The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-04-18
TELEPHONE PROBLEMS


 TELEPHONE PROBLEMS
 The very largeness of the use of the telephone is bringing in some pressing special problems vital to and within the telephone service itself. The growth of the traffic, more especially the ac- celerated growth of recent years, has not carried with it corresponding in- crease in efficiency of the service. The large present-day telephone systems of our cities, though adapted to give great i ly improved service for the creased traffic in it's average volume, are sub ject to excessive strains by rise of the volume of traffic to very high maxima daring the so-called rush periods;" at which times the standard of operating, ordinarily high as compared with that of former times, falls off badly unless such temporary deterioration in the { service is avoided by. corresponding ly excessive up keep of plant-operators and apparatus-that in turn means extra expense wholly unwarranted by the said average. The fact is that human operators are not competent for this work as it has developed; yet human operators (for manual system" of operating in cortradistinction to automatic" system that dispense with them) have been retained in the tele- phone service in far greater force than ever. It costs to-day considerably over the $20,OG0,O0 that it did by conservative estimate last year to pay them. Many experienced and conservative telephone engineers will tell you that it is one thing to talk about tn desirability of doing away with operators by the sub Stitution of automatic machines at central, and quite another proposition to carry such a revolution into practi- cal effect. But it is another story, and an important one with many sides to it. to it.
 During the many hours of the day when the business traffic is light there are too many Of her and she is liable to be slack in attention. During the comparatively short but strenuous rush hours there are too few of her because to employ more just to be in readiness for the brief time of maxi mum traffic would mean a big outlay in expensive switchboard positions normally not earning their keep. Moreover. if they were very many more than sound telephone engineering practice assibns to big city switch boards today they would fall over each other' in some phases of the work at a given switchboard equip ment during severe rush periods, mak- ing the confusion and inadequacy worse than it is.
 To summarize, then, the telephone service is facing serious limitation to its growth toward wider use at fair rates: and this limitation is one aris- ing from the inefficient use of the cap l ital invested by the clinging to hand labor in vital, ruling activities of the organization. At the same time, the l memorable presence of high and con- the traffic has obliged telephone engi- neers and managers to take successive steps of improvement and enlargement of their plants very conservatively and with firm stand on their experience in the immediate past; the pressing needs of the service, to be met in the next exchange or the next stage of transformation of an old exchange, have made out of the question any flirting with systems not constituting the next logical step of improvement in the existing order of things.
 1 Yet extreme need pushes an organi- zation, as it does an individual, along rapidly toward some conclusion, some solution of the difficulty, and one apt to be permanent. Perhaps the forcing of the bulk of the present manual oper- ators into the position of mechanisms to cooperate as best they may with the material mechanism with which l they deal, is a longer step toward the l general adoption of the much-heralded automatic telephone exchange" than any telephone engineeres allow them selves to dream of. For it may we'll be asked: If the best that can be done by the conservative engineers, clinging to manual operating, is to make their operators into imitation machines that l confessedly do not equal in afficiency the real thing with which they dael why not strike out from the ground uo" with a machine that is all ma- chine unhampered by human weakness and fallbility? The statement is cred- l ited to a very eminent Bell telephone off1cinal that if a telephone in cer- | tain big city were in use all the time 1 putting in a continuous stream of calls, 1 it would mean an expense to the tele- phone company of considerably more l than the actual S175 yearly cost to the subscriber, in pay of operator service alone It is not possible to let machin- cry make good in the telephone service as well as elsewhere the proposition; Small profits, large sales;" to make machinery take up this burden, grow ing too heavy for an army of tired wo- men doing day laborers' work, as ma chinery has many times before eased such an outworn burden to the ad- vancement of civilization ?--Boston Transcrip