Long Lines—When you call across the land
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.
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.