Talk:History of the telephone in the United States

Public Stations? Messengers?
In a 1898 newspaper ad, Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph had a note, "If your friends have no telephone connection, let us send a Messenger to bring them to one of our numerous Public Stations"

Might be worth including in the main article? Samatva (talk) 01:42, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
 * good idea. Rjensen (talk) 21:38, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

dial phones
Dial systems were invented early but the "dial system" era began in New York City in 1922 says Fagen. [ M. D. Fagen, ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875–1925) (Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975) p. 585.]   In 1928 Bell system phones averaged 5.5 local calls per day. Annually there were 24 billion local calls of which 19 billion originated from manual and 5 billion from dial telephones.[ Gherardi and Jewett, (1930) p. 7.] In the 1930s there was a falling off--Western Electric stopped making new dial phones for a while because demand was down, and few were made in ww2. so dial became a majority of Bell system phones after 1945. New Hampshire switched to dials town by town starting in the largest city in 1950 and finishing in a remote village in 1973. Rjensen (talk) 02:28, 9 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Rubbish. Dial telephones were in use by 1900, by 1910 the technology was fairly mature. The Bell System was 20 years behind, because they refused to give up manual service. These numerical details do not belong in lede of such a large subject matter. This totally misses the point even in the 1930, because the US experienced depression. Western Electric lost 80% of its work force. And no, dial telephone were not stopped in production, dial telephone conversions were pretty much the only activity permitted. The WW2 story is also wrong. Such generalizations are untenable for an article that purports to document historical impact. It is clear this is still just draft work with random bits of noise without coherent topic development. kbrose (talk) 03:10, 9 May 2023 (UTC)