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Washington, D.C., circa 1925. "Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co." National Photo Company Collection glass negative. View full size.
Washington did have LIncoln, DIstrict and NAtional as three of many telephone exchanges. Not sure about the others. I worked for C&P in the early 1970s when they were encouraging the use of telephone numbers without letters being assigned to the first two digits.
Note that the men (bosses) have arm chairs while the women (worker bees) have chairs without arms.
Also there is a bank of electrical switches on column #4 while the overhead lights have pull cords on them??
Very interesting picture.. whatever they are doing is broken down by exchange/central office.
Wish we could see more of gal in the pleated skirt front and center.
I wonder which woman the man on the far right is staring at? I love the human stories these photographs capture.
The men are sitting around the edge because they are the bosses. That was the culture of the time.
Odd to me, all the men are on the perimeter.
I'd sure like to see a photo of this mob at their Christmas party. Wonder if it would be as dramatic as the Western Electric bunch?
I'm curious about the signs on the pillars in the C & P office...Could those names on each sign be the prefixes
of the telephone exchanges? Atlantic...Lincoln... District...Franklin...Main...Metropolitan...National...
Sounds like they could be...
I'm old enough to remember the days before area codes and direct dial and when you called long distance, you placed the call through an operator. Your telephone number began with two letters and then the rest were numbers. In the city I grew up in, our telephone number began EL (short for Elgin). Some of the other exchanges in town that I recall were DI (for Dickenson), UT (for Utica) and WA (for Walnut).
Nothing like having large pieces of Conduit laying across the walkways.
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