Medium-to-large organizations often employ switchboard operators—specialized staff who answer general telephone calls to the organization and usually maintain internal communication through telephones, and pagers.

Depending on the employment setting, the roles and level of responsibilities of a "Switchboard operator" can vary greatly, from performing wake-up calls in a hotel to coordinating emergency responses, dispatching, and overhead paging in hospitals. Operators employed in healthcare settings have other duties, such as data entry, greeting patients and visitors, taking messages, triaging, or acting as an after hours answering service. Experienced, well trained operators generally command a higher salary.

In the early days of telephony, through roughly the 1960s, companies used manual telephone switchboards and switchboard operators connected each call by inserting a pair of phone plugs into the appropriate jacks. Each pair of plugs was part of a cord circuit with a switch associated that let the operator participate in the call. Each jack had a light above it that lit when the telephone receiver was lifted (the earliest systems required a generator on the phone to be cranked by hand). Lines from the central office were usually arranged along the bottom row. Before the advent of direct distance dialing, switchboard operators would work with their counterparts in the central office to complete long distance calls.

A note: in the United States of America, any switchboard operator employed by an independently owned public telephone company which has not more than seven hundred and fifty stations is excluded from the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

In January 1878 George Willard Croy became the world's first telephone operator when he started working for the Boston Telephone Despatch company.^[1]

Emma Nutt became the world's first female telephone operator on 1st September 1878 when she started working for the Boston Telephone Despatch company, because the attitude and behaviour of boys was unacceptable ^[2] Emma was hired by Alexander Graham Bell,^[1] and reportedly, could remember every number in the telephone directory of the New England Telephone Company.^[1]

[edit] See also

• Attendant console
• Private branch exchange
• Telephone switchboard
• Telephone operator

[edit] References

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