History Revisited - women in the exchange

INFORMATION HUB. The telephone exchange became a centre for community information.

When the first telephone exchange opened in Armidale in August 1901, there were 24 subscribers connected to a 100 line switchboard. By 1910, the number of subscribers had increased to nearly 250.

The new telephone system was far more capital and labour intensive than the telegraph system. Lines had to be connected to premises, phones installed with new switchboards purchased to handle the growing traffic.

In Armidale, the new exchange was open twenty-four hours. This required the appointment of what came to be called telephonists who managed not only the calls, but also the detailed paper work required to ensure proper billing.

The first NSW switch attendants were all men. It was not until August 1896 that the first women were appointed to the Sydney central exchange, all selected from the ranks of the Education Department’s pupil teachers. It would be 1913 before the first female telephonist was employed on the New England Tableland.

The move to employ women was not welcomed by all.

In April 1908, a letter writer in the Sydney Morning Herald complained that females “are physically unfit to endure the strain of much-nerve-wracking work as telephone operating.” However, there were practical reasons for their appointment, for the pay scales were more attractive to girls than boys.

Much later, advances in telecommunications would drain jobs from country areas, but initially the first employment effects were positive. When responsibility for postal, telegraph and telephone services was transferred to the Commonwealth after Federation, the large number of employees in the PMG gave the new Commonwealth a physical presence, its only physical presence, in large parts of Australia.

While the telephone service expanded rapidly, the costs involved in the spread of the required infrastructure meant considerable lags. It would be 1925 before the first telephone call could be made between Sydney and Brisbane. This made the telephone a device first for local communication, while the telegraph or post still carried longer distance traffic.

It is easy to underestimate the importance of improved local communication on the pattern of local life. Both country and town people could ring up and order goods for later collection or delivery. It became much easier to organise meetings and events, something that was used to great effect by those with interests in politics or the advancement of particular causes. The tempo of politics speeded up.

In many country areas, the local telephone exchange became the centre of community information, of gossip about what was going on.

The telephonist became the central person in a hub of information and exchange, the one person who was in contact with nearly everybody and knew what people were doing. She was also the person people depended on to get the news through when something went wrong.

People complained, of course, especially on the party lines with multiple subscribers on a single line where anybody could listen in, but nobody who could afford to pay would have been without the service. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 1 July 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History Revisited - telephone links towns

REVOLUTIONARY: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the first telephone connection between New York and Chicago in 1892. In Australia, Melbourne and Sydney were not linked until 1907.

In December 1877, E. C. Cracknell, Superintendent, Electric Telegraphs, in New South Wales successfully transmitted songs and music over the 224 km distance between West Maitland and Sydney using telegraph wires. Late in May the following year while Cracknell was visiting Armidale, there was a partially successful attempt to establish telephone communications between the Armidale and Uralla telegraph offices.

Those dates are quite remarkable.

Alexander Graham Bell first achieved transmission of intelligible speech over wire on 10 March 1876. According to Keith Munro who has recorded the history of country telephonists, details of Bell’s invention were published in the English Mechanic and World of Science of 6 April 1877 and then the Scientific American of 6 October 1877.

As soon as those publications reached Australia, both private individuals and those in the telegraph world began to experiment, constructing telephones based on the magazine articles. The potential value was clear to all, including those in the United States who triggered massive patent and political battles fighting for control of the technology.

In 1880, the first working telephone exchanges were established in Melbourne and Brisbane, followed by Sydney in 1881. The telephone age was dawning.

Despite the very early date of that experiment linking Uralla and Armidale, telephony was a little slower reaching the North. Graziers were especially early adopters, for this aided business.

Early in the 1890s, a transformer became available that allowed voice transmission over single wire telegraph lines. Over the next decade, lines were slung across paddocks to homesteads, allowing transmission of telegraphs and instructions.

Older Armidale residents may well remember those lines. Often sagging, the poles ancient and sometimes moss covered, they helped form the base of country communications.

The first Armidale service dates to 31 October 1891 when a line was installed between the Armidale Railway Station and the Goods Shed. Then came a gap until 1896 when a second line was installed between the Armidale Hospital and the Infectious Hospital. This was on the corner of O’Dell and Donnelly Streets.

Another gap, and then in 1899 a line was installed between the Hospital and Dr Sheldon’s surgery. In August 1901, the first Tablelands’ telephone exchange opened at Armidale. By the end of 1914, there were fifteen exchanges dotted across the Tablelands.

Those exchanges changed our lives for better and worse. They created new patterns of social interaction, of communications, of working, of politics. They speeded life up.

Later, with further technological advances that speeded life would become the whirly gig we know today. In the meantime, a very specific world was created that would, in it’s turn, be swept away.

In my last column in this series, I will look at some of the social aspects of the telephone.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 24 June 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History Revisited - age of the telegram

GROUNDBREAKING TECHNOLOGY: Telegraph boys, Brisbane, 1870.  Armidale's own office opened in October 1861

As I indicated in my last column, the telegraph spread globally with quite remarkable speed. This was a case where technology directly coincided with an urgent unmet need for rapid communications.

The installation costs of the system on land were relatively low, facilitating rapid construction. Operating and maintenance costs were considerable, but these could be recovered from a marketplace eager for quick communication. The telegram was a classic example of a simple packaged high value product. Creation of undersea cables was expensive and more complex, but by then the demand was there to justify the costs and risks.

The first commercial telegraph system was installed on the Great Western Railway between London and Birmingham in 1837. On 1 May 1844, the first public telephone line between Baltimore and Washington DC opened. In Australia, the first Australian line between Melbourne and Williamtown opened in March 1854.

All the Australian colonies rapidly built lines. In 1858, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide were linked. In November 1861, the newly constructed NSW and Queensland lines met at the border, linking all the Eastern colonies.

Demand grew rapidly. New lines had to be added, while relatively small centres were quickly connected.

On the New England, telegraph offices were opened simultaneously on 1 October 1861 in Armidale, Glen Innes and Tenterfield as part of the opening of the progressive opening of the Northern Line. In 1869, a line to Port Macquarie was opened.

Older Armidalians will remember the telegram. It was so much part of or lives that is hard now to realise that our kids know nothing about it!

So, for the younger generation, telegrams were expensive. The cost of the telegram was based on the number or words, a sort of Twitter equivalent, so people kept their messages short.

The expense meant that, for the private person, telegrams were only sent on special occasions; marriages, deaths, anniversaries, congratulations and achievements,

I was in Hobart hitchhiking when my Leaving Certificate results came out. I went to the Hobart GPO to collect my mail, and there were all the telegraphs and other messages congratulating me. I took them back to the boarding house and read and reread the lot. I had no idea so many people were interested.

The link of the telegram with special news made their arrival a matter of great concern. So often, and especially during the two wars, their arrival meant the death of a loved one. A telegram carried fear.

Standing on their doorsteps, people ripped the envelope open to find the worst. The short clipped words carried a message that would change their lives forever. Distressed, they would carry the message indoors, trying to wok out what had to be done, what to do next.

Telegraph traffic peaked in 1945. Now a new competitor, the telephone, had become well entrenched. I will look at this in my next column. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 17 June 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History Revisited - changing the way the world communicates

TRAILBLAZING: Built from as early as 500 BC, the Roman Roads were physical infrastructure vital to the maintenance and development of the Roman State. 

If you are going to run an Empire, you need communications. The Romans had the Roman Roads, while Marco Polo’s Travels describe in almost breathless tones the extensive communications system in the Great Khan’s empire.

Using both runners and horses with posting stations spaced at regular intervals, messages could be transmitted across vast distances within the Mongol Empire at remarkable speed. So important was the system, that provincial or local rulers were required by law to maintain the physical and animal infrastructure and given tax concessions to encourage them to do so.  

In the case of the British Empire, you find the Red Route, the network of undersea telegraph cables linking British territories. Intended to protect imperial interests and promote imperial commerce, the Red Route spread rapidly to the point that British cable laying ships dominated the global trade.

Australians have recently been commemorating various events connected with the First World War. There has been little recognition in those commemorations of the importance of the Red Route. It gave the British and Commonwealth side secure global communications, while Germany and the other Central Powers found their global communications badly disrupted.

Looking back, there were many remarkable features about the global spread of telegraphy. The first was its sheer speed.

Many complex problems had to be resolved before messages could be transmitted, let alone transmitted economically across a vast global cable network.

The first working telegraph system was created in 1816. The first commercial telegraph system was installed on the Great Western Railway between London and Birmingham in 1837. The first undersea cable was laid in 1850 between France and England. The growing international cable system reached Australia in October 1872.

If you think about it, that’s very fast, just fifty six years from first commercial application to global transformation. Its about the same time from the invention of the Turing machine to the creation of the internet.

Telegraphy transformed to world. It reduced the time taken to get a message from England to remote Australia from many weeks to seven hours. It transformed industry and governance.

New industries were created, warfare was revolutionised. For the first time, a newspaper in Sydney or Armidale could get information on events as they happened, not events past.. For the first time, a government official could expect to assert direct immediate control over a far distant subordinate. Real centralisation was born.

The remote Australian colonies were early adopters of the new technology. In my next  column, I will look at this and the impact on New England.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 10 June 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.

History Revisited - life as postmaster in Armidale's early days

HISTORIC BUILDING: The current Armidale Post Office first became functional in 1880 under the watch of long-serving postmaster John Emblin.

Armidale’s first Post Office was established in March 1843. Armidale was less than four years old. That first Post Master, John Pattison, was entitled to a commission of 20% on postal charges, then one shilling and three pence for a letter to Sydney, plus an allowance of 30 shillings per year for lighting.

As the old currency system disappears in the mist of time, we forget the meaning of these old numbers. When decimal currency was introduced in 1966, one shillings and three pence was equivalent to 15 cents per letter, 30 shillings for lighting $3.

Those values came after years of inflation. Those early letters were very expensive, well beyond the reach of most people assuming they could in fact write.

By the time Armidale’s first Postmaster was appointed, the NSW mail service had been in existence for just under thirty years. On 25 April 1809 ex-convict Isaac Nichols was appointed first Postmaster for NSW.

Envelopes had not yet been invented. Early letters were sealed by folding, often with wax sealing the folds. Postal costs were paid by the receiver.

In 1838, two things happened. One was the start of the overland service from Sydney to the Port Philip settlement. The second was the invention of prepaid stamped letter sheets, a world first, allowing money to be collected from the sender. Some of those sheets carried the insignia Melbourne New South Wales!

In April 1840, the first overland mail arrived in Sydney from the Moreton Bay settlement in, the Sydney Herald Records, “the short space of thirty-nine days.” Ten years later came the first adhesive postage stamp.

Things weren’t always easy for Armidale’s first Postmasters. Money was short, and Government officials in Sydney were not inclined to spend it unless absolutely necessary.

In 1864, local member of Parliament Robert Forster wrote to the Minister for Finance complaining that it was painful to him to be constantly “reminding the Government of the fact that the Postmaster at Armidale, his Wife & 7 children are obliged to Eat, drink, Cook & Sleep in one small room.”

Things did improve. In 1880, long serving (and suffering) Postmaster John Emblin with his wife and multiple children was able to move into a brand new post office on the corner of Beardy and Faulkner Streets, While extended, the building was recognisably that we know today.

In 1889 there was another development. Following continuing complaints from Armidale residents, a second daily mail delivery was introduced to coincide with the arrival of the Northern (Queensland) mail train.

Hard to believe now that Armidale had two daily mail deliveries and that mail from Queensland was sufficiently important to warrant a second delivery.

You have to remember that Armidale families once had interconnections across Northern NSW into Queensland, that New England was once the centre of widespread pastoral enterprises extending into Queensland, that Queensland children came in numbers to Armidale schools.

It was a different world. 

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 3 June 2015. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015.