in contact with the public – she knew the name of those who asked for her calls, their tastes, habits and even their moods. The female operators had to wear a hat and stockings while other employees had to wear a suit.

Between half-past ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, the number of calls often reached 3595, averaging more than ten calls per minute per operator. Until 1940, both in Europe and in America, if girls were married or were getting married, they had to keep it a secret to keep their job.

During the troubled times of 1910 and 1915, the press also reported the heroics of the “telephone girls” who, despite being exhausted by the difficult and long days of the war, ensured communications while maintaining the same professionalism and friendliness. On 5 October 1910, two bombs, perhaps launched from Terreiro do Paço, went through the skylight of the building where the Conceição Street station was located and exploded inside it. The telephone operators did not leave their workstations!

In the early 1930s, a tremendous technological advance in the automation of the telephone network took place (called the “golden age” of APT). With it came an increase in demand for telephone service. However, the operator’s intervention gradually lost its human tone, and this type of work started to disappear. Nevertheless, this resulted in a significant improvement in the quality of the service provided, in time and in labour costs, which would translate into a massive benefit for subscribers as telephone tariffs became cheaper and more accessible.

Most of the telephone operators transitioned to the information and customer support services, and some started to voice the wake-up, the time and the weather forecast services.

Women Telephone Exchange Operators, 1891. Photo credits: Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, Iconographic archive	Manual telephone exchange and female operators at the Maribor 1 post office, 1919–1920. Source: Technical museum of Slovenia