Bell Telephone Industrial Film "Before Your Telephone Rings" Phone Installation 64374 (1948)

Synopsis

Before Your Telephone Rings is a short educational film from 1948, presented by Western Electric, that shows the existing groundwork necessary to connect a phone number up to the telephone system when someone moves to a new home. The film opens with a shot of a people walking down a sidewalk in a neighborhood. A man carries in an oak barrel into a house. Inside the house, a telephone installer dials on a rotary phone, the final step in installing the Durant family’s new phone. Mrs. Durant walks into the office of Western Electric, a telephone company, to request the installation of a phone at her new home (02:08). The woman who helps Mrs. Durant talks to the camera about the process of setting up a new phone. Footage shows telephone lines strung from homes, running to the main telephone cables that run to the central office (03:45). A telephone employee in a lift examines suspended telephone cables. At a construction site for new homes, men set up new telephone poles and cables (04:50). Two men service an underground cable, accessed through a manhole (05:25). Viewers see how the cables run from underground through the central office and to the main frame. A man connects wires on the main frame to the new number assigned to Mrs. Durant (06:20). Men and women build telephone equipment in an assembly plant (07:35). Two men drive a truck overnight to bring supplies for telephone installation jobs. An installer (the man who set up Mrs. Durant’s phone in the beginning of the film)…

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Details

Running time

16 minutes

Collection

Ephemeral Films

Subjects on the Internet Archive

• Stock Footage