Abstract
As improvements were made in manually operated switchboards, the trend of telephony has always been to substitute automatic devices for human labour. So much progress was made in this direction that it soon became obvious that even in large cities it would be possible to eliminate almost all the operators by the substitution of electrically controlled machinery. In the Revue Générale de l'Electricite of March 11, M. R. Dreyfus discusses the prospects of long-distance automatic telephony and points out that in small countries like Switzerland and Holland automatic inter-urban working is already in process of realization. It has now been developed to the extent of eliminating the operator at the exchange of the subscriber initiating a trunk call. By simply using his dial the subscriber puts himself in touch with any other subscriber in the same country. M. Dreyfus thinks it quite likely that automatic operation will now be developed for international calls. The International Consulting Committee for Long Distance Telephone Communication (the C.C.I.T.), which was formed by international delegates at a conference in Paris in 1923, has now taken up the problem. It is stated that within a few years a subscriber in Paris will be able merely by dialling to put himself through to a subscriber in New York.
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Long-Distance Automatic Telephony. Nature 143, 715 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143715c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143715c0