Long Distance Made Easier

The telephone is growing up fast. It can now talk (a robot voice tells callers the time and weather). It acts as if it could think (when dialed on local calls). And last week in Philadelphia it was acting even more so. In operation was a new Bell Telephone Laboratories mechanical brain which enables the instrument to put through long distance calls without human assistance.

This is no mean achievement. A toll call, which must be relayed along a maze of loops and trunk lines, usually involves several skilled operators and a number of complex connections. In the new system, an operator in the town where the call originates calls the number by dialing or punching keys on a new kind of switchboard. Instead of plugs, this has a numbered keyboard like an adding machine. The message goes to the mechanical brain, called a "marker," which hunts out an available trunk line, tests a path to the destination and electrically sets up all connections--all within one second. If all lines are busy, overflow calls are stacked up in a special circuit and put through in order of priority as soon as lines are free. The marker has a trouble indicator which, on bungled calls, reports where & what the trouble is.

In its Philadelphia tests, this amazing instrument (known as the "crossbar toll switching system") has greatly speeded up long distance telephoning and relieved wartime overcrowding of toll lines. Telephone officials expect to install the system throughout the nation as soon as equipment is available after the war. Eventually, they believe, it will be possible for a customer to dial an out-of-town call on his home or office phone. Already, in Culver City, Calif., engineers are testing an instrument which not only permits direct dialing of toll calls (within a limited area) but automatically records on a printed ticket the length of the call and the charges.

Telephone engineers do not believe that the new system will end the need for operators; despite wide installation of local dialing systems, the telephone companies today employ more operators than ever before (because telephone use has increased). But the new device seems to foreshadow a day when men will seldom hear an operator's voice.

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