Connecting a telephone call by hand · Ceded (since 1983)

The Bryant Pond Telephone Company in Maine shuts down the last commercial hand-cranked switchboard in the United States, a service the Hathaway family had run from their living room for 481 customers.

What was ceded is the act of hearing a request and joining two lines with a cord. The machine could do it from 1891, when Almon Strowger patented an automatic exchange, but the last manual boards in the United States survived another ninety years, and the number of operators kept rising until about 1970 before falling to a few thousand. The operator did more than switch: she knew who was out of town, who was ill, and where the doctor could be found. That knowledge went with the cords. People still answer calls where the request is hard, in emergency dispatch, in relay services for deaf callers, and at hospital consoles.