Untitled Bell System

Complete Record: Still image of some sort of boat or water craft going across the water. Then still images of Alexander Graham Bell, surrounded by men as he uses his new invention, the telephone. Cuts to another image of Bell smoking a pipe and looking intelligent. The value of communication throughout the world. Tracking shot of a forest. Moss hangs from tree branches. A squirrel, an owl, a bird, a frog on a branch. The frog jumps in the water, birds fly away, a crane flies over a swamp. Branches reflected in the water. Tracking shot of trees in the swamp. Buddhist monuments and statues in Angkor in the jungle of Cambodia. Temples and carvings of gods, men, and animals like fish and crocodiles. Machu Picchu, the ruins of an Incan city in the Andes Mountains of Peru. An ancient, sacred fortress high in the mountains. Many stone steps and walls, each carefully set very tightly together. Great shots of Machu Picchu along fog shrouded peaks. Cut to the pyramids of Egypt, and many hieroglyphs carved and painted along the walls. These include pharaohs, gods, and daily life and activities, chronicling everything. Stone carving of face. A palm tree at sunset. The Acropolis of Athens in Greece. Stone pillars in Greek ruins. Great footage of ruins in Athens. Cut to the cathedral at Chartres in France, showing great archways and carvings of angels, kings, and holy depictions along the outside and entrance of the cathedral. The beautiful, elaborate stained glass windows from inside. Detail of the windows. Long shot of the cathedral far in the background, with a sea of wheat taking up the foreground. Stone ruins in Guatemala. A Mayan temple is seen, and an archeologist makes an impression of carvings and symbols on paper. A better shot of the temple, which may be at Tikal, with people looking at the base. Cut to a trolley car passing by in an Asian city. Car traffic and bicyclists in India. Cattle moving along the road. Women carrying bundles on their heads. A skyscraper in New York. A crane building more buildings. An airplane taking off a runway. A large dam with water gushing forth. Farming fields, a tractor or harvester with farm workers behind it picking eggplants. Installing water sprinklers for the crops. Cut to a submarine on the surface of the ocean. Underwater shots. A rocket ship taking off from the launch pad. Shot of the thrusters from out in space, detaching from the ship with Earth in the background. Scientists working in labs with complex glass pipework and beakers of substances, looking in microscopes and using lasers. A giant satellite dish complex, a man using the radar equipment, a communication station on a snowy peak. A Bell System cable ship out on the ocean, laying large telephone cables under the water. Sunset. A prayer tower in an Arabic city. Inside the mosque, people sit on the floor and pray and sing. In Africa, people carry drums and make music. Various drumming. Women winnow wheat outside their small house. An African man uses his bare feet to prepare a large pile of adobe for making a home. Manual labor, from moving cargo to carrying large packs. In India women bathe and wash in the river while children swim. A trail of small boats going along a river in Southeast country. Shacks and compact, rickety homes, almost like a slum. A Bolivian man pushes behind a plow being pulled by two large cows in an empty field in the Altiplano. Shots of the Bolivian landscape, llamas. Cut to a tall, lean radio tower at a school. A man makes a radio broadcast over the radio in Spanish. Teachers use the radio lessons to teach their young students from all over, in the middle of nowhere. Students all over the world are seen in class, working and learning to secure a better future. One boy reads a braille book at a desk while another types out braille sheets. A teacher in Africa has his young students clap and sing at their desks in front of a chalkboard. Another teacher sits with her students in front of cameras on a little stage. They sing for the educational television program. A loudspeaker attached to a large boat that glides down a river out of Bangkok, broadcasting to small villages and delivering messages about the importance of learning. An animated farming film being shown to people in Thailand. African tribesmen being taught how to put insecticide on their crops. A woman recording instructions about pronunciation lessons for a language class. The diverse students listen to the instruction phrases and repeat them. Landscapes and poor, isolated villages without means of communication. A plane’s propeller. The pilot radios in as he lands. Packages are delivered to Ethiopian villages. An Indian woman sits with a group around her. She is a nurse, and tries to teach the other women how to treat blindness in infants. A baby cries as she treats it. Men in Thailand struggle to raise up a telephone poll in the thick mud. More telephone polls are connected across the wetlands. People are taught to be engineers and know the electrical work required for phone networks. White instructors teach Thai natives. A crane lifts wires up high for a large radio tower. More broadcasting stations. People sit and listen to the radio in rural and desert locations. Two men traveling on camels in the sands. A large building, possibly for the UN. More radio and satellite dishes. High snowy mountains. A woman works at a call center, taking messages and connecting telephone lines with a switchboard. Shots of various machines involved with telephones and communications. Signs along this equipment that list cities like Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, Manila. Telephone lines in rural areas, and a montage of close ups of peoples from many ethnic backgrounds. Elderly people and children from many different countries looking into the camera and wearing their traditional clothing. Film ends with a shot of a young child walking down a canyon.