Goodbye Ring-a-Ling

Like the creak of wheels on a horse-drawn cart or the dry wheeze of a hand-cranked auto engine, the familiar ring-a-ling of the telephone will soon be only an echo of the past. The telephone of the future will emit four staccato baritone beeps--and this week, in the homes of 300 residents of Morris, Ill., a farming center 75 miles southwest of Chicago, the beep of tomorrow could already be heard. Using Morris as a pilot project, Bell Telephone Laboratories have installed telephones that can:

P: Reach frequently called numbers by dialing two digits instead of seven. P: Route incoming calls to another phone if the first line is busy. P: Transfer calls to another number. Thus, when called away to a friend's house while expecting an important message, the telephone user need only dial a code number to have the call routed to him. P:Convert extension phones to household intercom units by dialing two digits.

Such advances in the flexibility of the telephone are the result of a $25 million 50-year research effort; it produced a completely new electronic switching system that works 1,000 times faster than current dial telephones. The heart of the system, housed in several neat rows of grey cabinets in Electronic Central office at Morris, is 12,000 tiny transistors that control or amplify electrical current pulsing through a myriad of miniaturized devices, including 105,000 diodes, 23,000 neon-filled tubes that glow orange as they connect one telephone with another in a few millionths of a second. Electronic "eyes and ears," called scanners, spring into action the instant a phone is taken off the hook, activating a photographic memory brain that contains more than 2,000,000 bits of information in a coded pattern of black and white dots. The computer is so intelligent that it constantly checks its own circuits, makes some repairs itself. When it can't make the correction, the brain wisely teletypes for help from human custodians, reporting the location of the trouble spot, the month, day, hour and minute of the breakdown.' Morris (pop. 7,985), which only switched to dial phones a year ago, was chosen for the pilot project because of its size, its ratio of industrial business, rural and urban residents. Although less than 10% of the town's 4,500 telephone users are current participants in the experiment (at no extra charge), more customers will be gradually added.

By mid-1965, Western Electric Co., the Bell system's production arm, expects to be turning out models of the new equipment for installation all over the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.