Try to get a real live operator on the telephone these days and you're likely to find yourself lost in a forest of phone trees, pining for a human voice. But a century ago, it was the other way around: Operators themselves got on callers' nerves and made them wish for a machine that would connect calls automatically. In 1889, fed up with the sometimes discourteous and inaccurate central-office "hello girls," a Kansas City undertaker filed a patent that paved the way for the first automatic telephone exchange and put the power of telephony at the public's fingertips.

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