The San Francisco Chinese Telephone Exchange

Even I thought I’d never been excited and fascinated by a telephone exchange – but I decidedly am!

As I noted the other day this pops up in the Mr Wong detective series c-movie Phantom of Chinatown (1940). I’d never heard of it and don’t know much about it but I love the idea. In the movie it appears to be a small office called the Chinatown Exchange and employing about half a dozen Chinese telephone exchange girls and from 1894 to 1949 they ran a Chinese language telephone service which operated independently of the central San Francisco exchange.

According to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce  in 1914: “These girls respond all day with hardly a mistake to calls that are given (in English or one of five Chinese dialects) by the name of the subscriber instead of by his number — a mental feat that would be practically impossible to most high-schooled American misses.”

Here’s a pic of the girls hard at work:

It gets better – according to the Chinatown: San Francisco web site – “Since people were often asked for by name rather than by number, telephone operators memorized and knew each subscriber by name. This made telephone numbers unnecessary. The Chinatown community felt it was rude to refer to people by numbers. Operators also knew the address and occupations of subscribers so they could distinguish between two people with the same name. In addition, they had to speak five Chinese dialects and English.”

And it still gets better – there were also several public phone boxes in Chinatown connected exclusively to the Chinese Exchange which had a pagoda look about them and several remain preserved in San Francisco

The building is located at the Bank of Canton, 743 Washington St., Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s a marvellous pagoda-like building on the corner of Grant Avenue and Washington Street built in 1909 as the Chinatown telephone office.

I’ve never been to San Francisco but do have to pass through on business in October so expect more on the Chinese Exchange!!