normal activities one gets the feeling but this is a community of good neighbors the kind of a place you'd like to live perhaps grow old in the kind of a place but one of the most essential factors in its growth is communication communications provided by the telephone company and designed among other things to give my town the means for transacting  means for communicating information or seeking help for keeping old friends into yes communications on the telephone company that provides our part of  d like my town itself the telephone company is more than buildings in the wholesome switch for its people many people in many places doing many different jobs the operators who handle telephone calls in my town here in the central office you can feel the pulse of the community the flashing lights on the switchboard reflects the activity of the town  a the man settles back for the night it's the job of the traffic department to handle this changing volume of call it has to be ready with enough equipment and enough operators twenty four hours a day to meet the customer's demands for service from the earliest the number is right five six two four zero five six two four zero thank you the calling number a place called and length of the conversation noted for use by the accounting that sometimes an operator handles calls that are more urgent the telephone operators tradition of staying on the job in times of disaster is well  whole for my town and its people are being built to house the increasing population of workers and their families they all need communication on the telephone company to be ready to supply cable got about a hundred wires inside of it and each one of them connect to a phone in somebody's home or off phone will be ready for service that is they will be as soon as i  other departments coming in how they fit in the act so i guess that's a natural question for a newcomer to and you're curious and you should be about how your job fits in with others in the company well it's kind of a big order ted but i can tell you this all of us in the telephone company are organized to do just one thing to give people good telephone service now to do that and do it right takes a lot of people with a lot of different skills now i know you've been through this a plant school bus let's just review it say there's a new family like the gardeners here move to my town and one telephone service chances are someone in the family goes to the telephone office and address and how the name is to be listed in the directory you see she wants to be sure the customer gets complete telephone service these days homes have telephones wherever it's convenient and that's as it should be they want their extensions where they will be of most value it could be indoors in the bedroom or outdoors on a terrace and we install this can be of help for instance you'll find you have lots of chances to suggest locations for telephones while you work it's all part of doing a good job but let's get back to mrs gardner's request the service right now once the order was placed commercial goes right to work on first off a copy of the order with all the details to send to the point department there click assigns the necessary facilities to do the job including central office lines and outside  simultaneously directory traffic and accounting people receive identical copies of the order so they can prepare their records for the new customer the plan installation copy of that order comes to me and i assign the word to you fellows each morning now while you are hooking up the line for mrs gardner's phone the frame man in the central office was connecting it to the switching equipment that gives us the circuit that makes it possible for you never stop learning in this business and you'll understand your own job better when you know how other departments operate for instance the commercial the fact in addition to servicing new customers such as mrs gardner also handles the payments of the customer's bill and has a further responsibility on forwarding the names of new subscribers to the printer for the telephone directory every name address and number is carefully checked and rechecked for absolute accuracy it is an exacting task every step of the way as they say it's something for the book the book in this case being the most widely used by humans the year commercial also collects the money from public telephones that serve my town and stores factories transportation centers and even along the highway  then there are the telephone salesman they have a job of calling on business customers and suggesting the type of telephone system that will best serve the customers business needs directory advertising sales also call in business customers and show how yellow pages advertising can help they plan the kind of layout for the attract buyers and boost sales for the advertising the service the telephone people give can as an immediate right now it can seek and answer the needs of today it can plan the needs of tomorrow and the needs of tomorrow are a service when the customer needs it they decide where telephone cable will be installed how it will be installed underground or overhead and how much of it will be needed to do to be a two hundred pair cable or a four hundred and they have to make sure there's enough equipment in a central office to handle the switching of the cards and plan tables for routing long distance calls the engineers also work directly with builders in my town to be sure the telephone service will be ready for customers when they move into their new home how is this run twenty to twenty five thousand dollars and i've got the outworking figured it had been finished by spraying in other words you want to be ready for immediate telephone installation when the houses are completed definitely welts is a situation mr palmer laid out in the feeder cable coming up to this area but please don't got to get our poles and distribution cables in place for wiring to the house i had no idea there was so much involved but that's why we appreciate this advance notice some dollars don't include us in their plans and then the new homeowners have to wait for their telephones we don't want that to happen here we want phones available when our houses go up you can count on us we'll be ready in just such fashion planning on construction work go hand in hand  terminals go in accounting comes in it has to keep track of all the money and receive the company may know where it stands financially all bills in invoices come to accounting for checking and they keep all the cost records necessary to prepare the company's financial reports they have charge of the records the document the location the type of telephone plant here to prepare the paycheck neve handles a customer's bill from the first step of listing the customer's name and address through the successive stages of computing the bill and preparing it for m and the telephone company is a grateful protest we've seen the parts played by the various operating departments such as traffic whose operators handle many of the plans which install the engineering where all the planning and designing are done commercial which is responsible for many customer services and finally accounting where all the financial records are prepared working in support of these operating units the companies test apartment such as personnel personnel helps to develop and train people in all levels of employment they handle benefit and pension plans present reminders of earlier day they also watch over the health of the employees and arrange for medical attention whenever they need and equally important staff section is the legal department which checks all company contracts and represents the company in court action public relations is also one of the companies stepped apart it is largely responsible for keeping the public informed about the company its members write news releases for the community newspapers they also prepare a newspaper advertisement that promotes various telephone services and  coordinate activities that deal with radio or television shows they prepare films and other programs for employee and public group and they take part in a arranging telephone open houses to which the people of  community are invited the preparation of the company magazine is also the responsibility of public relations well mike we've had our problems and putting this together but they're then many excellent  comics showing part of it just now i think we've reached the point where we need a good story to wrap the whole thing up now i have some idea that i could talk all the way to that scene now that the previous articles have covered all phases let's start with eighty and take the parent company which coordinates the activities and policies of all the companies in the system each of the operating companies serves a specific area of the united states and long lines also connects the bell system with the thousands of independent telephone company it furnishes the links that make nationwide telephone service p long lines also provides the channels that radio and television broadcasters use for their nationwide network to serve a growing nation western also produces a vast amounts of people that are needed to and are connected these telephone found its bills and installs the dial switching equipment  switchboards used in most central offices in addition to manufacturing cable and communication equipment western also serves as the supplier for the entire bell system this means that the company is not only depend on it for their telephone apparatus but also there are other everyday supplies such as paper clips typewriter ribbon and anything else they need naturally western electric doesn't make all these things itself as a matter of fact most of the items are purchased from more than thirty three thousand industrial firms across the country from its warehouses strategically located over the nation western alike think is able to rush communication equipment to any stricken area in times of emergency this equipment is so standardized that truman brought from any operating company of the bell system can use it without further instruction this is sure  bell telephone laboratories is the research and development partner in the bell system it is one of the largest and most experienced industrial laboratories in the world and it is uniquely qualified to do the design work for both military and civilian communications a question its job is to provide america with the communications of the future as it has already designed the communications of the present laboratories modern research to improve telephone service and to do it in such a way as to what your efficient and economic operation the achievements of the laboratories researchers are many ranging through all branches of the communications one of their latest advances in telephone progress is leading to new systems of automatically switching telephone calls these systems are so radical in design that they promise to bring tomorrow's customers a multitude of almost dreamed of services the tiny device which will make these electronic switching systems possible is the revolutionary transistor invented after a laboratory is the transistor brought bell scientist one of the two nobel prizes they have won for discoveries in physics though it was primarily developed for the betterment of telephone communications the versatile transistor now appears in a staggering variety of devices and  it has become an important factor in the growth of many new industry development that is welcomed by the telephone company welcome because it is in the pattern of service that is traditional with every phase of telephone operation from its very beginning service has been an inseparable part of the telephone story as inseparable as the telephone company is long and continuing association with a communities the mine towns everywhere people gave us the opportunity to be absurd they have grown together these cities and villages of america and their telephone company good friends and good  they share the responsibilities of good citizenship who telephone people are proud of those responsibilities on the job land as individual citizens helping their communities in their own way