“My Apple’s telephone just called up the home office!”

The exciting world of telecomputing. With a Hayes system, you just plug it in! Communicating is so easy with a complete telecomputing system from Hayes. Hayes Smartmodem 300™ is a direct-connect modem for the new Apple IIc. Hayes Micromodem IIe installs easily in an expansion slot in the Apple II, IIe, III and Apple Plus. Packaged with Smartcom I™ companion software, both are complete systems. Best of all, both systems are from Hayes, the established telecomputing leader. Just plug in-and the world is your Apple!

We connect you to all the right places. Bulletin boards, databases, information services—naturally. And that’s just the beginning. Let your Apple plan your travel itinerary, including flight numbers, hotel and rental car reservations. Watch it retrieve and analyze daily stock and options prices. Work at home and send reports to and from your office. You can even do your gift shopping by computer!

Would you care to see our menu? Make your selection. Really With Smartcom I, you just order up what you want to do. The program guides you along the way. You can create, list, name, send, receive, print or erase files right from the menu. From the very first time you use it, you’ll find telecomputing with Hayes as easy as apple pie! We’ve got your number! We know that you want a system that’s flexible and accommodating. That’s why Smartcom I is so versatile, accepting ProDOS™ DOS 3.3, Pascal and CPM® operating systems. It provides you with a directory of all the files stored on your disk. And in combination with your Hayes modem, Smartcom I answers calls to your system, without your even being there.

Your Apple’s telephone goes anywhere the phone lines go. Hayes modems allow your Apple to communicate with any Bell-103 type modem over ordinary telephone lines. You simply connect directly into a modular phone jack to perform both Touch-Tone® and pulse dialing. Hayes Smartmodem 300 and Micromodem lie both transmit at 110 or 300 bits per second, in either half or full duplex.

Follow the leader. Over the years we’ve built our reputation as the telecomputing leader by developing quality products that set industry standards. Now we invite you to see for yourself just how simple it is to add powerful, easy to use telecomputing capabilities to your Apple computer with a complete, ready-to-go system from Hayes. Visit your Hayes dealer for a hands-on demonstration. And get on line with the world.

Hayes. We’re here to help.

Hayes

Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc.

5923 Peachtree Industrial Blvd. Norcross. Georgia 30092 , 404/441-1617.

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Self-Answering Telephone Thinks and Talks

By Harry Kursh

“HELLO, hello. This is the residence of Mr. John Smith. Your message is being recorded automatically. Ready! Please speak now.”

Don’t be surprised if that’s what you hear one of these days when you dial the familiar number of one of your friends. For Ipsophone—the robot telephone device with a brain—has been placed on the market and is rapidly coming into use all over the world. Three of these ingenious Swiss inventions have already been installed for the King of Egypt but their cost ($38 per month) will make them practical for even the smallest businessman.

How does it work? Well, suppose you have to go out and leave the phone un-tended. When it rings, there’s no one there to answer so after three buzzes, the Ipsophone voice swings into action with the words quoted above.

Your caller, if he’s not too astounded, leaves his message and hangs up. The message is recorded for you to listen to at your own convenience. You can get it when you return home or by calling from your office or any other part of the world where you can reach a telephone and ring the Ipsophone number.

How do you get the message?

As soon as the phone rings, the voice will again say: “Hello, hello. This is the residence of Mr. John Smith. Your message is being recorded automatically. Ready!” But before the Ipsophone says “Please speak now,” you break in with the words “Hello, hello.” Then, instead of recording a message, the Ipsophone will repeat the message it had recorded for you.

If you want to keep the message a secret and make sure nobody else gets it, you tan put an Acoustic Code Key into operation. This is a secret combination of numbers which you can set on your Ipsophone which makes your message as safe as if you had placed it in a burglar-proof vault. You yourself can get it only if you remember the secret code.

Here’s how it’s done. If you call your Ipsophone after putting the Code Key into operation, the voice begins to repeat a series of numbers beginning with zero. After each number, the voice stops for four seconds. To use your Code Key to un- lock the secrets of its brain, you repeat the word “hello” twice after each of the numbers you selected.

If someone else tries to break your code, “Ipsophone disconnects him or gives him a busy signal whenever he says “hello” after the wrong number. Since the Code Key can be changed as often as desired, unauthorized snooping is impossible.

The language used on Ipsophone can be adjusted by the company to accommodate any spoken language. In Switzerland, Ipsophones are already in operation in French and German. Jelmoli department store uses four to record orders for purchases after ordinary business hours. Banks use it to receive important messages after banking hours. The Journal of Geneva has an Ipsophone reserved for messages from its foreign correspondents around the world. Reuters, the British news agency, has an Ipsophone in use in Geneva, too. Doctors are making effective use of it by instructing patients to describe their condition to the Ipsophone in the event they are away from the office. From what the Ipsophone tells the doctors when they return, they are able to determine whether or not there’s an emergency.

Arrangements are under way with an American corporation to mass-produce thousands of Ipsophones because the Swiss company turns out only about 30 a month. And then they are merely leased.

So far, the most difficult (though easily solvable) problem the Ipsophone makers have encountered is caused by the same people who leave their keys under the doormat and then forget where they hid them. They forget their own secret code!

Two Ears Now Can Listen at One Telephone

A TELEPHONE attachment which permits the user to listen to a long distance call with both ears, and incidentally allows two people to hear from a single receiver at the same time, has been designed especially for noisy offices. The device is a sound-distributing chamber which slips over the end of the standard telephone receiver and sends part of the sound through a rubber tube ending in a metal cup, similar to that on a doctor’s stethoscope, which fits in the opposite ear of the user. Thus the person who is telephoning can listen to the conversation undisturbed by outside noises, and has one hand free to make notes, the maker points out.

When it is important for two people to hear a telephone conversation, one may listen through the standard receiver, the other through the rubber tube. The attachment can be slipped on the receiver or removed in an instant.

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Wired for Sin – THE VICE RACKET BEHIND THOSE PHONE ANSWERING SERVICES

Bigtown call girls operate freely because slick tele-fronts handle their incoming calls
By JACK MITCHELL

THE TALL, sleeky-dressed blonde got off the hotel elevator and made her way swiftly across the lobby to the telephone booths. Tossing aside a mink stole from her shapely shoulders, she took pencil and notebook from her pocketbook, dialed a number and said softly: “This is June. Any calls?”

“Hi, June,” said a female voice on the other end of the wire. “Sure, lots of action tonight. Mr. Cooper wants you to call him. Says you know the number. And a man named Al says he’s here from Chicago. Here’s his number. And then a Mr. Smith at…”

This scene, played by hundreds of blondes, redheads and brunettes, is being repeated many times in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and other major cities these days (and nights) as the telephone answering services from coast to coast emerge in a unique role — the call girl’s “home away from home.”

What was once the sedate, respectable and sin-proof medium for transmitting messages to busy doctors, lawyers, brokers and other professional men has blossomed into a bustling business for the dollar doves and scarlet Sadies who have at last found a cop-free method of plying their trade.

The public had little inkling of this role of the conventional answering service in the cuddle-for-cash trade until Nella Bogart, an admitted call girl, told the New York jury that subsequently acquitted her that she made as high as $500 weekly using a service switchboard that cost her $20 a month.

Despite this startling revelation, there was no flurry of activity on the part of hundreds of answering services to discontinue suspected “clients.” Trade went on as usual after Nella’s testimony exploded like an H-bomb on the front pages. Even the vice cops shrugged their collective shoulders from Boston to San Francisco. There’s little they can do about this, for the ladies of the evening have come up with a virtually tap-proof formula for evading the law.

TAP-PROOF FORMULA What’s more, this electronic “home away from home” is inexpensive, dependable and has the added factor of reassuring the “John” (the name call girls give their customers) that a squad of detectives won’t be listening in when he dials his play-for-pay doxie.

For an on-the-spot account of how this new sin-with-safety program works, TOP SECRET interviewed several service switchboard owners, message girls and even a soiled dove who had married one of her “Johns” and settled down to being an honest woman.

We’ll call her Angella because she’s now a popular young matron in a neat Long Island community. But not long ago she was one of Miami’s most successful call girls.

“I was bugged twice for pros (arrested for prostitution)” Angella told this reporter. “The cops got me on a wire tap. Then I tried the answering service.

“I didn’t even go to their office in downtown Miami. They didn’t ask any questions such as my address and home phone. They explained the charge was $18 a month and I sent them a money-order. It was as simple as that.”

“Didn’t they want to know your occupation?”

“No. I told them I was a model. They seemed satisfied. It worked fine and I never had any trouble. The cops can’t put on a phone tap because the girl always calls from a pay phone and even if they try to trace her call back, she’s gone by the time they get there. What’s more, the bulls are leery of fooling around with the answering services — most of them have plenty of respectable clients.”

A “headset” or message girl who worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift for a West Coast switchboard service said during her fourteen months on the job “at least twenty call girls were clients of my outfit.”

“I got to know them all pretty well,” she told TOP SECRET. “Their voices, their habits, their regular customers, the guys they liked and the ones they didn’t want to see. I used to give them little extra services and most of them asked for my home address and sent me a ten or twenty dollar bill every month as a tip. Since I made a buck an hour on the switchboard, those tips came in handy.”

“That’s a pretty heavy tip.”

She shrugged. “They could afford it. Some of the girls would get a dozen messages during my eight-hour shift. At $20 to $50 a call, I could figure out they made plenty.

“One girl named Joan had a friend who used to come down every two weeks from Portland. He’d never fail to call about 9 a.m. and ask the girl on the morning shift for Joan’s home phone. She told him we didn’t have it, which was the truth. Then he’d ask for Joan’s address. We didn’t have that either. We knew he wasn’t a copper, but every answering service has one rule that never changes: Even if we have a home phone and address, we must never give it out.

DAY STARTS AT 3 “Most of the call girls give us only their first names and usually send in their monthly payment either by money order (using a phoney surname) or cash.”

“Don’t you keep a record on them.”

“Sure,” said the message girl. “A file card with the name ‘June’ or ‘Margie’ or whatever it is and the occupation which usually is ‘model.’ Sometimes instructions such as ‘will call for messages after 3 p.m.’ Most call girls sleep until then and the bulk of their business is done in the late afternoon and evening.”

“What’s a call girl’s average day like?”

“Pretty much the same pattern,” said the switchboard service operator. “By time she’s awake and calls in, we usually have half a dozen messages for her. The more messages, the greater her success in her trade, so to speak. The prostitute who gets only one or two a day I figure is either getting too old or too lazy.

“Most messages just give first names of the ‘Johns’ and their phone. A fellow named Joe wants her to call room 506 at his hotel at 6 p.m. That means his wife won’t be back until late. Carl wants her to call him back. Says she knows the number. A fellow named Jimmy says he’s a friend of George’s and to call him at his hotel. Most call girls are leery of this ‘friend of a friend’ business and tell me to forget the message.”

The switchboard operator said in only one case in her experience did a call girl leave a home phone. “Most of them are scared to death of wire taps and use phone booths. When they get through with one job, they just go to a public phone and call me.”

A Washington switchboard service owner said he felt certain some of his feminine clients were soiled doves. “But I’m not a cop,” he said. “And about half my revenue comes from ladies who never tell us much about themselves. I’m not breaking any laws by giving them telephone service and I don’t intend to. If the cops want to investigate, I won’t stand in their way. But I’ve never seen these clients and probably never will.”

A New York vice officer pointed out that one of the evils of the “home away from home” switchboard service is that by its very nature, it blocks police efforts to round up the call girls.

“LIVE AND LET LIVE”?

“Suppose we go after a subscriber who really is a model?” he said. “Then we have an invasion of privacy suit against the city on our hands, to say nothing of the howls about civil liberties that would go up. We get into enough trouble with wire taps. Tracking down an answering service client and proving that she uses the telephone to engage in prostitution is mighty tough.”

To prove his point, the Nella Bogart and Pat Ward cases are among the very few on record where call girls admitted using an answering service. Pat Ward, the best known dollar dove in the famous Mickey Jelke case, said the oleo heir (who was convicted) told her: “The first thing a call girl needed was an answering service.”

And, interestingly enough, Pat’s use of a switchboard service did not figure in the evidence. Despite her disclosure, nothing was done to investigate the hundreds of answering services that take up ten pages in the New York City classified telephone directory.

Of the arrests made each year in the major cities for prostitution, nine out of ten of the play-for-pay pretties are streetwalkers or bar girls who solicit business. The smart call girl scorns such a practice. Not only does it pay low — as little as five dollars a customer — but the chances of arrest are greatly increased.

The call girl who can make as high as $500 a week also has another factor working for her — the changed attitude of judges, social welfare agencies and others towards prostitution.

Chief Magistrate John M. Murtagh of New York recently proposed that the local vice squad be abolished and a “live and let live” policy be adopted toward the city’s sin sisters.

This promptly brought a retort from Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy that his force would “keep after the prostitutes.”

“Big shots or little shots — make them blank-shots,” were his orders. “Put them out of business and keep them out of business.”

The latter directive is going to take a lot of doing. With her address and home telephone known only to herself, the successful call girl can go through her lifetime of selling sex by the hour with little fear of arrest — thanks to that switchboard service.

Vice officers in one mid-western city tried to put the heat on the “Johns.” Seizing a bunch of messages at one answering service, the cops contacted the girl’s customers, demanding to know where the girl lived. Unanimously her “clients” told the bluecoats that they hadn’t the vaguest idea. They had never been in her home, knew only the number she gave them — the answering service. Convinced the “Johns” were telling the truth, the cops tried to plant a message, sending two officers to a hotel with instructions to call the switchboard and leave word for the cuddle-for-cash lass to buzz “John and Al.”

But the $20 monthly tip the lady of the evening sent her friend on the switchboard paid off. When she checked in, the message-taker slipped her the word that the cops had been in and were on the prowl. The call girl took the next plane for Miami and plied her trade there for a couple of months. When she returned, it was simple to contact her favorite operator again and leave a code name.

At this writing, she is averaging between $350 and $500 a week and the vice squad is still looking for her.

As one veteran law enforcement officer summed it up: “These answering services have many legitimate clients. They have no information on those they suspect are call girls. They can’t help us too much. Even the 100-per-cent honest managers have no proof to offer us. So it’s a war of communications and right now the call girls are winning hands down.”

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You and your telephone

ON BEING A WOMAN: DR. JOYCE BROTHERS

Trying to reach a friend by phone the other day, I got the busy signal five times in a row. The first few times I fumed—there’s something about that frustrating buzz that sets my nerves on edge—but by the fourth try I was amused, remembering how, just a few days before, she and I had been on the phone at least half an hour, talking about a party we’d both been to.

That set me thinking: What is it about women and telephones, anyway? We do make more calls than men—strictly business calls aside— and if we’re honest, we have to admit we gab a lot longer. This male-female difference shows up early. A recent Bell System survey of teenagers confirms what every mother suspects: at all ages, girls use the telephone more than boys (as much as one to three hours a day, according to another study). What’s more, sixty-five percent of their calls are “just to chat.”

It’s in those teen years, when girls first begin to take serious notice of the opposite sex, that the fascination with the telephone begins. (Sometimes, I suspect, it’s the fascination of the snake for its victim!) It doesn’t end there, though. Confess—don’t you, even now, feel a slight stab of excitement; of expectancy, every time the phone rings?

THE TELEPHONE AS TYRANT

That emotion, partly an uneasy one, isn’t confined to women. It’s a rare person, man or woman, who can bear to let a ringing phone go unanswered. Even a phone ringing in a movie or on television creates a feeling that you ought to do something about it. According to Marshall McLuhan (the “medium is the message” man), that’s because the telephone is a highly personal instrument, a form of communication that demands a partner. You can’t ignore it, or treat it as background noise, as you can radio or television; you have to react to it.

A woman’s reaction is heightened by an emotional hangover from her dating days. Then the telephone was the instrument, par excellence, of romance. It brought invitations to parties and movie dates and Cokes, as well as tete-a-tetes as intimate as love letters. Every call, then, started a girl’s heart thumping, in the expectation that it might be from her current heart throb.

Just as often, though, the phone was likely to remain stubbornly silent and she would go through the agony of waiting for the call that never came. Popular songs, from the oldie All Alone by the Telephone to the current Please Let It Be Him, faithfully reflect this feminine anguish over the least vulnerable of double standards: the male’s prerogative to make the advances, telephonic or otherwise.

That’s all behind us wives and mothers now, thank goodness. But the trill of a telephone still has the power to raise an echo, however faint, of the love-hate feelings we once had for that unreliable go-between. We’d be utterly lost without our phones, not just because they’re a great convenience, but because we have a strong, if ambivalent, attachment to them.

THE TELEPHONE AS PET

Most of the time our feelings of fondness for the gadget win out. McLuhan suggests that children and teenagers best express the personal nature of the telephone. They treat it as a kind of animate thing, a pet, fondling the cord and embracing the receiver with obvious affection and involvement. But grown-up women, too, often betray their emotional attachment in similar ways.

For a woman, a phone is a means for exercising her special talents. Women tend to be more verbal than men; on the average, they talk at an earlier age and learn new words more quickly. They are also more concerned with interpersonal relationships—analyzing human behavior, sympathizing, criticizing or just plain gossiping—and are more sensitive to nuances of feeling and behavior. Men tend to be interested, primarily, in what people do; women, in why they do it—a subject that calls for a lot more palaver.

At the same time, a woman’s role in the home cuts her off from direct contact with much of the outside world, especially when her children are young. So she makes up for it by using her telephone as an extension of herself, as a vehicle for social chitchat, for catching up with the local news, giving and receiving moral support— the kind of conversation her husband’s involved in all day at his work (without even noticing it), but which —if it weren’t for the phone—she’d be largely deprived of.

There’s another thing men forget when they complain about phone bills and that is it’s usually the wife’s job to maintain friendly contacts with her husband’s family as well as her own. That’s no small task, and the woman who prefers just to pick up the phone rather than carry on a never-ending correspondence can hardly be blamed. (Incidentally, two-thirds of all longdistance calls from home phones are made by women.) But women’s love affairs with the telephone are hardly one long idyll. There are calls from salesmen who won’t take no for an answer, invitations they’d just as soon duck, umpteen fund-raising appeals. Increasingly, too, these days women are bothered by anonymous calls from weird, sick people who derive pleasure from shocking others with obscene conversation.

Unless you resort to an unlisted number (a device, incidentally, as popular with status seekers and bill dodgers as with those who need protection), you are more or less at the mercy of anybody with a dime. The phone is a great invader of privacy.

All this, together with the fact that a phone can be the bearer of bad news as well as good, helps to account for our mixed feelings toward Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. In addition, a telephone can actually create an intense feeling of loneliness, for, by remaining silent though connected, potentially, to all the world, it seems to mock the person whom no one cares enough about to call—at least just then.

All the same, the Bell people don’t have to worry. Women are no more likely to desert their telephones than their husbands, and men had just better get used to the idea!

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“I’ve just had my eyes opened… to the fact that some of our business problems were really communications problems!”

An active business is constantly changing. It broadens its products, expands its market, hires more people, gains more customers, faces more competition. And with these changes come problems.

A lot of those problems involve communications . . . because communicating is vital to nearly all business operations.

How do you spot those problems? How do you know if and where you need better communications?

Simple. You call in a Bell System Communications Consultant. He does a thorough, expert study of your operations and gives you a full report and recommendation. The analysis costs you nothing.

Try it. Just call your Bell Telephone Business Office and ask for the services of a Communications Consultant.

Bell System
American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Associated Companies

No-finger dialing

It’s here at last—relief for your throbbing dialing finger. Just slip this plastic card into Bell Labs’ experimental dialer phone and the number is dialed automatically. The card could also be used to transmit information over telephone lines to computers, or even to check bank balances.

Call Indicator for Telephone
THE numbers dialed on automatic telephones can now be recorded on a call indicator device invented by William Green-berg of Portland, Ore. In the center of the regular telephone dial is a space where the numbers being dialed are reproduced, showing what number is being called, and warning immediately of any error. Pressing a small button at the top of the device clears the figures for the next call.

“What! No Kitchen Telephone?”

Of all things, Mr. Bridegroom! Surely you don’t expect that lovely new bride to get along without a telephone in the kitchen!

Maybe there was a time when one telephone seemed enough, just as one radio and one bathroom and one car seemed enough.

But everybody is used to more comfort and convenience these days. And there’s nothing that makes life so much easier as telephones around the home.

In the living room, of course. In the kitchen, conveniently hung on the wall. In the bedroom, to save steps and for added peace of mind both day and night. For the son and daughter who’d like telephones of their own, with separate listings.

Would you like to know more about complete telephone service and how surprisingly little it costs? Just call the business office of your local Bell telephone company.

BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM

Reminding you that someone, somewhere, would enjoy hearing your voice today.

Telephone booths on prowl

This mobile telephone truck, equipped with six pay phones and a coin changer, can speed to any spot in Washington, D.C., where emergency phone service is needed in a hurry. Its crew just hooks it into existing wires.

While waiting for emergencies to call it into service, the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. uses the unit to collect dimes from stationary booths.

THE SMALLER THE BETTER: NEW DIMENSIONS IN CONVERSATION

In the eye of a needle above is a transistor switch that can turn on or off in ten billionths of a second. It is an example of the micro-miniature devices that Western Electric makes today for the new Electronic Switching Systems now being put into service in the Bell telephone network. Life-size, the unit shown is scarcely larger than the period that ends this sentence. ? Producing electronic components that are nearly invisible to the naked eye calls for the ultimate in manufacturing care and precision at Western Electric, the Bell System’s manufacturing and supply unit.

Moreover, the ingenuity of our teammates at Bell Telephone Laboratories continues to yield communications products so unique that completely new techniques are needed to translate them into volume production. Working closely with people at Bell Labs, Western Electric’s engineers must develop the new machines and processes to do the job. ? Thus telephone teamwork brings new ideas into everyday reality. Result: your Bell telephone company is better able to provide you with continually new and reliable communications services, when and where you need them.

Pushbutton calling

Tired of dialing calls? Here’s an add-on that converts an ordinary dial phone for pushbutton signaling. The 5-1/4-inch sphere also has a memory for 10 frequently used numbers you can call with two buttons. Busy number? Just wait and push one button to repeat your call. Made by Pye in England.

Memory phone

Push one of Touch-a-matic’s 32 buttons and it places prerecorded phone numbers for you. An integrated-circuit memory (foreground) containing 15,000 transistors does the job. To store numbers, you push a “record” button, then the digits. Developed at Bell Labs, the new phones will appear in 1974.

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What the New Domestic COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES Will Do for You

Canada’s pioneering Aniks, and U.S. successors, are introducing the revolutionary innovation of overland telephone-and-TV relays in the sky. They promise bargain rates for long-distance phone calls, picture phones that everyone can afford—and better television programs, by way of novel kinds of TV networks

By WERNHER von BRAUN
PS Consulting Editor, Space

On Jan. 11, 1973, Rudy Pudluk, community manager of Resolute on a Canadian island above the Arctic Circle, made a long-distance phone call to Ottawa. The English-speaking Eskimo chatted with Gerard Pelletier, Minister of Communications, and with David Golden, president of Telesat Canada, whose system carried his voice across the frozen North.

His call began commercial operations of Anik 1, North America’s first domestic communications satellite—and the world’s first domestic one in a synchronous orbit, like that of our transocean Intelsat satellites.

Anik 1 was launched from Cape Kennedy on Nov. 9, 1972. It hangs stationary with respect to Earth, 22,300 miles high, over the equator and the eastern Pacific at 109° west longitude (which puts it due south of Gallup, N.M., and mid western Canada). From its lofty height it views Canada coast to coast.

By the time you read this it will have been joined nearby in orbit by an identical twin, Anik 2, if all has gone well. One communications satellite has ample relaying range to span the continent; Anik 2 will simply add more message-carrying capacity, and be a backup in orbit. Anik 3, completing the litter, will be kept on the ground as a spare.

Within a year the United States will follow Canada’s example and launch domestic communications satellites of its own. They’ll transmit phone calls, television programs, telegrams, Telex, U.S. Postal Service Mailgrams, facsimiles of documents, computer data. A hotel-reservation service may find you accommodations via satellite.

A new kind of message net. For years we’ve enjoyed the advantages of transocean phone-and-TV satellites—but the Western world has waited until now for domestic ones, satellites linking points within a country’s own borders.

Understandably they came first in the Soviet Union—a nation with interior distances so vast that people in Vladivostok are awakening to a new day, when their countrymen in Kiev are going to bed the night before. Since 1965, the USSR has been spanned by Molniya (“lightning”) domestic communications satellites in elliptical orbits at steep angles to the equator.

Communications have to be switched from one Molniya to another as they pass successively over the country. Currently, however, the Russians are reported to have developed a synchronous version (awaiting launching at this writing) that will stay put in the sky as the Aniks do.

Anik means “brother” in Eskimo —and Telesat Canada, established by the Canadian Parliament in 1969, has set up a network extending all the way from Canada’s densely populated south to the remote northern settlements of its Eskimos and Indians.

The 37 satellite-linked earth stations of its initial net include two “heavy-route” ones at the Toronto and Victoria transcontinental-route terminals, with 98-foot dish antennas resembling those for global satellites; other stations’ dishes are smaller. Six “network television” stations transmit and receive TV; 25 “remote TV” stations receive it only.

“Northern telecommunication” stations at Resolute and Frobisher Bay establish a moderate-traffic phone link to lines in the south. “Thin-route” stations on Baffin Island and at Igloolik provide limited phone service to small Arctic communities. High-frequency radiotelephone links, available only two hours a day and subject to interference and fading, served Arctic outposts before.

What Aniks are like. Skillful design makes Anik an “economy” satellite. At bargain cost it offers phone-and-TV capacity in the same class with the big Intelsat IVs from the same maker, Hughes Aircraft.

Smaller than an Intelsat IV (11% feet high instead of 17%) and much lighter in weight (about 1200 pounds at liftoff, vs. 3100), an Anik is less expensive to buy, and to launch into orbit, a service for which the owner reimburses NASA. A Thor-Delta vehicle suffices, rather than the huskier Atlas-Centaur it takes to loft the Intelsat. All told, an Anik in orbit costs about $16% million, compared to about $29% million for an orbited Intelsat IV. It likewise is designed for a seven-year lifetime.

Chunky little Anik receives signals from Earth, and retransmits them back to other points, with a five-foot parabolic antenna of fine gold mesh rather than a solid dish. For electric power, some 20,000 solar cells surround Anik’s drum-shaped body. According to Telesat Canada, an Anik satellite’s 12 transponders (radio repeaters) give it a total capacity of up to nearly 12,000 oneway voice circuits—enough for 6000 two-way phone conversations—or 12 color television programs, at once.

Up to within a few months of Anik 1′s launching, the United States had done little about domestic communications satellites of its own.

It had been a pioneer with communications satellites. It played a leading part in establishing the Comsat/Intelsat net of global satellite links; and the Aniks themselves were built by a U.S. firm. But U.S. domestic ones long went neglected, for a simple reason: The U.S. already had a splendid network of coaxial cables and microwave towers, which seemed entirely capable of providing good long-distance communications and of expanding fast enough to meet ever-growing needs.

Domestic communications satellites, however, can do things far beyond the reach of any earthbound system. Realizing this, the Federal Communications Commission cleared the way for them on June 16, 1972. It laid down the basic rules in a memorable “open skies” decision, which assured lively competition in the field: A go-ahead for U.S. systems. The FCC announced it was ready to license a limited number of technically and financially qualified U.S. companies to set up their own commercial systems of domestic communications satellites. Each system was to consist of the necessary space elements and ground stations, and would be expected to offer its channels to an emerging market of interested customers.

The scramble was on!

Some U.S. companies couldn’t wait to get their own satellites into orbit, and began setting up arrangements with Telesat Canada to lease Anik channels—which could serve U.S. cities just as well. Canadian users’ needs already claimed most of Anik 1′s capacity, but Anik 2 would have plenty to spare. The American Satellite Corp. and RCA were among prospective U.S. Anik customers.

Efforts to get systems of U.S. domestic communications satellites into early operation looked much like a race, with at least seven contenders. These were examples: Even before Hughes had completed Canada’s three Aniks, it had Western Union’s order for three more of the same. Western Union planned to orbit the first of them before mid-1974. Its “Westar” domestic-satellite system, besides carrying its own messages, would have channels to lease to all comers.

American Satellite Corp. (jointly owned by Fairchild Industries and Western Union International) contracted with Hughes for three 12-transponder domestic satellites, and made a down payment to NASA for a first launch in the third quarter of 1974. By then it planned to have a network of eight ground stations, near New York, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta or Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

It has also initiated, with Fair-child, design and development of an advanced 24-transponder domestic communications satellite for future use in its system.

Big ones by 1975. For lease to AT&T, Communications Satellite Corp. will establish a U.S. domestic-satellite system with four big satellites, three in orbit and one on the ground. The first is to be launched in 1975. Announced details show them to be as large as Comsat’s global Intelsat IVs and of even greater message capacity: They’ll be about 18 feet high and weigh about 3100 pounds at liftoff by Atlas-Centaur vehicles. Each 24-transponder satellite will provide some 14,400 two-way voice-grade circuits. It will have two dish antennas of five-foot diameter, one vertically polarized and the other horizontally polarized (see box on technology below).

The three orbiting satellites will provide domestic-satellite service to all 50 states and Puerto Rico, and will be incorporated into AT&T’s nationwide network “to expand and diversify its services to customers.”

A satellite in synchronous orbit (as all these coming ones will be) is like a 22,300-mile-high microwave tower. It is in line-of-sight contact with every point in the U.S. Radio energy can therefore be beamed up to it (“uplink”) and down from it (“downlink”) in straight lines. Relatively short stretches of land lines, of course, connect users with the nearest Earth terminals.

Innovations we’ll see. Changes we can expect domestic satellites to bring about have been compared to those from paperback books. Books weren’t new; the real novelty of the paperbacks was their availability in so many places and at such low cost.

Even the most conservative planners expect the FCC’s “open skies” ruling to revolutionize the entire pattern of telecommunications in the United States. Here is why domestic communications satellites (“dom-sats” as they’re already being called (or short) are so exciting:

• They can provide many more channels, for the same investment, than conventional long-distance cables or microwave lines.

• A domestic communications satellite can carry a telephone call from Washington to Los Angeles as cheaply as from Washington to Baltimore.
Beyond a certain distance—say, 1000 miles for the present—the satellite route is the more economical one. First rates proposed for leasing U.S. domestic-satellite voice circuits give a striking example. The cost is only one-third as much as for coast-to-coast voice-grade circuits by land routes.

Presuming that the ultimate user will eventually share the benefit of the saving, agreeably lower rates for long-distance telephone calls could be your introduction to the practical advantages of domestic satellites.

• Communications satellites can connect one point with a multitude of other points—unlike a coaxial cable or a string of microwave towers on the ground, which always go from one point to another point.

In a TV hookup, for example, a domestic satellite can relay a program originating in New York to 50 or more TV stations throughout the nation, for local transmission—either via broadcast or cable TV.

Better TV on the way. Joining cable-TV systems into regional and national networks by satellite may be foreshadowed as early as this month. Subject to FCC clearance, an East (‘oast program was to be transmitted to Anaheim, Calif., by way of Anik in a June trial planned by TelePrompTer Corp., the largest cable-TV operator. This would test the feasibility of its “spacecast” plan to connect its cable-TV systems in 33 states and two Canadian provinces with a U.S. domestic satellite in 1974.

The predictable hook-up of local cable TV to satellites will drastically change our entire mode of distributing television programs.

A vast number of available uplink channels can simultaneously bring an advanced satellite dozens of different programs, originating in different cities. Each receiving station can draw upon a rich variety of fare for its viewers’ delectation. Moreover, the number of receiving stations can far exceed the present number of television stations, because they quietly feed the received signal into the local TV cable, rather than tying up a precious frequency “on the air.”

You’ll have a wider choice of what you want to watch through a recent FCC ruling: Franchises for new cable-TV installations, henceforth, will be granted only if they provide two-way communication.

If you prefer a free program sponsored by a commercial advertiser, fine. If you don’t want to miss a particular noncommercial pay-TV program—one of 50 programs the satellite may offer at the time—you just punch a two-digit number into a “touch-tone” communicator on your television set. The cable relay station will release the requested program to your set, and bill you at the end of the month.

In this way TV at last will break free of “lowest common denominator” programs (which often capture the highest Nielsen ratings), and be able to meet the infinite diversity of individual tastes.

TV will also be enabled to make a much greater contribution in the field of education. Congestion at campuses could be relieved if students went to their universities only for seminars, discussions, and laboratory work, while boning up on their chosen subjects via TV.

TV direct from the sky. A high-powered synchronous satellite can broadcast TV programs, beamed up to it from a central ground transmitter, direct to specially equipped individual receiving sets on Earth. (Due to the shorter frequencies used, the familiar rake-shaped TV antenna will be replaced by a wire-mesh dish about the size of a beach umbrella.) While this may be a long way off for home entertainment, it has immediate interest for educational programs in remote areas.

As soon as next year, the huge Fairchild-built ATS-F television-broadcast satellite, first of its kind, will give the idea a trial. (ATS is for Applications Technology Satellite, a many-purpose NASA series; F designates the sixth.) Weighing 2800 pounds at launch by a Titan III-C into synchronous orbit, ATS-F will unfold in space great solar-panel booms of total 52-foot span and an umbrella-shaped antenna of 30-foot diameter. First, in U.S. experiments, it will broadcast educational programs to Indian reservations in the Rockies, and to Eskimo settlements in Alaska.

In 1975, ATS-F’s thrusters will nudge it around the equator from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean for a momentous trial of a plan to beam educational TV all over northern In- dia LPS, May ’70], Experimental broadcasts will go to community TV receivers set up for the purpose in hundreds of remote villages.

Success of this ATS-F experiment would open the way to a projected operational system of India’s own, which could well make it the first country with direct sky-to-receiver television on a national scale. The full-fledged system would reach as many as thousands of villages via satellite, with educational programs broadcast in local tongues and suited especially to local needs.

More things are ahead. Steerable needle beams (see “technology” box) will open up a new era in communication with moving vehicles. Telephone service enroute can be provided quite readily for passengers in aircraft, ships, buses, and autos. In the eighties, automobiles will come with a circular receive-and-transmit antenna buried in the roof, flush and invisible. It will permit you to call anyone else on the globe from your moving car.

Picture phones for everyone. The almost unlimited channel capacity of communications satellites will finally transform video telephone service from an expensive luxury into a popular-priced amenity of everyday living.

This will not only be good news for young lovers—it will also help to keep fathers and husbands at home. Future monthly meetings of a national corporation’s general managers will no longer require their physical presence at corporate headquarters in a distant city.

Instead, each participant will sit before a 3-D color camera in a booth at his home office. Relayed by satellite, the images of all the others are projected upon the curved wall of the booth, and their voices are heard. All have the feeling of being seated together in the same room, around the same table.

Letting the electrons and microwaves do the traveling will become the fashion of the eighties. In the long run it will help to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution; it could even contribute to abating the energy crisis and countering the troublesome trend toward ever more urbanization.

I have heard it said that if Alexander Graham Bell had waited until the advent of satellites and microwaves to invent the telephone, instead of stringing the globe with millions of tons of copper wire, he would have opted for switchboards in the sky.

—————————————

What’s ahead in domestic satellites’ technology Reducing ground stations’ cost will help them grow in number to make the most of domestic communications satellites. This can be done by boosting power (and cost) of the satellite. The trend is that way in the Intelsat community—so a trans-ocean message to a developing country’s $3-million ground station won’t incongruously have to reach a town 50 miles away by the local tom-tom system. (It had been only logical to put the burden of weight and expense on the ground when the satellites and launch techniques were in their infancy.) As important as higher power is “spectrum conservation.” Frequencies are limited; separate use of the same frequency in “vertical” and “horizontal” polarization makes them go twice as far. The electromagnetic waves swing up-and-down, left-and-right, respectively. Careful antenna and circuit design can keep them from interfering with each other. An alternative is to aim two beams of identical frequency at different spots on Earth—as can be done with large enough antenna dishes, far enough apart.

Higher frequencies will reduce the size of large, cumbersome-to-launch antenna arrays and ultimately permit steerable needle-sharp beams to be pointed down at small-area ground targets. That will open the way to high-speed channel switching, another way to get more mileage from limited frequencies. When the satellite relays a TV program to a ground station or a number of them, of course it ties up that frequency for the program’s duration. But the frequency used to relay a rare telephone call to a remote town can be reassigned to another call in much less time.
Beam-steering and frequency-reassignment require sophisticated equipment. To route a dial-phone call, you dial digits that activate a string of switching relays. A similar coded instruction will be sent to future satellites from the call-originating ground station. Solid-state switching equipment will select an available downlink frequency and aim it by needle-sharp beam at the destination. A great number of beams can emanate simultaneously from a satellite.

Advanced technology will enable one satellite to handle 100,000 circuits or more with ease.

HUGE CAMERA READS METERS TO COUNT TELEPHONE CALLS

Special cameras of new design are taking the place of human meter readers who check and record, each month, the number of telephone calls for which you are to be billed. In the larger cities, a single telephone central office may employ as many as 10,000 individual registers or meters, and teams of clerks have been required to read them. Photographing twenty-five meters at a time, the cameras give a quicker reading and one that is proof against error.

Charting our own course

Over the years Gen Tel has become a large and important part of the nation’s vast communications network.

In fact, Gen Tel is today the largest of the many Independent telephone companies that supply a substantial share of America’s great and growing communications needs.

By striving for strength through self-reliance, Gen Tel has become a fully integrated communications system-with separate operating, manufacturing and research facilities.

Although we chart our own course in providing modern communications in 31 states, we contribute to the economic growth of the entire nation by drawing on hundreds of businesses, large and small, for many of our needs.

We at General Telephone & Electronics will continue to build on the principle that self-reliance is the nation’s strength, as it is our strength. By charting new courses, we intend to forward our progress and that of America through more and better communications for home, business and national defense.

General Telephone & Electronics Corporation, 730 Third Ave., New York 17.

GENERAL TELEPHONE & ELECTRONICS

NOVEL WEEKLY SERVICE KEEPS PHONES GERMFREE

Telephone subscribers in a number of eastern cities may now avail themselves of a service that undertakes to keep the instruments free of germs. Once a week, a uniformed representative calls, undoes a kit resembling a physician’s case, and applies an antiseptic paste that is said to keep the telephone in sanitary condition.

It’s kind of amazing to think that my iPhone has far more capacity than the entire “overseas” telephone network had at this time.

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‘America Calling’

How A Transatlantic ‘Phone Call is Made

By A. P. PECK

1. Within an average of 12 minutes after an American subscriber puts in a call for a party in London, the connection is made and conversation is carried on as clearly and easily as if the called party were only a few blocks away. Behind this commonplace occurrence (an average of 50,000 overseas calls are made yearly, 60 to 65 percent of them being transatlantic), there is a vast array of technical developments and their application, aimed toward maintenance of service and speech quality.

2. The United States subscriber making the call asks his local operator for “Long Distance” (above); she in turn connects him with one of the operators at the switchboard through which all overseas calls are handled, shown at 3.

3. Left: The “Overseas” board through which passes the call to London. Here are handled most of the ‘phone calls set up between the United States and foreign countries by wire and radio telephony. First duty of an operator receiving a call at this board is to write down all details of the destination of that particular call.

4. Left: After the “Over-seas” operator looks up the number of the called party in London, she passes the information to the London operator over the radio circuit. At the desk shown are assembled ‘phone books of the principal foreign cities reached by the radio service.

5. Right: The wire part of the overseas circuit passes through the control room in the same building as the switchboard. Here operators maintain a constant watch on the apparatus; here also outgoing speech is “scrambled”.

6. To insure privacy of overseas telephony, speech is “scrambled,” or inverted in frequency; anyone listening in with a radio receiver would hear sounds resembling almost anything but coherent speech. The above drawing, fanciful in its execution, shows briefly what happens. The voice frequencies of “America calling” are scrambled to sound something like “on oy ikau ki yung”; they are unscrambled when they reach the receiver.

7. From the control room shown at 5, a wire line carries the voice of the speaker to a short-wave transmitting station at Lawrenceville, New Jersey (above), whence it is hurled across the Atlantic by a directive radio antenna system, picked up at a receiving station near London, and sent on its way once more by wire.

8. Left: The radio control room in the London Trunk Exchange, where the voice from the United States is unscrambled. Here also operators keep check on the functioning of all associated apparatus, and control the volume of current passing through the circuit so that transmitted speech will at all times be within the easily audible range—neither too loud nor too low for perfect understanding.

9. From the radio control room the incoming voice is passed by wire to the International Exchange in the same building, whence it is routed through the local telephone exchange system and finally reaches the party being called.

10. Right: The call is completed. Quickly and without hitch, two parties on opposite sides of the Atlantic have been connected by wire and radio, an accomplishment made possible by the findings of intensive scientific research.

WHAT IS THE AT&T?

All that most people see of the telephone company are a telephone and a few feet of wire.

But through that telephone you can talk with any one of millions of people, all linked together by the web of equipment of the Bell System.

All its efforts are turned constantly to one job—to give better telephone service to an ever-increasing number of people, as cheaply as it possibly can.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company provides the staff work for the Bell System. To it the operation of the telephone service is a public trust. It pays a reasonable dividend to its stockholders . . . and uses all earnings beyond that to improve and extend the service.

There are more than 550,000 stockholders, and no one person owns so much as one per cent of its stock.

The Bell System operates through 24 regional companies, each one attuned to the needs of its particular territory. In addition, the 5000 members of the Bell Laboratories staff do the scientific work which makes it possible to improve and widen the service at least cost to its users. The Western Electric Company, which manufactures for the Bell System, specializes in the economical production of telephone equipment of the highest quality.

All these facilities are directly available throughout the entire Bell System, at any time or place. . . . Because of them, every dollar that you spend for telephone service brings you constantly greater value and convenience.

AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY

He’s using the telephone that lends an extra hand

For people who want to keep both hands free when they telephone, Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers have devised a new telephone with a sensitive microphone in its base.

To use it, simply press a button. The microphone picks up your voice and sends it on its way. Your party’s voice comes to you through a small loudspeaker. Both hands are left free.

The volume can be adjusted to suit yourself. If privacy is needed, you simply lift the handset; this shuts off the microphone and loudspeaker and you talk just as you would on a regular telephone.

This new development of Bell Laboratories increases the number of ways your local Bell telephone company can serve in businesses and homes.

Bell Telephone Laboratories
Improving telephone service for America provides careers for creative men in scientific and technical fields.

Your handy phones away from home

Quick, easy way to keep in touch and get things done wherever you are. Convenient public telephones save you time, money and trouble.

A LIGHT IN THE DARK —More and more outdoor telephone booths are being placed at convenient locations and are available for service 24 hours a day. They supplement the hundreds of thousands of public telephones in buildings, stores, hotels, gas stations, airports, railroad stations and bus terminals.

The Call That Saves a Dinner. Take a moment to make a thoughtful call home when you’re late. Saves worry as well as the dinner.

“I’ve Been Thinking About You.” Someone would like to hear from you. So obey that nice impulse to call. There’s always a telephone nearby.

“He Wants Immediate Delivery.” A quick telephone call is a big help in making appointments, reporting orders and speeding deliveries.

“We’ll Be There About Ten.” When you’re traveling, it’s always a good idea to telephone ahead for rooms or tell friends when you’ll arrive.

It’s Fun to Phone… BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM

“Hellos” by the Millions

RECENT figures compiled by the Bell System show that there is more than 145 million miles of telephone wire in the world, or enough to reach from the Sun out past the planet Mars; and about 60% of it is in the United States, where it was used for more than twenty-seven billion conversations over the wire last year. (At three minutes each, this is 154,000 years of talk.) That is, every man, woman and child in the United States made 220 calls; or, rather, leaving out those who can not use the telephone, there was an average of only about one call a day. In the use of the telegraph, the United States is a shade less pre-eminent; it has only a third of the world’s 6,773,500 miles of wire.

More Telephone Service for more people

From The 1946 Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

1. In no year since the telephone was invented was there such a remarkable increase in the amount of telephone service furnished to the American people as in 1946. The net gain in the number of Bell telephones was 3,264,000, or more than twice the gain for any previous year. Additional telephones were installed at a rate averaging more than 25 a minute every working day.

2. Achievement of this kind reflects the skill, energy and determination of the 617,000 people working together on the Bell System team. What has been done has not been done easily. Many thousands of new employees have been trained in telephone work. It has been necessary to overcome serious difficulties caused by the persistent scarcity of certain essential raw materials needed in large quantities.

3. Most of those who were waiting for Bell telephone service at the start of 1946 had been cared for by the year’s end. In addition, the System was able to take care of more than 70 per cent of all new applications received. Yet the total number of new requests for service was so great (there were more than five million) that at the beginning of 1947 there were still about two million people waiting for service.

4. We are working hard to remedy this situation and also to reach the point where all calls can be handled with pre-war speed or better —in short, to give every customer the kind of service he wants when and as he wants it. With experience at hand in abundance, and with new tools and techniques, the Bell System looks forward to steadily increasing achievement in service to the American people.

BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM

NEW TELEPHONIC DEVICE KEEPS HANDS FREE

MR. GEORGE TANKARD is shown below with his new invention that is designed with an eye to speeding up the efficiency of a busy man. This invention is balanced on the shoulder by the form fitting holder. The receiver is placed in the holder and then adjusted to the shoulder so that the ear gets the best results. It is interesting to note that this device has been produced in London, where the American type of speed efficiency has been taking a very strong hold in the last few years.

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The Microwaves Are Coming!

Invisible network will handle phone rails, telegrams, television, FM and AIM broadcasts, complete newspapers—even carry your mail.

By Martin Mann
PSM photos by Robert F. Smith

COMMUNICATIONS are being revolutionized faster than you think. The humming wires beside the highways already are rivaled by new systems, capable of transmitting more spoken or written words and more still or moving pictures from coast to coast. The difference between these new systems and those of the past is as great as that between oxcarts and stratoliners. Radio relay systems, coaxial cables, and other improvements in communications systems soon will bring you not only better, faster services such as you already know, but also completely new kinds of service.

Your radio program now comes to you in waves a fifth of a mile long. Your son’s television program, and his telegrams and long-distance phone calls—even his mail-will come to him in waves only two or three inches long. Telegrams are now flying between New York and Philadelphia in these microwaves; phone calls will be made in microwaves next year between New York and Boston; and television shows are being sent this way now from New York to Schenectady and Philadelphia.

These microwave relays use invisible beams in the air instead of wires. No poles support them. The poles and wires are replaced by steel or concrete towers every 30 miles or so. On these towers are antennas that catch the microwaves, shunt them down to repeater equipment to be amplified, then send them on to the next station.

These relay stations are as automatic as electric refrigerators—designed to operate with only occasional human supervision. If a tube fails, its duplicate is standing by, ready to switch into operation immediately without interrupting service—and at the same time to flash a trouble signal to the nearest testboard. A furnace heats each tower building in winter and in the summer it is cooled by air-conditioning devices for the machinery’s benefit. Banks of batteries and current from the local utility companies supply the power. In some stations, a gasoline generator automatically starts itself and takes over the job of charging the batteries if the utility lines fail.

You will not notice any difference when your phone calls begin to go through these radio relays. On a call from New York to Boston, for example, your voice will travel as usual from the handset through the switchboard into a trunk line for Boston. That trunk line now is a thick copper, rubber, and lead cable buried in a ditch along the Atlantic coastline. When radio relay is used, however, the cable carrying your voice will end on the roof of the telephone building in lower Manhattan. There it will feed into a microwave transmitter, aimed at the first relay station atop Jackie Jones Mountain, N. Y., 35 miles away.

At Jackie Jones, a strange antenna that looks like a big square metal funnel will receive the beam. This antenna is a set of criss-crossing metal plates that focus microwaves into a narrow beam. From this lens, the beam will travel down into the tower to amplifiers, to be strengthened after its 35-mile trip. It will then go back up to a second lens, which will aim it at the next relay station on Birch Hill in Connecticut. This process will be repeated in each of seven relay stations until your voice reaches the receiving lens on the Boston telephone building and goes into wires again.

The Bell System already has the equipment installed for this New York-to-Boston chain of relay stations and is working on chains from New York to Philadelphia and Chicago. These relays will be capable of handling television shows as well as phone calls. Western Union now is using a radio relay system developed by the Radio Corporation of America between New York and Philadelphia, will soon send telegrams from Pittsburgh to Washington the same way, and expects every main telegraph route in the country to be a radio relay system within a few years. The General Electric Co. is now transmitting television shows from New York to Schenectady, and the Philco Corporation has a similar link between New York and Philadelphia television stations. The beams transmitted and received by the relay stations are so narrow that it would be difficult to tap them. This is one of several reasons for using extremely high frequencies (around 4,000 megacycles, several thousand times as high as those of ordinary broadcasting stations). At such frequencies, the energy can be focused into beams so narrow that 100,000,000 times as much of it reaches the receiver as would otherwise. Most microwave transmitters produce only one watt of power, as compared to the 1,000 to 500,000 watts scattered by lower frequency radio stations.

Microwave beams, moreover, are not bothered by sunspots, thunderstorms, man-made electrical interference, hail, sleet, or snow. Since the towers are always on hills, even floods will seldom cause trouble. But the big reason for high-frequency beams is their tremendous carrying capacity. Several hundred people will be able to talk at the same time over Bell System’s New York-Boston beams.

Radio relays, however, are not the only means of increasing the capacity of a communications system. Much further developed than radio relays for telephone service is the coaxial cable, which is basically a copper tube with a wire running down the center. “Coax” already is being used both for telephone and television service. The cable must be buried in a deep ditch, and many amplifiers are needed, but the Bell System’s experience with coaxial cable has been so gratifying that more of it is being laid rapidly. By 1950, 12,000 miles of such cable will have been laid to link practically every major city in the United States.

The ability of radio relays and coaxial cables to carry more traffic will solve the major problem of the communications companies: how to handle more business. The wire networks have been called upon to carry an ever-increasing load of phone calls and telegrams. On top of that, there are new kinds of business that will not fit well on the wires—television, FM, and high-speed facsimile. Existing wires will continue to be used for comparatively short-distance phone calls and telegrams, but the burden imposed by the addition of new services will be handled largely by the new systems.

Television is the greediest customer. A television show can be sent over ordinary wires, but many amplifiers are needed and a coast-to-coast hookup by such wires is impractical. Even microwave equipment at present will carry only one television program per channel, because that is all the amplifiers can take. Better amplifiers, like the traveling-wave tube (PSM, Nov. ’46, p. 111), are being developed, however, and may increase the capacities of microwave systems.

Already, too, scientists are working on another kind of wire that possesses almost limitless carrying capacity—wave guides, which are just what the name suggests: copper pipes that guide waves. In a wave guide, the radio wave travels in the empty space inside, not in the copper itself. The copper serves only to hold the wave in place. Engineers call the waveguides “plumbing” because they look and work like the water pipes in your home.

Waveguides already are being used in radio relay stations (and radar sets, too).

They carry the microwaves the few feet from the receiving antennas to the amplifiers and back to the transmitting antennas.

Waveguides promise to be the ideal means of communicating intelligence when present difficulties are ironed out. A single pipe could carry all of the communications between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It could take every phone call and telegram now handled by hundreds of wires and still have plenty of room left for television, FM, and facsimile. As a long-distance path for communications, however, waveguides are still in their infancy.

Networks of some kind, capable of delivering television and FM service to every home in the country the way wire networks now carry standard broadcasts, will be avail-able in the very near future. They will also make possible such spectacular services as radio mail, a system of high-speed facsimile which may replace telegrams and air mail by speeding your letters across the continent at the rate of a million words a minute.

Radio mail equipment is being perfected now by RCA and Eastman Kodak under the name of Ultrafax. This equipment will combine photography and television to flash any kind of written material over a great distance almost instantaneously. Letters, books, newspapers or what have you will be first photographed on motion picture film. The film then will pass before the lens of a special television camera that will convert it to a radio wave and send it over a microwave relax or a coaxial cable to a distant receiver. There an electron beam will “write out” the material on unexposed film. After fast processing, this film will reproduce the original.

David Sarnoff, RCA president, says Ultra-fax will be capable of sending 40 tons of air mail from coast to coast in a single day. Besides letters, Ultrafax will be able to send newspapers over the air, perhaps even in the middle of regular television broadcasts. E. K. Jett, of the Federal Communications Commission, suggests that Ultrafax might be used to transmit a whole issue of the New York Times from New York to San Francisco during the few seconds between programs. The screen on a home television receiver would darken while the announcer said, “This is WNBT, New York,” and in that instant the picture frequencies would be used to send the whole newspaper. With the help of modern, high-speed methods of reproduction at the receiving end, San Franciscans could get their copies of the Times as soon as New Yorkers!

YOUR NEW PHONE

TELEPHONE subscribers will soon be getting a new, small-size phone like the one shown at left. The set will be offered in several colors and, later, in two models. The first model will feature a combined night-light and dial-light. The second model will have a two-line pick-up with a hold button for the first line and provision for use with home-intercommunication and speakerphone systems. Quantity production of the novel telephones is expected to begin in 1960. •

Incidentally, those calls cost roughly $119 a minute in 2009 dollars.

207 Talk Across Ocean on Xmas

CHRISTMAS traffic on the overseas telephone circuits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company this year eclipsed all previous records. Throughout the day a total of 207 messages was handled, and the connections established involved Europe, South America, Australia, and the “S. S. Belgeland” off the west coast of Central America.

Practically all of the traffic was of a social or personal nature, involving interchange of holiday greetings. The average length of the conversations was five minutes, at a rate of $30 for the first three minutes.

She Tells Herself the Time

LONDON now has a time-telling telephone service, obtained by dialing T-I-M on the automatic exchanges. A natural-sounding voice gives the time— but it is, as a matter of fact, a phonographic reproduction. It has been recorded on a glass disc, in the same manner as sound tracks are put on moving-picture films, and similarly reproduced electrically in any telephone circuit connected in. The phone thus functions as does a theatre loud speaker, when connected in the projector’s amplifier circuit.

TELEPHONY

WORLDS GREATEST HANDBOOK Sent FREE!

Would you like a well-paid position as Telephone expert? Only a few minutes a day with this wonder-book will prepare you to break into this fascinating field in less than a year. New edition, includes “automatic” machine switching, “manual” switchboards, long-distance and cable lines,—every engineering, operating and business phase of the great telephone industry.

For Beginners and Experts Written in simple language for the beginner by McMeen and Miller with help of Staff Engineers of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. In daily use by hundreds of electrical and telephone engineers as a dependable reference encyclopedia. Has helped thousands of men employed in telephone work smash ahead to better-paid positions. A year’s consulting membership in American Technical Society free if you mail coupon at once for book on approval. Reduced price, easy payments.

AMERICAN TECHNICAL SOCIETY Dept. T-3320 Drexel Ave. & 58th St.,Chicago

Old Phone Holds Unusual Record

THE tiny town of Bay, California, holds the distinction of having the furthest west telephone exchange in America. The old-fashioned switchboard is stationed in the general store, and tended by the storekeeper, Mrs. Z. E. Robertson.

Eastport, Maine, brags of being furthest east. The town fathers of Bay are going to change the name of their hamlet to Westport, and take their place in the hall of fame.

The longest straight telephone call in the country is from Eastport, Maine, to Bay. Only one such call has ever been recorded.

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If it’s the best telecommunications system on earth, why on earth change it?

If you’ve ever tried to make a telephone call anyplace else on earth, you know what you’ve got in America. The best telecommunications system in the world.

But now you’ve heard the Bell System is on the verge of major changes. Changes in how we’re organized. Changes in the way you can choose to do business with us.

Why change something that works?

There’s a very good reason. The telecommunications business itself has changed.

For most of our history, the Bell System has had one overriding goal: universal service. Dependable telephone service at reasonable rates for everyone who wanted it.

Bolstering that goal were government policies determining that telephone companies would operate differently from most American companies. Within many areas of the country, we were to be the exclusive supplier of telecommunications services. And since the Bell System didn’t operate in a competitive market, its rates and profits were strictly regulated by the government. But today the goal of universal service has been achieved. Over 96% of American households have telephone service.

Now regulators and legislators in this country are looking more to the marketplace and competition, rather than to regulation, to decide who will provide competitive services and equipment and how they will be priced. In part, this stems from an increasing sentiment in this country for the deregulation of major industries.

But perhaps most important is the fact that technology has changed the future of telecommunications. We are about to enter a new era – the Information Age. The technology of communications gradually has merged with that of computers. The marriage of these two technologies offers the potential for an impressive array of new customer services. However, the blending of these two technologies has also blurred the boundaries between a traditionally regulated industry – communications-and the unregulated data-processing industry.

The combination of all these factors has led to a rethinking of public policies on telecommunications. These changes will require some changes in the Bell System. But we can assure you that your telephone service will still be the best telecommunications system on earth.

Along with your local Bell telephone company, we’ll be telling you about any changes as they occur. In ads like this.

In each of these ads you’ll find a telephone number. That number is an important part of our “Let’s Talk” program.

This program has been set up by the Bell System to help you understand exactly what the changes at the Bell System will mean for you right now. And in the future.

Call us. At 1 800 555-5000.

There’ll be somebody to talk to. Somebody to help you. To answer your questions. To get you information.

So call us.

Let’s talk

Bell System