The Great Northern Replaces the Telegraph Key With a Telephone
Starting May 26, the Great Northern begins dispatching trains by telephone between Spokane and Leavenworth, with portable sets aboard every train — and telegraph operators' jobs left hanging.
Commencing next Thursday morning, May 26, the Great Northern Railroad Company will begin the use of the telephone for train dispatching. In about ten days the phones will be installed and ready for work between Spokane and Troy. Those to be cut in on Thursday morning are between Spokane and Leavenworth. Every station and siding will be equipped with a telephone and there is a selector set by which the dispatcher can call any station he wants. There is no ringing of bells, unless the station specified is wanted. The Great Northern is not figuring on doing away with its telegraph operators. While the wages of the operators were cut on some of the Eastern divisions, it is not believed that the same order will apply in this district. Every train, both passenger and freight, that leaves Spokane going in either direction will be equipped with a portable telephone set, which will enable any of the train crew to fasten the contact wires to the dispatcher's wire and be in instant communication. In cases of a wreck or emergency the advantage of the telephone over the telegraph may readily be seen. All Eastern roads are beginning to lean toward the telephone in this respect, and in a few years, railroad men say, nearly all of the important roads will have taken up this means of train dispatching.
“The Great Northern is not figuring on doing away with its telegraph operators.”
The telephone displacing the telegraph key was the automation panic of its day, and the paper's reassurance that operators' jobs were safe reads exactly like a modern corporate statement about AI. The Great Northern's Spokane–Troy line ran through Newport, so this technological shift arrived on the town's own rails. Within a generation the telegraph operator was indeed nearly gone.
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