Authored by Gina Coticchio

The first manual switchboard came about in 1878 and Hazleton, Pennsylvania got its first dial switchboard in 1954. At 11:59pm on April 24the switchboard was up and running in this small town (The Plain Speaker 1954). The Bell telephone company decided to invest in this small town by opening up a building on W. Green St. in Hazleton; with the new switchboard, converting to dial service was costing them $1.5 million (The Plain Speaker 1954). According to Tom Gabos, who is the president of the Hazleton Historical Society Museum, “this switchboard came from the corner of W. Green Street, right across from where our library now is” (Tom Gabos, pers. comm, September 2019). This new technology that was coming to Hazleton was welcomed with open arms. Once word got around of the new switchboard technology, Hazleton was booming with people who wanted to see how this technology would work. By 1940, the population of Hazleton was just over 38,000 (City of Hazleton Pennsylvania, n.d.). By 1953, about 14,000 people were using telephone technology (The Plain Speaker 1954). This is a little under half of what the population was in Hazleton back in 1940.