Oct 9, 2013 4 min read

“Number, please.”

With the possible exception of its use in the purchase of lottery tickets, “Number, please” is something you don’t often hear anymore. And if you do happen to hear that phrase these days, the word “please” probably would be omitted.

Until the advent of the dial tone 50 years ago, those two words, “Number, please,” started every telephone conversation since Alexander Graham Bell summoned his laboratory assistant with a brusque, “Watson, come here. I need you,” at the moment telephonic communications was born.

“Number, please” was simple, direct, concise, to the point, always spoken in a friendly manner and always in a female voice. It put a caller in touch with an operator who, in turn, put the call through.

Mary Schneider, who celebrated her 100th birthday March 20, spoke that phrase, “Number, please,” hundreds of times a day when she was a Bell Telephone Co. operator in her hometown of Burgettstown, beginning in 1921.

She was transferred to the telephone company offices in Washington, where she became a long- distance operator and later a supervisor. She retired in 1958.

“The switchboard got too big for me,” she said. “After they put in the 2,500-board, I was too small, too short, to reach the top row of the switchboard.

“I was only 5 feet 2, and I just couldn’t reach the top row to make the connections,” she said, “so they transferred me to toll calls. I became a long-distance operator because the long-distance board was lower and I could put the calls through.”

In what were the infant days of what has become the communications revolution, a telephone operator – unseen but ever-present – was a friend and confidant as well as a servant.

“We were like little detectives,” is how Schneider put it. “We would find people, especially long-distance. Callers wanted to speak to a certain person, and we did our best to find that person.

“I remember one time that a man called and told me that he had been to dinner in a restaurant in Elm Grove (W.Va.), and that he’d left some important papers there and that he needed to get in touch with somebody at the restaurant.

“The only trouble was, he didn’t know the telephone number or even the name of the restaurant,” she said

“What we had back then in the telephone business were information operators in every city. A caller would ask, ‘Information, please?’ and the operator would help.

“With the help of an information operator down in Wheeling (W.Va.), I was able to find out what restaurant the caller had visited and I was able to put him through,” she said. “To the best of my recollection, I think he was able to get the important papers that he had left behind.”

Retired for 44 years, Schneider confesses that she does not know much about the modern telephone business, even though she was the first president of National Trail Council of Telephone Pioneers of America.

And it was not too long ago, although she can’t narrow it down to a specific year, that she got her first, and only, push-button phone.

“I still have a rotary-dial telephone in the bedroom next to my bed,” she said, “although I have a push-button phone next to my kitchen table.

“For me, there’s just too many buttons to push. You know, push a button to talk to this person, push another button to talk to somebody else.

“When I use the old phone, the one with the rotary dial, I just stay on the line until somebody comes on the line and connects me. It’s easier that way,” she added.