SUPER-ROBOT SPEEDS PHONED TELEGRAMS

When a New Yorker calls one of the city’s principal telegraph companies on the phone to send a wire, he now sets in motion a super-robot so swift that a stopwatch often cannot time it.

Within the short space of one second, on the average, he hears the answering voice of one of 110 girls, who sit at desks as shown in photo above. This is made possible by the “automatic call distributor, ” called one of the most important inventions in recent years.
Read the rest of this entry »

Making a Telephone Talk Through Loudspeaker

“WILL you speak a little louder please?” That request is unnecessary for users of a new telephone loudspeaker invented by H.O. Rugh, of Chicago, Ill. The installation consists of a horn loudspeaker operating from the telephone receiver through an audio amplifier similar to amplifiers used in radio. The latter is supplied with current from the house lighting circuit and is contained in a small cabinet upon which the telephone instrument rests.
Read the rest of this entry »

Directory Dials the Phone

A NEW desk telephone directory not only finds the number you want but actually dials it for you. All you have to do is slide the knob on the face of the device, called an Auto Dial, to the name you want, then press the small lever at the foot of the machine. When the lever returns to its normal position, in five or six seconds, your call is made and you pick up the phone.
Read the rest of this entry »

What the Telephone Map Shows

EVERY dot on the map marks a town where there is a telephone exchange, the same sized dot being used for a large city as for a small village. Some of these exchanges are owned by the Associated Bell companies and some by independent companies. Where joined together in one system they meet the needs of each community and, with their suburban lines, reach 70,000 places and over 8,000,000 subscribers.

The pyramids show that only a minority of the exchanges are Bell-owned, and that the greater majority of the exchanges are owned by independent companies and connected with the Bell System.

At comparatively few points are there two telephone companies, and there are comparatively few exchanges, chiefly rural, which do not have outside connections.

The recent agreement between the Attorney General of the United States and the Bell System will facilitate connections between all telephone subscribers regardless of who owns the exchanges.

Over 8,000 different telephone companies have already connected their exchanges to provide universal service for the whole country.

American Telephone and Telegraph Company And Associated Companies
One Policy One System Universal Service

“Finger” Speeds Dialing

Easily attached to the top of a dial-telephone receiver, a metal finger now on the market fits snugly into the dial holes, helps prevent inaccurate dialing, eliminates the danger of broken finger nails, and speeds up the dialing process by about ten percent.

Huh, apparently at some time after this article was published an extra ‘e’ was added to employee because in this article it’s all employes and employe.

view additional pages

Heroes of the Switchboard and Phone Lines

FIRES, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes— these are some of the hazards that bring drama into the work of telephone employes. Keeping communication lines open during disasters is a vital matter. As long as nature behaves herself, as long as things go along normally, the work of the lineman, the operator, and the man on the test board is routine, but when trouble begins heroes are made.
Read the rest of this entry »

This article is an exploration of the changes that will be brought on by the rise of solid-state electronics. The author does a very good job extrapolating what will be possible, with very few of the flights of fancy such as flying cars and domed cities that are common to articles of this genre. Almost every product he discusses is available now.

People do have video crib monitors, solar panels are available, but are not quite efficient enough to power a house, as he predicted. Video phones are only now really practical because of the bandwidth limitations spelled out in the article. We don’t have ultrasonic washing machines in our houses, but ultrasonics are used in a number of areas for cleaning. We do (did) rent movies for our color VCRs, and there are megahertz range computers managing very complicated factory production with very little human intervention. Not to mention touch tone phones and microwave ovens. Plus, if you showed that picture of a flat screen tv on the first page to someone without any context they’d probably guess that someone had hacked an LCD monitor to look all “retro”. By the way, if you’re interested in flat screen TVs, you should check out this one from 1958.

I’ve actually been wanting to post this article for a few years. When I was posting this piece about a pocket transistor radio, I noticed that the author used the word “stereatronics”, which I’d never heard. I googled it and found the complete text of this article, with no pictures, here. After reading it I learned that stereatronics was a word created for this article, which they hoped would catch on. It didn’t. I thought it would be perfect to post to the site, so I tracked down a copy. Then when I got it I realized that Colliers magazine was 11×14″ and I couldn’t fit it on my scanner. However, I recently bought an 11×17″ scanner for the site, and so here it is.

view additional pages

Stereatronics – A New Science that Will Change Your Way of Life

Tiny solids are turning the electronics industry upside down. Some vibrate, others change light to energy or energy to light, or direct current to alternating. Together, they spell revolution

A NEW science, stereatronics, has been creeping up on us in the last few years and has started to make major changes in the way we live. Few of us have noticed any difference; the changes have come so quietly that even many of the people who are closest to the new science are surprised at what it has been doing. Yet the evidences have been all about us.

—Television sets are a great deal less expensive now than they were a relatively few months ago.

—More and more tape recorders are being sold. Five years back, they were too costly for most people. Ten years ago, they weren’t to be had at any price.
Read the rest of this entry »

Few things are as useless to a businessman as information that reaches him too late

When vital business information is tardy, something or someone usually suffers. Production is slowed up. A customer has to wait. A decision is delayed.

Remedy: Bell System Data-Phone* service. Connected with the business machine-virtually any type —it converts data (from punched cards or tapes) into a special “tone” language and transmits it over the same nationwide telephone network you use for voice communications.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it is cordless. I doesn’t look all that convenient to tote around though.

Cordless phone

Shown in its recharging tray (immediate right), the Satellite Phone communicates via radio to a transponder (center), which is connected to the phone line. Transmitter and receiver built into a phone (far right) make it cordless. It’s $395 with charger from Keltner Research, 2126 S. Kalamath, Denver, Colo. 80223.

Bricks Test Storm Resistance of Phone Wires
To determine how well telephone wires will carry the extra weight of ice during snow and sleet storms, engineers string bricks along experimental open-wire lines at the Bell Laboratories field station in Chester, N. J. It has been found that an accumulation of ice one inch in radial thickness adds about twenty-two ounces to a foot of wire, or 200 pounds on a 150-foot span.

FOUR-FOOT DIAL SHOWS PHONES MYSTERIES

The intricacies of using the dial telephone come easily to students at a western secretarial school, where a four-foot dial was recently rigged up to explain its mysteries.

Not a dummy, the big dial actually works. It is connected with two telephones, an amplifying apparatus, and a loudspeaker. When the instructor dials a number, the loudspeaker reproduces, so that all may hear them, the typical sounds that will be heard; and the instructor explains to the pupils what they mean.