I took these pictures at the Orange County Sheriffs Training Academy located on the site of the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, near the huge blimp hangars. This seems to be a new addition to their ‘museum’ collection, which includes such things as weapons and improvised explosive devices such as the often seen alarm clock with sticks of dynamite (they’re all disarmed).
The old manual switchboard demanded that a person be available to do the job. Some of these switchboards were installed in the corner of a small store in a small town and manned by a part time operator who also served as the clerk of the store and the town’s postmaster. This usually limited the service time to daytime hours. Not to mention secrets tended to spread all over town.
One has to appreciate how far the world has come since the days when the only way to talk to someone down the street or across the country was by asking another human being to connect you up. Nowadays, you can talk into your phone ans some impersonal voice recognition software tells you it’ssorry, please repeat that, and after a few times finally does connect you to a real human being. But often we’re not so lucky: we get lost in a maze of verbal menues and can’t get anywhere.
Maybe the old switchboards weren’t so bad, after all.
I would LOVE to sit at an old cord board again!!! I do have a small one from a hospital, that is hooked to 5 or 6 phones here in my home.