Automatic ticketing of telephone toll calls

A new telephone facility, automatic toll ticketing, was placed in public service on Dec. 7, 1936. This demonstrates the practical possibility of offering to a telephone subscriber the advantages of full automatic dial service for toll as well as local calls, and furnishes an individual printed record of every toll call in which no human agency save the calling and called parties has been involved. The system has been placed in operation in the Bruges exchange to permit calls to be established by dialling, without the intervention of an operator, from Bruges subscribers to subscribers in Blankenberghe, 9 miles away and outside the local zone. The record consists of the directory numbers of the two subscribers, the tariff per time unit of conversation and the number of such units expended. The date and the time of day to the nearest 5 min. are also recorded, together with other identification marks for the operating staff. The paper describes fully the modifications made to the switching equipment to bring the new facility into use.