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That service is growing even faster than the U.S. Every working day, A.T.&T. installs 11,500 new phones and handles 251 million calls. The number of Bell telephone calls within the U.S. is expanding by 15% a year, and A.T.&T. is straining to prevent a massive clogging of overloaded circuits by steadily expanding and improving its equipment. Actually, the Bell System is one great computer, linked by 24 billion interconnections and by enough copper wire to spin a four-ply cable to the sun. The computer's innards are an orderly assemblage of $24 billion worth of the most sophisticated equipment ever devised, and its long limbs sprawl over 3,000,000 square miles of city, plain, mountain, valley and river. It is in constant change, works around the clock, seldom errs—and often corrects itself when it does.
Kappel and his long-nosed engineers never cease devising comely new gadgets to hook onto this computer to bring more profit to A.T.&T. and to add luster and convenience to what they call "p.o.t."—plain old telephone service. They have successfully sold the idea of color for telephones: 21 million colored phones are now in use in U.S. homes. For a monthly charge of $25 to $35 apiece, they have installed 17,000 telephones in cars and trucks, including several in Lyndon Johnson's autos. Though 37% of the nation's telephones are already extension phones, A.T.&T. executives figure that less than a quarter of U.S. homes are "fully telephoned"—having all the telephones they could use.
An even greater field for expansion lies in the area of business phones, which already account for fully half of A.T.&T.'s revenues. The company's new pushbutton Touch-Tone, which reduces the average "dialing" time from nine to four seconds, will make every business phone a candidate for replacement. Cost: $5 for installation, plus $1.50 to $1.90 extra a month. Another innovation that A.T.&T. recently introduced is the Card Dialer, which enables a user to reach frequently dialed numbers by slipping a punched-hole plastic card into the base of the phone. It cuts dialing time to two seconds, costs $15 to install, plus $3.50 a month extra, with 40 free cards. This year A.T.&T. will bring out the Trim-line phone, whose dial is embedded in the receiver; aside from being good-looking, it also will be a boon for the nearsighted and the bedridden.
The Hell with Economics. These new products—and the ideas behind them—spring from the fertile soil of two A.T.&T.-owned giants in their own right: Western Electric and Bell Labs. Western has 149,000 employees, turns out more than 50,000 kinds of communications gear, and buys parts and materials from small businesses in some 3,000 U.S. towns. U.S. trustbusters complain that Western sells equipment to A.T. & T. at half the price it charges competitors, point out that it earns only 5% on its sales. Kappel argues that if A.T.&T. did not have Western, its own costs would jump by hundreds of millions a