A MIRACLE FOR MRS. SMITH

[Music] [Applause] only seconds remain if there's anything left in the bag of tricks now's the time to pull it out there's the snap looks like a pass it is one it's good and he's going over for a touchdown up and stands they're calling it a miracle cats but maybe they miss something only a few when those cheering thousands fully understand what has happened fewer yet realized that this afternoon's football magic actually began to take form months ago first as a well-conceived plan exploiting power speed and deception it began to round into shape with monotonous routine drill familiarizing every player with every part of his performance in the overall strategy then hour after hour in patient practice before empty silent stands the manoeuvre was rehearsed over and over against the scrubs polishing and perfecting the all-important technique and timing of team play hours weeks and months of preparation for the few seconds that pay off in a score perhaps a game even a championship but the miracles of team play are not always accomplished by the cheers of crowds for instance consider mrs. Smith her Majesty the American housewife about to take part in an everyday miracle communication oh don't be silly I'm just telephoning the butcher of course but let's see what that means [Music] [Applause] [Music] thus with one finger mrs. Smith puts into action of fabulously intricate and precisely coordinated system and is mrs. Smith impressed a little over awed by the magic she has wrought magic Fiddlesticks what a simplest thing in the world the simplest thing in the world to mrs. Smith yes yet it takes one of the most complex systems in the world to achieve that simplicity on her telephone book is a familiar emblem and the symbol of a high standard of industrial teamwork - mrs. Smith it means simply the telephone company and she knows the telephone company in a way she's met the courteous little lady behind the tellers desk on several occasions and she likes her she knows the girl who answers her puzzling questions and then there's that nice person on long distance who was so clever in locating mr. Smith in Springfield one of the telephone supervisors is a member of her garden club and last spring when that tree limb tore down the wires why some men from the telephone company got everything fixed in almost no time yes indeed mrs. Smith knows the telephone company yet there is so much she doesn't see so much that is concealed behind the scenes here's a group of new employees players on the team going through blackboard drill with their coach let's listen every day the nation makes more than 100 million telephone calls for business or social contact and trivial matters or critical emergency everybody turns to the telephone to talk half a block or halfway around the world to get all those calls through is a big job and to us the most important job in the world it's a real job for the team of more than a half million Bell System men and women and it's a job of teamwork between the three units that make up the bail system teamwork between the operating telephone companies Western Electric the supply unit of the bail system and the scientific resources of Bell Laboratories three names and three services coordinated by the parent company AT&T working toward the common goal of more and better telephone service at the lowest possible cost working together and working for whom why for mrs. Smith of course to trace that pattern of teamplay let's take a familiar example her telephone came into being in Bell Telephone laboratories the largest single organization in the world devoted exclusively to communications research of course what goes on here would be somewhat baffling to mrs. Smith in Bell Laboratories scientists and technicians are constantly improving on the past and probing into the future mrs. Smith may understand little of electronics and nuclear physics for that matter she doesn't have to but she would be at least surprised and perhaps a little flattered to know how important she is in the eyes of this distinguished scientific group she accepts the styling of her telephone as a matter of course little realizing how many designs were developed and considered before the selection of hers as having dignity and grace to fit tastefully into her home for the studies made to be sure that it would fit comfortably and easily into her hand in the hands of thousands of her neighbors or the research required to assure the most efficient speaking and listening position recognize this probably not but this is a truly all-american portrait incorporating accurate measurements of the heads and faces of all types of mr. and mrs. Smith's in America being human mrs. Smith probably will be a bit careless or impatient at times so in the laboratory experimental designs are put through a carefully calculated program of abuse day in and day out thousands upon thousands of times pre proving the durability and reliability of the telephone mechanism so accustomed is Her Majesty to seeing her telephone in this compact simple form that she'd probably be a little shocked to discover that it actually contains nearly 500 parts and in no industry even in watchmaking our standards of precision more critical than those required in telephone manufacture yet although often subjected to abuse that would ruin a watch the telephone is expected to survive and perform perfectly and it does because the equipment is designed to stand up under these rough conditions of use not only designed but thoroughly tested and because mrs. Smith telephone is the result of a teaming up of the development and production engineers of a Bell System for a telephone would be only a laboratory achievement unless translated into quantity production this is the task of Western Electric matching technological progress with facilities for multiplying the laboratory design by the millions from hundreds of piece parts skilled fingers build up sub assemblies conveyors keep the job moving to the casual observer the entire production process is bewilderingly complex but actually it is coordinated into a steady consecutive flow here every six seconds a new Bell Telephone is born completely assembled tested and proved representing the highest coordination of Science and Industry and yet alone the telephone is utterly useless for the instrument itself represents only six percent of all the plant and equipment needed to provide telephone service this service might be likened to an iceberg there is a lot more to than you can see before mrs. Smith's telephone comes to life it must be connected with the nerve system of the telephone network here telephone wire is produced thousands of miles of it every day first scarcely recognizable but wait the 60-inch billet is brought to cherry red heat then under ponderous rolls the billet gradually changes shape now it's a luminous snake constantly stretching and extending smaller and smaller longer until that original 5 foot do it of copper will eventually be transformed into 2160 miles of precisely accurate finished wire watch the giant cabling machines in action the wire now insulated with paper races from a battery of spinning reels to become cable units these same cable units are later joined together to form cable core after drying giant presses give a heavy protective coat of enduring lead or if the cable is designed for underwater use an additional sheath of steel wire Armour is provided to protect the thousands of vital voice ways it contains yes it's just telephone wire but in a broader sense it is a lifeline of communication nerve center of thousands of lines of voice ways is the telephone central office keeping telephone traffic moving swiftly and orderly making central office equipment is a huge job it is no mass production project however for each switchboard must be specially engineered to fit the specific central office for which it is intended whether it's the central office of some quiet village or one of the central office switchboards for a great city every job is a custom job and perhaps that's the best way to describe telephone manufacture custom work on a quantity scale altogether 23 factories and the 112 thousand men and women of Western Electric in 18 cities produce more than 150 thousand different piece parts which make up some 40,000 separate finished items of telephone apparatus some are familiar at first glance most are utterly unknown even to those who depend upon them every day for example vacuum tubes naturally most of us associate such tubes with radio receivers but actually they were developed first to provide better telephone service and today thousands of Western electric vacuum tubes in a great variety of sizes are used to do many different telephone jobs many are used for amplifying circuits boosting voice power so that mrs. Smith can talk across the country as clearly as around the corner with these tubes to help her she can talk across the oceans around the world tubes also furnish the invisible link between lonely island communities and the outside world precision craftsmanship that's Western electric production take the making of crystals for radio and telephone circuits they're not much to look at but to do their job some crystals must be ground to within a millionth of an inch must vibrate 50 million times a second others are accurate to one part in 700 million if a clock were to run continuously with that accuracy it would not gain or lose more than a minute in a thousand years precision craftsmanship on our broad scale not only must every piece of equipment operate perfectly as an individual part but each telephone must be keeping in harmony with each one of the millions of other telephones in the bell system to which mrs. Smith may want to talk for Western Electric is the supply unit for the bell system operating telephone companies which link the nation in an overall can occasions Network to attain this uncompromising precision and uniformity production quality control inspection and testing have become a science in themselves to one accustomed to consider micrometers as the last word in accuracy the new order of electronic gauging seems strange indeed the sweep of a needle on a dial the flickering pattern of a light wave on an oscilloscope the squeal of a beat frequency may not seem very significant but they represent standards of measurement actually far beyond the power of human senses probably few products of man can be so critically judged so frequently challenged for in a very real sense this is living equipment to realize what that means think of a bell telephone exchange in even a small village on duty 24 hours a day every day burying a responsibility in which it must not fail or the repeater station often remote and unattended on the job urea Mandurah stepping up the power of the voice weighs and relays across the miles between how good is good enough in establishing production quality standards for these vital voice waves obviously there can be only one answer only a standard which becomes ever increasingly critical as new methods of quality judgment are devised precision craftsmanship on our broad scale a responsibility which has grown in Western Electric through more than six decades as a member of the telephone service team yet vital as is this role of apparatus builder it is only part of the Western electrics job a supply unit of the Bell System supply unit may be the term would be more meaningful if we called it logistics that's what we called it in war good logistics meant simply getting there fastest with the mostess in the telephone system we call it supply by any name it's the scientific scheduling of materials manufacturing processes and distribution to anticipate mrs. Smith's telephone requirements it's the teamwork by which the vast production output required by the telephone companies in 17 operating areas may be channeled to those points when and where needed with the exact precision of a touchdown play that's Western electrics job a job that begins with a purchase of basic raw materials and extends to a long list of supplies essential to a great nationwide industry all the world contributes its treasures to telephone service mountains of copper copper for wires and tons of rubber to cover them and some you'd scarcely imagine gold 24-karat gold yes indeed and many other metals even more precious go into the endless millions of electrical con of these and many more right down to the paper clips and typewriter ribbons and thousands of other items needed to run the telephone plan and this responsibility is one requiring more than merely due consideration for quality service and fair price supplementing its own vast manufacturing facilities Western Electric buys for the telephone companies many millions of dollars worth of telephone material from thousands of other manufacturers located all over the country to assure that this equipment will measure up to Bell System standards a staff is constantly employed inspecting suppliers products and gauging quality with eyes just as critical as those in Western electrics home plants to ensure the factory standards of performance carry over to the point of operations the equipment for each central office must be installed and tested initially by the men who know it best teams of Western Electric installers they may be assigned here a week a month or a year and the individual telephone companies gain a technical service at a savings reflected in the cost to mrs. Smith but when the last line is completed the last connection tested this flying Quadron will go on to a new job perhaps in the next town perhaps hundreds of miles away key control points in this entire complex pattern of peacetime logistics are the merchandize departments at the main factory locations and 29 western electric distributing houses strategically located to serve the Bell Telephone companies here are maintained stocks of apparatus and supplies source of a never-ending stream with every item on a definite schedule reels of cable for a mining community over the ridge a dozen a hundred telephones for an apartment building to be completed next month apparatus for a new exchange now which will reach capacity operation in three years all these in the thousand and one day-to-day items are in constant demand by the operating companies engaged in linking America by voice ways a constant stream moving out where and when needed and to maintain ample stocks in readiness without the wasteful pile up of oversupply is a job demanding its own hiya strategy a large part of which is anticipation how many Poles how many wires will snap in the next winter sleep storms how many instruments will need repair and replacement all about growth of new industries shifts in population new communities which will require enlargement of telephone services one two or five years hence the answers to these questions come to Western Electric through Bell System team play so that efficient and economical production and distribution are taken in stride but there are events that no one can foresee as when disaster strikes and whole communities are cut off from the world yet even such emergencies are met with their own special tactics Communications must be restored first so in the matter of hours equipment is on its way by train by truck by plane equipment identical to that destroy by nature gone berserk and soon after the skies have cleared the highly intricate facilities of telephone communication are back on the job thanks to the years of experience in the established working pattern of Western Electric and the rest of the bail system thus three great functional units are inseparably United in a single service service to mrs. Smith this then is the story of the making and procuring of the countless devices that service tools for those whose deft fingers and technical skill produce for mrs. Smith the miracle that is really no miracle at all it is the result of the kind of team play through which this nation has achieved industrial greatness out of this coordinated teamwork our coming new innovations new progress which will advance telephone service even more significantly than in the past when that last they come will mrs. Smith be a little wide-eyed by the reaching of new milestones and communication not at all she has learned to accept such things confidently and complacently and after all that's just the way it should [Music]