File:Bell telephone magazine (1922) (14733597346).jpg

Identifier: belltelephonemag22amerrich (find matches)
Title: Bell telephone magazine
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: American Telephone and Telegraph Company American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Information Dept
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: (New York, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., etc.)
Contributing Library: Prelinger Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ially de-signed to make it possible for the op-erators easily and quickly to reach themost up-to-date form of ready ref-erence records that could be adaptedto Information service needs. Asecond had to do with making thespeed of answer by the Informa- i 1943-44 Information About Information 251 tion operator reasonably fast. Thisspeed of answer is the interval be-tween the time a call is connected to the Information desk and the timethat an operator is able to answer it.A primary purpose of both of theseobjectives was to provide better serv-ice for the customer; and the firstgeneral information on the central-ized desk sent to the Bell System tors who can actually answer a callthat has been connected to a particu-lar trunk. This number of operatorsis known as the operator team size.To illustrate:—with the best recordsavailable in those days, the Informa-tion operator required about oneminute on the average to look upthe desired number and give it to the customer. If, at a decentralized
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This is the No. 4 Information Desk, designed for rotary files Companies by the staff engineersstated, With the new equipment theInformation service will be im-proved. The speed of answer is largely de-pendent upon the number of opera- desk, there were only one operatorand she were busy on one call whena new call arrived, it might mean adelay of as much as a full minutebefore she could answer this secondcall, perhaps even more if she had to 252 Bell Telephone Magazine WINTER choose between two or three waitingcalls. If there were a team of twooperators at the decentralized desk,it would mean that every half minute,on the average, one of them wouldbecome available to take another calland thus waiting time for an answerby Information would be reduced ac-cordingly. What happened to the team sizewhen a centralized desk was usedand what effect did this have on speedof answer? The early No. i desks,with a total of about thirty Informa-tion trunks in front of each operator,could ordinarily ha

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