The Bell System strives constantly to improve service. New devices, new
systems, promise more and better telephone service at the lowest
possible cost.
Dial service is being extended, of course, to more and more communities.
Also, new equipment now enables operators to dial many long distance
calls straight through to distant telephones without the assistance of
other telephone operators along the route. Operator long distance
dialing networks now crisscross the country, reaching out to about 3,600
cities and localities. Other localities are constantly being joined to
these networks.
In more than 40 towns special installations enable customers to dial
long distance calls directly to more than 11,000,000 telephones from
coast to coast. An “electric brain” receives a number as it is dialed
and completes the call. An automatic accounting system gathers the
information for billing. Bell telephone engineers plan the extension of
this Direct Distance Dialing to serve the whole nation in a decade or
so.
Bell System mobile telephone service is now a reality in most major
cities and on many highways. “Traveling telephones” are numerous on
ships that ply coastal and inland waterways, and a growing number of
passenger trains now offer regular telephone service. In addition,
private line mobile telephone systems, leased and serviced by the
various Bell telephone companies, are being used increasingly by police
departments, utilities and industrial concerns.
With the help of fast, economical construction methods and new
transmission techniques, the Bell companies are improving and extending
telephone service in rural areas. Power-driven augers quickly drill pole
holes. Special plows place wire underground and cover it, in one
operation. By means of special equipment, both electric power and
telephone conversations can travel to farms over the same wires.
[Illustration: _Information for billing toll calls is punched on
paper tape by automatic message accounting machine._]
[Illustration: _Ambulance driver talks over mobile telephone._]
These methods have helped telephone engineers and construction forces
put in rural telephone facilities three times faster than ever before.
Gradually, the telephone is eliminating the traditional isolation of
farm life. Rural localities have been linked by literally tens of
thousands of miles of new pole lines, by modern central office
buildings, by the most up-to-date switchboards. Great strides are being
made in improving the quality of rural telephone service.
With the steady pressure of world tensions, the Bell System has taken
many steps to make sure that America’s defense needs will be met. The
telephone companies have a good foundation to build on. Telephone
buildings are of unusually strong construction. The entire United States
is blanketed by a network of telephone circuits. American cities are
underlaid by networks of underground cables, which, as wartime
experience in Japan showed, would not generally be destroyed even by
atom bombs.
The nation is now spanned—coast to coast, and north to south—by
“backbone” communication routes. Calls between cities can be routed over
many alternate paths, and destruction of telephone facilities at one
point would be like throwing a pebble through a huge spider web. While
service at the one point might be temporarily interrupted, the
nation-wide communications web would continue to function. Because of
the strength and flexibility of the telephone network, the basic means
of communication in the nation’s Civil Defense setup has been built
around the telephone.
Throughout America the work of improving and strengthening the telephone
system goes on. The goal is to help make the nation invulnerable against
attack, and to provide the public with the best possible service, at
reasonable cost, in rural communities, in cities, and on intercity
routes.
[Illustration: _Power driven augers help speed construction of rural
telephone lines._]
[Illustration: _Civil Defense air raid warning network relies mainly
on telephone communications._]