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.
Information for billing toll calls is punched on paper tape by automatic message accounting machine.
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.
