America remembers Emma Nutt – switchboard pioneer

Hello September. The first day of the month memorializes the late Emma Mills Nutt of Chelsea, Mass., who was America’s first female telephone operator. 

She was hired by Alexander Graham Bell and reported to work on Sept. 1, 1878. At age 18, she became a trailblazer of telephony. 

 

Emma Mills Nutt

Sept. 1 also is the birthday of comedy queen Lily Tomlin, born in 1939. Her portrayal of a 1940s-era telephone operator on the “Laugh-In” show debuted on U.S. television in 1969. It was hilariously popular and was the springboard for Tomlin’s acting career. 

Tomlin’s legendary character was known as Ernestine. Her sarcastic and nasally routine began with her placing a call from her switchboard station to the private line of unsuspecting customers such as General Motors, the Central Intelligence Agency or Cher.

“One ringy dingy; two ringy dingy,” Ernestine would count. When the call was picked up, she would say: “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” Tomlin’s outlandish customer service skills…or lack thereof…and intermittent snorting made for humorous skits. 

Whereas Emma Nutt was the real deal. She was professional and savvy with a cultured, soothing voice, according to the archivist at the New England Historical Society in Boston. Her success opened doors of opportunity for women to be employed as operators. 

The archivist said: “The original telephone operators were teenage boys who had transitioned from being telegraph operators. These young men ‘didn’t do well talking to real people.’ They were impatient, they liked to play jokes and they swore. Customers complained that they spoke too gruffly to them.” 

Bell received the patent as the inventor of the telephone in 1876, and Bell Telephone Company was formed in Boston in 1877. He was appalled by the misbehavior and “rebellious attitudes” of the young male operators that he had hired.

As a solution, he dismissed them and began to hire women. Emma Nutt was the first. Before long, she had memorized the phone number of every customer in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, or so it’s told. 

The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities noted that female operators “had to pass height, weight and arm length tests, in order to fit into the tight quarters provided to switchboard operators.” 

Jennifer Latson, writing for TIME magazine, said: “Today, telephones are omnipresent in the world around us. Almost everyone carries a mobile phone. The ability to talk to the people we need to, whenever we need to, is something we take for granted. But connecting a call wasn’t always so seamless. 

Back in the early days, “unless you shared a direct line with the person you wished to speak with, an operator would need to connect your call for you,” Latson wrote. 

“Nutt excelled at her job and set an example for what all telephone operators should be – gentle, patient and overwhelmingly positive. Customers could connect with their operator to find out the names and addresses of other local customers…the latest news, weather forecast or sports results.” 

Latson continued: “Particularly early on, they would often serve the same small group of customers every day. As such, they’d create a sense of trust and friendship with their callers, and so they’d also become a good source of gossip.” 

Ernestine epitomized that image of the telephone operator, spreading gossip with her pal Phoenicia, another operator. 

In the nonfiction world, Emma Nutt’s success as an operator triggered the use of “the female voice” in technology…a trend that has continued into the 21st century.