Imagine sharing one phone with up to 11 other students on your dorm floor. Penn State students who lived in the residence halls through 1977 don’t need to imagine it; they lived it. Now, with current students’ near-universal use of cell phones, Penn State’s residence halls will once again feature shared hallway phones. That’s just the latest change in campus phone service since the first telephone was installed in the 1880s.

The decision to pull “landlines” (the undoubtedly Gen X-coined term that refers to what those over age 30 tend to call “telephones”) from Penn State’s residence halls turned out to be a no-brainer. As Penn State Housing Director Conal Carr explained to The Daily Collegian in July, some quick research revealed nearly all students carry cell phones, and during the 2007-08 school year, almost three-quarters of them used their room landlines less than 20 times. That hardly justifies the $800,000 Housing was paying to keep the lines active in nearly 50 residence halls.

Replacing the individual room landlines will be courtesy phones in the hallways that will work for local calls and for calling 911 in case of an emergency. “In a way, it’s going back to the way our students’ parents had it,” Carr told The Collegian. The story of phones on campus and in the residence halls has many twists since the first telephone was installed in 1883.

“An Indispensable Nuisance”
A local newspaper, The Bellefonte Democrat Watchman, reported on June 23, 1883, “The State College (as Penn State was then know) now is connected by telephone to the outside world.” President George Atherton was responsible for Penn State’s first telephone, which was located in his office. But Atherton’s daughter, Helen Govier, recalled later that he considered the new form of communication “an indispensable nuisance.” It wasn’t long before the business office, Engineering Building, Agriculture Building, and registrar’s office also had telephones.  

Those early telephones were connected to Bellefonte, then the population center of the county. Within five years, Penn State was also connected to Lemont. At the same time, eight of the houses in what would become the town of State College had telephones “from which one may have instant communication with any one of 166 other telephones of the Bellefonte exchange and with 1,800 others through the Central Pennsylvania Telephone Company.” A century before faxes and e-mails, ringing the operator, giving her a name or number, and waiting while she connected your call through her switchboard was considered “instant communication.”

The First World Wide Web
Even if Atherton found the gadget somewhat annoying, faculty, students, and townspeople embraced this latest technology. The town of State College, established in 1896, had its first telephone exchange two years later, serving both town and campus. By 1925, Penn State was operating its own switchboard in 105 Old Main. By day, three operators connected calls between the 150 extensions (phones) on campus and through five trunk lines into town. (The campus patrol handled calls at night.) Penn State’s first phone number was State College 500.

As phones were added, a patchwork of systems evolved to serve callers. It’s not clear exactly when telephones first appeared in the residence halls but in 1938 a small residence hall switchboard was installed in Atherton Hall. It was later expanded with a larger switchboard in Simmons Hall. Shared phones in West Halls could have been installed even earlier since they were on the same switchboard as the University’s administrative phones.

Frustration Builds
By the late 1950s, students increasingly griped about residence hall phone service. The men living in West Halls were particularly vocal. They had to make do with one telephone for every 45 men, and placing calls, even to coeds across campus, involved going through two campus operators. For the 1957 school year, Penn State added 557 new phones to the dorms, prompting one Collegian reporter to note, “West Halls residents who complain that poor telephone service is the reason they go dateless week after week will have to find a new excuse...” While the men in West Halls enjoyed the more favorable ratio of one phone for every four rooms, they still had to go through the University’s exchange and the residence hall exchange to reach parts of campus like South Halls. And even though the women living in South Halls had the luxury of a telephone in each room, all students living in the residence halls had to use the one “coin box phone” on each floor to call town or long distance. 

By decade’s end, Penn State made a significant investment in improving phone service on campus with the installation of $450,000 worth of direct dial equipment, housed in a new building behind Boucke Building. Each telephone now had a specific number that could be dialed directly by someone else on campus, downtown, in surrounding communities, or by the long-distance operator. The concept of direct dialing was so novel The Collegian carried several reminders that calling between residence halls and other campus phones required five digits, such as 5-1234, while calling from off campus took the whole number University 5-1234. (The letters used in early phone numbers indicated the exchange. It would not be until the mid-1960s that phone numbers would be strictly numeric.) 

With direct dialing came other changes. For one, the University would need only 12 operators instead of the 35 employed when all calls were connected through the switchboards. Of greater importance to students at the time was that it also meant the elimination of individual phones in dorm rooms, which were deemed too costly. Instead, phones would be placed in the hallways with one phone shared by every three to four rooms, the system already in place in West Halls. 

Ma Bell’s Christmas Gift
Residence hall students lived with shared hallway phones for nearly 20 years. They did gain direct dialing to off-campus exchanges like Adams (State College) and Homestead (Boalsburg) in 1962 but would wait another 15 years for the next big change in phone service.

As making on-campus and local calls got easier, placing long distance calls remained challenging, especially at 11:00 each night when long distance rates dropped. As late as 1977—when residence hall capacity exceeded 10,000 students—there were only 144 lines available in the system for long distance calls. Anticipating the increased revenue from students placing direct-dial, long-distance calls, Bell of Pennsylvania, or “Ma Bell” as the system of Bell Telephone Companies were commonly known, installed black rotary telephones in all residence hall rooms during Christmas break. To safeguard residents’ possessions, the work crews were locked in the dorms by day and watched by the Campus Police as they exited at day’s end, according to The Collegian. When students returned in early January 1978, they could dial long-distance calls directly from their rooms for the first time.

The divesture of the Bell System in 1984 brought a surge of competition in the long-distance telephone market, including the rise of such companies as Sprint and MCI. Taking advantage of cheaper long-distance rates at that time required touch-tone service to enter the appropriate access code. The Residence Hall Advisory Board (RHAB) started lobbying for touch-tone service soon after, and Penn State added it by 1987.

Twenty years after the last big change—and 126 years after the first telephone arrived on campus—Penn State is once again adapting to changing phone habits. Though landlines are no longer routinely provided in residence hall rooms, they can be reactivated by request.