Recent Trends in Toll Transmission in the United States

Recent Trends in Toll Transmission in the United States * By EDWIN H. COLPITTS Y O U R 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: " t o 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.