across the hudson river from new york city and westward into the state of new jersey is the city of angle angling could be any one of hundreds of american communities population twenty five thousand main street was busy stores banks and movie theaters attractive suburban homes with their neat lawns and their well groomed look in size in the kind of people who live here  englewood is like many other american towns and that was one of the reasons it has become the first town in the world to have an unusual kind of telephone service she just picked up her telephone and dialed her daughter in san francisco california in a matter of seconds she is talking with her simple and yes you are seeing the results of many many years of coordinated effort in research engineering and operating experience it's hard for us to realize today that in the early eighteen eighties the telephone was considered a newfangled contraption boy operators man the switchboards in those days and it was an adventure to be able to talk with friends or relatives on the other side of town the telephone at last was dialing a deep human need the ne people separated from one another to talk with each other soon alert girl operators replaced the boys new types of bans germans were developed and the telephone grew up with a growing america the demand for telephone service snowball indeed the use of the telephone became so tremendous that by the nineteen twenties dial service was rapidly being introduced to help handle the increased volume of calls as the calls increased more operators were needed more calls to handle meant more jobs to do and more people to fill those jobs this has been the story all through the development of the telephone for instance in the days when we had little or no dial it was the bell system had two hundred seventy thousand employees by the time seventy percent of the telephones were dial there were six hundred thousand employees more than twice as many but the remarkable use of the telephone was only part of the story of change in american life as  became towns and towns became industrial cities people's interests brought in where those early citizens were thrilled to telephone across town people now wanted to call towns and cities across the nation finally they wanted their voices to spy on the ocean as they did truly america had grown up all of which brings us back to englewood from any of angle which telephones you could already dial any one of more than four million of our telephones in the surrounding territories by an example of modern telephone service and therefore a fine proving ground for this new type of long distance service proving ground to answer such questions as w customers like the service they find it easy to use what improvements can be ma this first installation now enables telephone users to dial their own long distance calls as well as their local calls and calls to nearby communities the equipment that makes this service possible is among the most complex that man has ever devised when you dial a number the equipment obediently receives the information stores it up a remembers it it searches out an electrical pathway for your call using the one that is most suitable at a given instant if it finds one pathway blocked it drives another and another another if it runs into trouble it automatically reports the trouble and its probable sars parts of the equipment connected with other parts exchange information they do this sometimes by a touch system such as the blind use in reading braille sometimes it's done with a stream of electrons flowing through space sometimes it uses an elaborate system of musical notes played in cards that are heard and interpreted by a mechanical here but even that is not all of it keeping track of the details of the call is done automatically to when you dial a number polls are punched in the continuous representing your telephone number and the number you dial more holes are punched to show the time when you start and when you finish talking and hang on if you've got a busy signal or the number doesn't answer no charges made since all this information is in the form of tiny holes on a long piece of paper the meaning of these tiny holes has to be expressed in words and thinking this is done by running the tape through several machines which assembly information translate it's as easy as dialing a local call remember that number mrs warren looked up in her personal telephone notebook three one eight garfield five two three six eight the only difference between that and the local number is the three digits at the beginning three one eight is the code for the san francisco area if her daughter of lived in chicago mrs warren would have dialed the code three one two and then the telephone number cleveland two one six boston six one seven all together more than eighty numbered areas  planned for the united states some parts of canada for some time past area numbers like these have been used by telephone operators and dialing long distance calls when the people in the englewood area with one and two party lines were given this service they could dial to thirteen of these areas that meant that more than eleven million telephones could be dialed from englewood when will the eleven million be able to dial englewood and what about the remaining millions of telephones in the bell system the answer lies in the future but this much we do know over the years we have seen the results of a successful formula planned research to anticipate the demands of a growing nation vailable resources plus the continued efforts of many people combination has given america steady improvements in telephone service and the story of long distance dialing points the way to even better telephone service for you tomorrow