Our phones today can easily feel like an extension to our own arms as we constantly have them on hand, but it wasn’t that long ago that if you wished to connect to others, these wonderful ladies had you covered by connecting you not just to America but the rest of the world.
This 1943 photograph shows a group of switchboard operators working with a large Bell System international switchboard. The Bell System dominated the telephone services industry in North America for just over a century from its creation in 1877 until its demise in the early 1980s when it employed over one million people.
