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Show May Phone From Moving Train This Dazzling Prediction 1$ Made After 70 Years of Telephone Service. CHICAGO. Before long you may be able to take up a telephone in a private booth on a speeding train and talk to your wife or office 1,000 miles away. The same service may be available to passengers on luxury lux-ury airliners, says the Chicago Tribune. Trib-une. Dazzling? Sure. But there's no doubt that new techniques developed in war research have unlocked vast new fields for the telephone, which first was used 70 years ago, on March 10, 1876, to be exact Some time in the future a telephone tele-phone subscriber may be able to dial a toll call straight across the nation, just as he now dials from his office to his home. The charge would be automatically computed and recorded at the telephone exchange. ex-change. Nationwide dialing by long distance dis-tance operators already is on the way. The American Telephone and Telegraph company says that within with-in a few years operators will be dialing straight across the continent con-tinent When this is adopted, A. T. & T. may divide the nation Into 60 or 70 "numbering plan areas," each designated by a code. How It Works. If a call were being made from Chicago to Market 2-2100 at Newark, New-ark, N". J., the Chicago operator would determine that New Jersey's area code was, say, 312 and would dial 312 followed by the listed number num-ber MA 2-2100. A device already has been invented invent-ed which, If no one answers, tells you: "There is no one here, but if you want to leave aimessage it will b transcribed." Two-way voice communication by radio-telephone between motor vehicle vehi-cle s already is here. Business con-cerns con-cerns are using it '.for delivery trucks, taxi fleets, repairmen', buses and harbor and river craft. The Bell system says telephones in cars, trucks, and other mobile units will be connected with the general telephone system. If a man wants to talk from his desk to the occupant of an automobile. auto-mobile. Bell explains, he will first dial or ask for the mobile service j operator. He will give her the call number or designation of the vehicle. vehi-cle. She will send out a signal by dialing the call number. A tone or a light will indicate to the car occupant occu-pant that he is wanted. He will pick up his dashboard telephone, tele-phone, and the conversation starts. The driver of a mobile unit can originate calls merely Ly pushing i the "talk" button to signal the operator. oper-ator. When Bell Talked. All this is a far cry from the day 70 years ago when Alexander Graham Gra-ham Bell first talked over a wire. Bell's first telephone patent was granted March 7, 1876, but at first earned no return. It was not until May, 1877, that the first telephones were put into use 'nmmercially. At the end of 1945, there were 22,445,500 Bell system telephones in service, plus more than 5,400,000 operated by some 6,000 other companies. com-panies. Through radio-telephone, a phone user in this country can be connected connect-ed with any one of more than 46 million mil-lion telephones in service in the world. The radiotelephone provides direct communication between the United States and 39 foreign points. The United States already has over 50 per cent of the world's telephones, tele-phones, and A. T. & T. has a huge backlog of orders delayed by the war. During the last quarter of 1945 the gain in telephones totaled 560,-000 560,-000 the highest in any quarter in history. |
