On September 1, 1878, Emma Nutt walked into the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company and became the first woman ever employed as a telephone operator. She would stay for 33 years. In her first shift, she connected about fifty calls an hour — by hand, on a switchboard, from memory.
That number sounds small now. It wasn't. The cognitive load of holding fifty people's destinations in your head while a new call lit up the board every few seconds was — and is — extraordinary. Emma's generation of operators invented a particular kind of mental stamina that didn't exist before. The switchboard created a new form of attention, and then a new form of fatigue.
We're in the same moment now, only faster.