e to provide service to newly developed communities. Johnson cites the growth of Dallas, Texas, as a case in point. The Texas Telephone Company had the phone-service franchise in tiny Garland, Texas, some miles east of Dallas in the 1950s. But in the 1950s, Garland and Dallas began to grow toward each other. The Garland exchange, Johnson says,
had long rural lines providing service in the area squarely between the big city and the small town. It was an area which Bell [metropolitan telephone company] had refused to serve because of the small number of customers. However, as Dallas developed toward Garland, Bell moved in and at times removed Texas Telephone Company telephones, leaving the instruments on the front porch after putting in Bell equipment. . . . Some subscribers wanted to keep both telephones in order to avoid a toll call between Garland and Dallas, but that was apparently not going to be permitted by Bell. (Johnson, 1990, p. 78)
One reason for so much attention to control of telephone hardware and communication systems comes down to the telephone companies' view that the equipment was mainly going to be used as a business device. However, the use of telephones appears to have grown in unanticipated ways. For example, because initial telephone users were by and large businesses, the expectation seems to have been that telephones would have almost exclusively business applications. That would help explain why the first telephone operators hired were almost exclusively young men. Johnson explains that "the experiment seems to have been an instant disaster. The job demanded the virtues of patience and calmness, not very common virtues to be found in the high-spirited teenage boys who manned the switchboards" (Johnson, 1990, p. 29.) From 1879 to the 1960s, accordingly, virtually all operators were women. Martin (1988) says that this fact affected the shape of the telephone industry from the 1920s onward--an effect amplified...