WRITER MARSHALL LOEB looked up from the stack of research prepared for him by Correspondent Bob Ball and Researcher Jean Pascoe, considered his deadline for this week's cover story and mused about time and TIME. What if he had one of those new pushbutton telephones? The buttons save five seconds a call compared with that old-fashioned dial. At the rate of, say, 24 seven-digit calls, he could save two minutes a day, ten minutes in a five-day week, and, allowing for four weeks' vacation, that would add up to an important eight hours a year!

Whether this bit of strategic calculation will ultimately get Loeb a pushbutton phone remains to be seen, but it is clear that he is not the first TIME writer to muse about what the telephone might do in the future. "Use of automatic [dial] telephones increased 50% during 1925," reported TIME, March 15, 1926. "The automatic seems the only relief for telephone congestion in the great cities." And another writer joined the Bell men in peering a long way ahead in the May 18, 1931, issue: "Telephonic television is still the most satisfactory means of transmitting the image. In the U.S. there is one telephone-television circuit in regular operation. One end of it is in the American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s offices at No. 195 Broadway, the other in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. A.T. & T. is experimenting because it feels that sometime a practical use for television may crop up. Only uses conceived so far: for separated sweethearts, for identifying criminals, for the convenience of bank depositors who want to cash checks away from home."

Some people may argue that no practical use for television ever cropped up, but these bits of history emphasize how fast and how much communications have advanced. The pace was fast enough when TIME, Feb. 23, 1959, reported in a cover story on the great strides being made by "The Telephone Man," but it is even faster now. Looking to the near future, Artist Robert Vickrey chose for the cover background a section of the new "Trimline" phone that has dialing, listening and speaking elements all in one piece, a wiring pattern in an A.T. & T. experimental office, part of a dialer card for the new automatic dialing phone and the soon-to-be-familiar pushbuttons.

The cover story, edited by Edward L. Jamieson (who, incidentally, wrote the 1959 cover story), deals of course with where the world's biggest company came from and where it is, but, perhaps most important, with what might be ahead. Assessing what new developments of the present mean in terms of the future is becoming a more and more important part of the journalist's task as the pace of change increases. Whether it is a story like Modern Living's report on how new communities are being developed around the family airplane, or Medicine's story of how a dramatic new use of the plastic bag will help save lives, or where Chairman Frederick Kappel is leading the world's biggest company--TIME aims to keep looking ahead of change.

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