Within its own territory your local telephone company provides
inter-city service. But when you make a call that crosses the
territories of various Bell companies, you are served also by the
facilities of the Long Lines Department. This organization is
responsible as well for overseas telephone service to points in
countries abroad.
More than 337,000,000 conversations a year are handled over Long Lines
facilities. To handle this volume of conversations and its various other
services, Long Lines requires:
■ About 27,000 highly trained telephone employees, including operators,
engineers, maintenance men, construction forces, Commercial and
Accounting people in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
■ Telephone central office forces in 233 cities and towns.
■ Telephone equipment and plant, including almost 2,400 buildings, in
all but one state.
■ About 27,000,000 miles of talking circuits.
Nine years after the telephone was invented, when the farthest one could
talk was from New York to Boston, AT&T announced in its charter its plan
to connect every place in the country “by cable and other appropriate
means with the rest of the world.” Long distance lines reached Chicago
in 1892. Gradually, telephone scientists solved the technical
difficulties of transmitting speech over still greater distances. By
1915, Bell engineers had developed vacuum tube amplifiers to step-up
fading voice currents, and the human voice spanned the miles between New
York and San Francisco.
[Illustration: _Calls to overseas points are handled by operators at
three terminals. This Long Lines operator at the overseas
switchboard in New York City is putting through a call to Paris._]