The Bell System Technical Journal 



Vol. XVI April, 1937 No. 2 



Recent Trends in Toll Transmission in the United States * 



By EDWIN H. COLPITTS 



YOUR country is advancing industrially and commercially with 

 tremendous strides. Adequate telephone communication is of 

 such great importance under these conditions that I felt a general 

 statement as to methods in process of being applied to the plant of 

 the Bell System would be interesting and possibly helpful. I am 

 fully aware that, in some or even many respects, your problems will 

 differ from ours. Much of what I have presented may, therefore, 

 serve only to suggest research and development to meet your own 

 requirements. Perhaps also, in some small way, this statement of 

 progress in communication may stimulate research and development 

 in other industries and services. 



In the year 1885, only nine years after the telephone was invented, 

 a Telephone Company was chartered in the United States for the 

 following purpose: "to connect one or more points in each and every 

 city, town, or place in the State of New York with one or more points 

 in each and every other city, town or place in said State and in each 

 and every other of the United States and in Canada and Mexico; 

 and each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to be connected 

 with each and every other city, town, and place in said states and 

 countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with the 

 rest of the known world." 



This was an ambitious program, and thirty years passed before the 

 results of research and development could be embodied in apparatus 

 and equipment to make it possible to talk between cities on the 

 Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States, and about forty years 

 passed before the establishment of telephone service between America 

 and Europe. Telephone service was later extended to other parts of 

 the world including your country, and it is now possible for a telephone 

 subscriber in the United States to converse with a person at any one 

 of thirty-four odd million subscriber stations in a large number of 

 countries of the world. Further, it is possible to talk with persons on 

 suitably equipped ships at sea. Expanding still further beyond the 

 goal set in 1885, and departing from the idea of two-way conversation, 



* One of three Iwadare Foundation lectures delivered during the past month in 

 Japan by Dr. Colpitts. 



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