The dial telephone, which required no contact with an operator, was not invented during the Great Depression; in fact, the first patent for a dial telephone dates to 1892. The transition from the non-dial telephone to the dial telephone took many decades. However, during the Great Depression, there rose a narrative focus on the loss of telephone operators’ jobs, and the transition to dial telephones was troubled by moral qualms that by adopting the dial phone one was complicit in destroying a job.
