TOOLS OF TELEPHONY

[Music] [Applause] [Applause] your telephone a familiar everyday object is the key which stands ready to unlock a vast array of equipment most of it unseen which is summoned into action to get you the connection you want these are the tools of telephony they are many and varied but every one of them stands ever ready to serve you only because someone made it like the colorful new telephones miles of unseen cable and these switching frames someone made it or someone installed it like this dial central office equipment or warehouse dat near the point of use or someone bought it like these specially equipped telephone trucks to the American telephone and telegraph Ani and its operating companies across the nation this someone is the Western Electric Company with its 21 manufacturing locations in ten states seventeen installation areas from coast to coast a purchasing system that buys not only for its own plants but for the operating companies too and a chain of buses that covers the nation nearly everything a Bell Telephone company needs to do its job is secured to orders placed on a western electric distributing house nearby there are 29 of these houses and no telephone need is more than a few hours away from their extensive stock of everything from phone booths to paper clips these vast warehouses are the handi department stores of the Bell System a thousand and more requisitions a day come from a telephone company into a typical distributing house nine out of ten of them for shipment the same day they call for a vast assortment of things big & Little's some made by Western some bought from suppliers the smaller items are stored along half-mile conveyor lines into which the dispatcher feeds his orders one typical house starts ten thousand different items including three thousand types of apparatus and 1,800 different kinds of printed matter the stock turnover is rapid on many of the items but Western stock selectors must still be ready to supply replacement parts for equipment installed years ago the hampers go to the telephone companies loading platform for transport during the night 2 telephone work centers some of this material will be installed tomorrow morning while it is still being built [Music] [Applause] [Music] the trucks come back to the houses with used equipment that has been removed from service this is carefully sorted and classified some of it of course isn't worth the cost of repair and goes into various channels of Salvage [Music] old cable and wire metal parts and the like has shipped to the company Salvage plant on Staten Island New York for the Nassau smelting and refining company reclaims the copper LED and other metals this operation has been particularly useful to the system in the recurring periods when copper has been scarce [Music] [Applause] [Applause] back at the distributing house the repairable items have entered a highly organized reconditioning routine the shops handle all sorts of equipment but the volume job is on the telephone instruments themselves there is a constant turnover of instruments young families move into larger homes business concerns shift address families move from one residence to another and every instrument returned to us must be checked and reconditioned before it is used again the disassembled instruments are classified by the amount of work which needs to be done and are fed along the conveyor networking to the appropriate shop section an ingenious system of pins in the Traveling boxes automatically selects the right route all California placement parts as needed and a thorough check out on the test panel [Music] when nature goes on the rampage and disrupt service anywhere in the system the men of the distributing houses get on the job regardless of ours or whether somewhere out there in the storm other telephone men are fighting to restore service to stricken communities they must have tools and supplies what they need all they need when they need them the distributing house is ready aerial wire drop wire pull hardware and a hundred other necessities will be on the emergency scene in a matter of hours to be backed up by reserve stocks rushed from the factories [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's on the way [Music] hurricane Carol Hurricane Hazel Yuba City in the Western floods not one man out there in the storm had his work delayed by lack of material things the Bell Telephone company's order which Western Electric does not manufacture are bought from suppliers in 3,000 American cities and towns westerns purchasing people buy them along with all the supplies machinery and raw materials which it needs for its own operations the nationwide orders add into such a volume that westerns buyers can be specialists some men for example buy nothing but wood wood products from plywood poles they know as much about their specialty as a man can know [Music] many suppliers some is a big part of their output stabilizing their employment and saving on sales and credit expense the bail companies share these savings but the supplier must make a fair profit so he'll continue to be a healthy dependable source take these high-speed presses for printing millions of telephone directories often westerns pooled orders justify installing expensive cost cutting machinery and again bail companies share the savings [Music] we buy from all kinds of companies summer the Giants of American industry skilled in the manufacture of unusual items such as these microwave antennas often our volume justifies keeping western zone inspector right in the manufacturers plan to control quality of the source but many of our 28,000 suppliers are as small as this little enterprise which turns out very satisfactory wooden pins for cross arms and wherever possible we buy near the point of use from local merchants or dealers the billion dollars we dispersed last year for materials and outside services made itself felt in many places probably your town was one of the three thousand communities to which Western Electric checks were mailed [Music] the purchasing people also buy the raw materials which Western Electric uses in its factories copper almost a tenth of all copper consumed in the nation steel for fabrication interacts and frames plastics for insulating wire covering cable and making the familiar telephone sets and others by the hundreds in quantities large and small but before materials can be processed the products they will become must be developed and designed this is the job of the Bell Telephone laboratories owned jointly by Western Electric and AT&T much of the research is fundamental investigating the frontiers of present knowledge from one such project came the device which will affect our whole material way of life the transistor new tools of telephony start in the laboratories informally like this but they must sometime end up like this and that is the challenge to westerns manufacturing division of course Western makes not only telephone instruments but in its 21 plants spread over ten states it makes thousands of other tools of telephony that most telephone users will never see some of the plants are big others are modest in size in 1955 many of the plants had to put on night shifts many work to six-day week and deliveries were up 20% over an already active 1954 [Music] if westerns production men are to hold prices down in the face of rising wages and material costs manufacturing must be constantly more efficient here is such an effort teamwork in action the wire spring relay for switching telephone calls and central offices came from the laboratories as an experimental model their men worked in liaison with Western engineers to ready the device for quantity manufacture production would ordinarily have been set up in standard assembly groups like this but the stakes were high these relays were needed by the million and westerns development engineers set about designing an automated machine that would perform a whole series of complex operations in sequence to turn out the wire spring combs for the relay faster cheaper and better than manual methods could ever achieve this machine rarely a series of related machines in a 30-foot line cost three hundred thousand dollars the investment is substantial but the economy of automated production makes it pay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the 150,000 and more items in Western electrics product file are of infinite variety from huge like these reels of cable to small coils for telephone rings round by the million and the rest of buttons for assuring quietness in telephones to outright tiny so very tiny that they must be processed under a microscope westerns Allentown plant is in the vanguard of today's growing trend toward miniaturization whereby an entire telephone central office may someday fit into a space no larger than a living room it calls for precise factory techniques as in shaping the filament for a small electron cube micro manufacturing you might call it and here again Western as it has done for three-quarters of a century as pioneering here a tiny grid is wound with wire the operator can hardly see [Music] there mr. beads act as tiny switches conducting electricity and larger volume when hot than when cold these skills once rare and costly have now been made practical for volume application wire is always the target of nature's attacks wire and flooded conduits wire loaded with ice why are beaten by desert Sun and heat even on Pleasant days the relentless attack continues vulnerable to all these hazards for example is the wire from the pole to the subscribers house and a new kind of wire from our Baltimore plant is already reducing this cause of service interruption this wire starts with a steel core for strength a series of plating operations coached to steel with copper for conductivity and other metals to resist corrosion the process developed by westerns engineers is called electro forming it is continuous and nearly automatic the entire building including the 200-foot plating tanks and the complex wire transfers is operated by only six men [Applause] these strong wires now coated with copper are laid in a bed of rubber and covered with tough neoprene to resist abrasion the hurricane tonight would leave this floor nearly bare tomorrow another new type of telephone wire coated with plastic in any of eight colors at 2,000 feet per minute will provide the long years of trouble-free service the bell system demands reducing red-hot billets of copper to wire brings out some unusual teamwork between the Western Electric men and their machines each time the hot copper passes between rollers it becomes thinner when down to a quarter-inch it is ready to be cleaned and drawn into wire [Music] here the wires enter a huge machine which insulates them with a coat of paper the insulated wires then come together in a bundle [Music] these cable units are combined on a custom basis more or fewer of them according to the needs of the telephone company the whole cable may contain over four thousand into wires enclosed in one jacket [Music] today protective plastic replaces the traditional lead sheath on many cables in the future the sheath may be of aluminum formed directly on the cable [Music] to the manufacturing engineer no process is ever final intricate wiring for telephone switching equipments slow and costly to make by hand now flows from a machine which starts with wire on spools a small network a complicated assembly of miniature components needed in every telephone now gets a series of tests on an automatic machine this little glass-enclosed switch compact and positive when made by hand cost too much for widespread use the engineers developed a machine which is a miniature factory in itself starting with metal parts and glass tubing and going through a self-control sequence of operations checking itself for quality and delivering the switches in great quantity at 20% of their old price the little signal lamps which flash on telephone switchboards light up the sometimes overlooked fact that automation must be applied with common sense despite the huge volume of these tiny lamps 10 million of them are made each year the clever machines still need the supervision of human hands deft hands controlled by human intelligence and judgment [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] a gleaming crystal of germanium spins up from a batch of molten metal ready to be sliced into the tiny wafer which is the heart of the transistor the growing family of transistors is dropping in cost as mass production engineering continues tiny and cool transistors use so little current that today's familiar telephone bell which rings on eighty five volts may someday be replaced by a transistorized musical tone which needs only one volt the Indianapolis plant typifies modern volume manufacture error made the telephone instruments themselves well over five million of them last year probably more this year in the year after a few ounces of plastic become a handset housing in seconds by the use of a polished steel die that took six months to make and cost fifty five thousand dollars a set expensive tools that cut production costs are made feasible by the pooled orders of all the bail companies color rides the conveyor lines today eight colors to match any decor and convenience to match the color spring cords wall telephone speaker phones volume control phones illuminated dials and answering sets all produced for the users convenience and at a reasonable price [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] an ideal fusion of machines and people and despite the machines still a lot of people last year Western paid over 600 million dollars to 120 thousand men and women a third of whom have been with us for 10 years or more from the vast Kearney plant and from the even bigger Hawthorne works comes equipment for automatically switching telephone calls and central offices engineers custom design each addition or expansion from files which detail every central office and the bell system and shop supervisors keep hundreds of components moving through production to meet the factories part of the complicated installation schedule since no two towns are alike every central office must be different so Western tailors the combination of frames amplifiers and so on to the particular community requirement and builds this custom combination out of standard volume produced units which differ in number rather than in design [Music] the wire wrapping gun which makes connections without solder is saving time as well as soldering assemblies like this these huge frames for a new central office are just one part of the world's biggest electronic brain the bail system plant where a person can put a problem into the computer in Seattle and seconds later get his answer in Miami a typical order for central office equipment calls on Western to engineer furnish and install from factory merchandise docks the equipment goes out to westerns installers the 18,000 men work out of headquarters in 16 far-flung cities the installers are the Marines of Western Electric the mobile force that rolls into a town moves into an empty space in a telephone building and proceeds to fill it with pulsing clicky equipment this job has been an active preparation for many months the supervisors have enough blueprints and specifications to paper the walls of their big room 10 times over the job begins new men learned from the old hands mastering one skill and moving unto a more difficult one until they become old hands themselves [Music] the hundreds of wires in each of these cables are to the layman is alike as blades of grass but each one of the thousands of strands has its own origin and seeks its own destination last year Western installed nearly two million dial lines in sixty five hundred towns and cities the custom-made apparatus flows from the factories to the job each frame and panel skidded to its predetermined place on a schedule set up before most of it was manufactured quite a crew these installers scattered in small groups from coast to coast but effectively is close together as though all of them were in the same room working with the same tools on units manufactured to the same specifications making connections to tie in with other circuits being connected at the same moment by distant men whom they may never meet so that a call placed at any one of the 46 million telephones in the system can get an answer from any other telephone and do it so dependably that the caller will keep right on taking his tools of telephony for granted now the job is nearing completion and the Western supervisor and the telephone company wire chief bring their people together into the team that will test and check and observe until this infinitely complex web of circuits is proven ready for service every connection every switch every relay and the thousands of circuits will either check out okay or drop a card automatically punch to spot what is wrong okay and the time grows shorter coordinating committees from Western and the telephone company matched their schedules and point for their big date the hour of the cut over now the new office meets its major challenge the load test which dumps a flood of simulated calls in much greater volume and should ever come through the cables if it passes this [Music] [Applause] it passes finished like 99% of the projects right on the scheduled date and the force now ready to move on says goodbye to its vocal friends the supervisor stuffs the last of his papers into his familiar brown briefcase and moves on to the next job the day a substantial part of westerns manpower and machines is devoted to the national defense [Music] at one of its plants Western men and women make the fantastically complicated Nike guided missile system which will locate a sky borne invader track him and guide the warhead to the kill [Music] to train men of the Navy Army and Air Force in using the new electronic weapons which we produce members of westerns field engineering force followed the flag wherever it goes and it goes to some far places to spam the Arctic wastes with a 3,000 mile line of radar stations known as the dew line the government called on westerns unique experience in organizing new and complicated undertakings 200 thousand tons of equipment and supplies had to be moved into a forbidding region and then installed here were once a man considered himself lucky just to stay alive now he drops huge bulldozers from the skies as a matter of below-zero routine to build a new frontier of defense for the nation this is Western Electric a nationwide structure built on 74 years of service to the Bell companies and the telephone users service in purchasing the most suitable materials at the fairest price distributing the materials to the right place at the right time manufacturing tools of telephony to serve dependably for decades service in installing the tools to meet the ever-increasing needs of a whole nation of customers service in the final analysis by people a hundred and twenty thousand loyal and industrious men and women without whom even the finest plant would be only brick concrete and dead metal over the years a miracle has come to pass until today any person can talk directly voice to ear with any other person in our whole country and in much of the world abroad clearly quickly and at low cost through the most active period of America's growth it has been the privilege of the Western Electric Company to engineer furnish and install the tools of telephony to the end at the progress of the past they serve as the promise of the future [Music]