Within its own territory your local telephone company provides inter-city service. But when you make a call that crosses the territories of various Bell companies, you are served also by the facilities of the Long Lines Department. This organization is responsible as well for overseas telephone service to points in countries abroad.
More than 337,000,000 conversations a year are handled over Long Lines facilities. To handle this volume of conversations and its various other services, Long Lines requires:
■ About 27,000 highly trained telephone employees, including operators, engineers, maintenance men, construction forces, Commercial and Accounting people in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
■ Telephone central office forces in 233 cities and towns.
■ Telephone equipment and plant, including almost 2,400 buildings, in all but one state.
■ About 27,000,000 miles of talking circuits.
Nine years after the telephone was invented, when the farthest one could talk was from New York to Boston, AT&T announced in its charter its plan to connect every place in the country “by cable and other appropriate means with the rest of the world.” Long distance lines reached Chicago in 1892. Gradually, telephone scientists solved the technical difficulties of transmitting speech over still greater distances. By 1915, Bell engineers had developed vacuum tube amplifiers to step-up fading voice currents, and the human voice spanned the miles between New York and San Francisco.
[Illustration: _Calls to overseas points are handled by operators at three terminals. This Long Lines operator at the overseas switchboard in New York City is putting through a call to Paris._]
In that same year, telephone engineers also made history by establishing experimental radio-telephone connections across the Atlantic between Arlington, Va., near Washington. D. C., to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as well as to the Hawaiian Islands and Panama.
Although World War I delayed the development of overseas service, years of further experimenting and perfecting led, in 1927, to the opening of regular overseas telephone service between the United States and England. Since then service has been extended to more than 100 countries and territories overseas, and it is possible now to reach some 96% of the world’s telephones from any telephone in the United States. Today, overseas conversations take place at the rate of over 1,000,000 a year. Overseas centers in New York, Oakland and Miami furnish the overseas radiotelephone service, handling calls in much the same way as other long distance calls.