File:Bell telephone magazine (1922) (14754254944).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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ne tothree or four positions. The inade-quacy and inefficiency of this arrange-ment to meet changing conditions ledto the idea of centralizing the Infor-mation service for all the offices of a these trunks would be so arrangedthat any one of several operatorscould answer any call. The first centralized desk was in-stalled in 1910 and was known asthe No. I type of Information desk.It was designed to accommodate booktype records * and to provide for a * For a description of these and other recordsreferred to herein, see Providing the Informa-tion Service, Magazine, August, 1941. 250 Bell Telephone Magazine WINTER maximum of thirty Informationtrunks in front of an operator.These thirty trunks were multipledbefore as many operators as were re-quired to handle the simultaneouscalls that would normally be con- today, although the state of the artin those days did not permit as closean attainment of the goal as is nowpossible. Among the principal objectives,two may be cited to illustrate the
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This close-up of an Information position illustrates desk design to make voluminousrecords, such as those for a metropolitan area, readily available to the operator nected to these trunks. It was atthis point that Information servicereally began to warrant study anddevelopment with staff engineershaving constantly under review itsvarious phases. It is of interest tonote that the major considerations indesigning the first centralized deskwere basically the same as they are approach to the problem. One wasthat the desk should be specially 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 tothe Information desk and the timethat an operator is able to

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