Magazine & Newspaper Advertisements & Articles

ADSI

The old Bell System used to advertise extensively in magazines. Some of the magazines are now available on Google Books. Here is how to search for them from LIFE Magazine.

  1. Use the URL books.google.com
  2. In the search string, enter LIFE Bell Telephone.
  3. Under TOOLS, select MAGAZINES. (This will eliminate books.)
  4. This will display various issues. If you click on a reference, it will display the ad (or an article).
  5. Some experimentation may be necessary.

You should vary the search string, such as "LIFE WESTERN ELECTRIC". To get old Western Union ads, enter "LIFE WESTERN UNION" (no quotes).

Bell also advertised in other publications. For a while they advertised in BOYS LIFE. Simply say "BOYS LIFE Bell Telephone" to bring up those references.

In LIFE, Bell advertised roughly every other week. During WW II, Bell asked customers NOT to use the telephone and be patient due to war traffic, as well as touting their contributions to the war effort. After the war they asked for patience while they caught up on a huge backlog of service orders. In the 1950s, they touted their contributions to the Korean War and Cold War defense. By the later 1950s, Bell had caught up to consumer demand was now advertising long distance and extension phones.

Bell sometimes advertised in Billboard magazine. These ads were mostly geared toward the television industry.

— HAncock4, Telecom Digest

All credits for this page's content's sourcing and commentary go to HAncock4 (see above) generally unless otherwise specified. This page is merely a compilation.

Commitment to Service  ||  Strikes  ||  Emergencies  ||  Employment  ||  Telephones & Supplementaries  ||  Reliability & Quality  ||  Restoration of Service  ||  Telephone Mischief & Vandalism  ||  Public Defense  ||  Western Electric  ||  Michigan Technic  ||  Teletype  ||  Company Ads  ||  Telecom Progress  ||  Call Director Phones  ||  Product Advertisements  ||  New Services  ||  Achievements  ||  Intercoms  ||  Western Union  ||  Miscellaneous  ||  Telephone Power  ||  Telegraph  ||  Rail  ||   Telex

Education

Remote learning is nothing new. Back around 1960, the telephone companies offered service and equipmentfor it, such as for ill children.

Years ago the Bell System developed a device to allow children who are sick at home to participate in school. I'm not sure how effective it was as it was audio only, but Bell used to advertise it. I heard the unit was actually built by Executone for Bell.

Commitment to Service

Strikes

Emergencies

Employment

In the past, the Bell System was proud that multiple generations of a family would work for the telephone company.

Telephones & Supplementaries

Reliability & Quality

Here is a 1951 Bell System ad showing military personnel using pay phones. The booths are notable in that they had all the features of full-service phone booths. Note the:

  1. seat
  2. table
  3. light
  4. ventilator fan
  5. door

All of these contributed toward the comfort and convenience of the user--the table was very useful for taking notes during a call. The closable door allowed privacy and elimination of outside noise.

As an aside, the large pay phone installations, such as in a major train station or military base, had an attendant to help place calls, provide out of town directories, and make change.

Restoration of Service

Telephone Mischief & Vandalism

Public Defense

Western Electric

Michigan Technic

Bell Telephone ran numerous advertisements touting its contributions to the war effort. It also encouraged people not to use the telephone since facilities were overloaded.

Here are some samples from "Michigan Technic" an engineering journal (from google books).

The ads marked "vivid drawing" were part of a series of ads that featured very rich emotional artwork. Other ads of that series appeared in LIFE magazine in color.

Teletype

At one time Western Electric's subsidiary Teletype used to advertise for its machines. Before the days of electronic computer memory, paper tape served as a store and forward mechanism.

Company Ads

Historically, General Telephone/Automatic Electric sold their equipment to (1) independent telephone companies and (2) to businesses seeking a private internal system that was not connected to the outside Bell network. But in 1972 GTE/AE was advertising their systems to business in direct competition to Bell, as shown by the following ad in a business magazine:

Also in that issue, Bell advertised its 800A PBX.

Many of the areas served by Century Link were once served by the independent telephone companies, one of which was GTE. Here is an ad by them.

The Automatic Electric Company, a competitor to Western Electric, made emergency telephone systems. Here is a 1961 ad by them.

Telecom Progress

I recently found some ads by General Telephone/Automatic Electric on their carrier/microwave offerings. These ran in the Saturday Evening post circa 1960. General Telephone (later General Telephone & Electronics) was an independent company not affiliated with the Bell System. It bought Automatic Electric Co in the late 1950s. Also owned Sylvania.

The following ads give some general background on GTE/AE. Note that while their telephone sets appear similar to Western Electric sets, there were some subtle differences.

You may scroll through the entire issue of all of the above magazines. Interesting ads for televisions, appliances, automobiles, foods, and other consumer products of that era.

Side note: Allis Chalmers had some two-page color ads for power generation and distribution. They may be of interest to readers here:

The Bell System opened a voice cable across the Atlantic in the mid 1950s. This was a major improvement since the radio was unreliable and inadequate. Here are some ads for the cable:

In addition to the trans-Atlantic cable, Bell also installed cables to Hawaii:

TAT-1 was retrieved and repaired at least once due to damage from a fishing trawler. Here's a report of a repair in 1959 which took slightly over three days from damage to full repair. The damage was in shallow water close to the Scotland end of the cable and a suitable cable ship was in port nearby.

TAT-1 had 51 voice channels. By 1978, TAT-6 was in service with 4000 channels, later expanded to 10,000, and TAT-7 was being laid with another 4000 channels expandable to 10,000. — John Levine

In 1947, Bendix Radio ran an ad for their radio telephone units for automobiles. It seems that it was mostly oriented toward commercial applications such as taxicabs or public safety. Bendix was involved in a number of technology fields at the time.

100 years ago AT&T ran an ad extolling their maintenance (right side).

The Automatic Electric Co. ran an ad touting its P-A-X systems. In addition to basic communication, their system also offered code call, emergency calls, and conference calls.

I'll leave it others to decide how far we advanced in the last 100 years given all the network crashes reported [today].

Call Director Phones

To meet the growing needs of businesses, the Bell System introduced a large scale multi-line telephone set, known as the Call Director. Behind it was a more sophisticated key system.

An ad for it is shown here (on the opposite page is an ad by Western Union pushing telegrams).

Bell offered two devices for speed-dialing. The first was a magnetic tape device with a high capacity. The caller would speed through an indexed directory. Known as Magicall.

The second was using a plastic punched card that was inserted in a reader. Known as the Card Dialer.

Speed-dialing ad

Also, on pg 16 of the same issue is an ad by Executone for an intercom. A benefit was taking internal traffic away from the expensive rented telephone company system.

Opposite (pg 17) is a summary ad by General Telephone & Electronics. In fine print it mentions its Automatic Electric subsidiary.

The Bell System also had a lesser known multi-button unit known as the "Key Chief".

Product Advertisements

New Services

Automatic Electric Co. ran an ad touting its "push button" grocery system. It used telephone switching technology. The items would be lifted from the shelf, collected, packaged, and delivered to the check out counter with a totalized sales slip. By 1959 AE was a subsidiary of GTE. (Also, Bell Telephone ad for long distance conference calls on page 2.): archive.org article (It's on the right side. You may scroll through the rest of the magazine).

Achievements

Intercoms

Often in old movies and TV shows we'll see an executive lean into an intercom console on his desk and summon a staff member.

In the past, several independent vendors provided office intercom systems. Here is some ads from the 1950s:

Western Union

(You may scroll through the rest of the magazines. Good look at the technology of the day, such as Fairbanks Morse diesel engines, copying machines, autos, adding and accounting machines, coal heat, file cabinet systems, cast iron piping, etc. Bell System ads, too.)

The following is from 2016:

When teleprinters came along and replaced Morse circa 1920, the telegraph companies had a choice between tape printers and page printers. A tape printer printed the message on a strip of continuous tape; while a page printer was more like a modern Teletype, printing on a sheet of paper.

The companies chose the tape printer and continued with that until the 1960s. That meant the tape had to pasted onto the telegram blank, a manual step, but there were other advantages. The WUTR of January 1956 explains why:

When improved machines came along, such as popular workhorse Teletype Model 28, Western Union converted to page printing. However, the character set was slightly different and a conversion effort was required.

The 'last mile' was always a tough spot for Western Union. A hundred years ago they used boys as messengers. Then they got adults and it was expensive. By the 1970s WU wanted out of the telegram business as it was too expensive and inefficient. Mailgram was a great saver for a while--a win win for the public and WU.

One nice simple feature of the TTY 33 was that the punch had an arrowhead on it. So, when you tore off the tape, it left an arrow, making it easy to see where the tape began and ended.

We had a GE Terminet machine that ran at 300 char/sec. The printer used a band and was quiet. But the tape punch was quite noisy at 300 cps.

Making raw papertape stock was a big business in itself. Here are some ads by a paper company:

— HAncock4, Telecom Digest

Miscellaneous

  • The August 10, 1957 issue of The Saturday Evening Post featured an illustration of "the phone boys" by Ben Prins. The table-of-contents page provides an explanation of the boys' activity.
  • Is Your Telephone Voice A Good "FIT"? — 1951
  • The IT&T - World wide system of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation
  • 900,000 AT&T Stockholders (Bell System)
  • Tireless, Talky Teen-agers and Toiling Telephones — Apr. 2, 1956 (LIFE)
  • 'U' Switchboard 'Gals' Have 4,000 Calls Per Hour — May 5, 1950 (Lafayette Ledger)
  • A young couple runs up a $250,000 yearly business on seven telephones — Oct. 4, 1948
  • Crippled by outage, users reevaluate AT&T service — Nov. 28, 1988 (AT&T)
  • Bell Telephone News, Volume 9 — 1919
  • Telephony, Volume 10 — January 1, 1905 (Telephone Publishing Corporation)
  • Telephones and Telegraphs, 1902 — 1906
  • The 'Hi-Fi' Bandwagon — Jun. 15, 1953
  • How to Buy Hi-Fidelity — Feb. 28, 1955
  • Famous Bell System ad of the company saving a pole that had memories of a fallen soldier
  • In 1968 a newspaper described GTE's pulse code modulation
  • In 1967 General Telephone Co (an independent carrier) advertised its data communications services (via Lenkurt)
  • In 1978 GTE of Florida ran an ad describing its data services in use
  • AE/Lenkurt ad from 1951
    • — I'm not sure how much GTE's Automatic Electric worked with broadband carrier. AE had an affiliate, Lenkurt, that did extensive work with carrier and microwave.
  • Electronic Design has an article describing data communications as of 1969. Include are laser multiplexing and sending EKG over a phone line.

    • Here are 1962 ads for data communications by both General Telephone and the Bell System.

    Both companies (as well as Western Union) correctly saw that the new computers entering service would require interconnection and they all sought to serve them.
    Actually, interconnecting data processing machines, such as punched card tabulators, began years earlier, but with the growth of computers, there was demand for more accurate and higher speed communications. The Bell System developed a line of modems.

    Telephone Power

    The classic No. 6 dry cell was once widely used in telephone and industrial service.

    The Allis-Chalmers company made heavy equipment for distribution and engineering:

    General Electric Co also made power systems:

    The Cutler-Hammer Company made controls for heavy motors:

    A local power company advertised to solicit industries to settle in its service territory:

    Even a telephone equipment supplier, the Automatic Electric Company, advertised for industrial control systems:

    You can scroll through each of the above magazines. Interesting historical technology, including radio and induction communications and switching relay logic.

    Telegraph

    Rail

    The 1950 issue of Railway Signaling and Communications (Volume 43) contains numerous ads for communication products. It is a good illustration of the state of the art of that time. Electronics and improved materials were entering the marketplace.
    The Automatic Electric Company, of Chicago, was a competitor to Western Electric and marketed equipment specifically for railway applications. Railway telephones had to work over long distances and be rugged. Some of the ads are described below:

    The transistor was invented in 1948, although it took roughly ten years for it be developed into a commercial viable product. That is, able to be manufactured at a cost less than a tube and reliable enough to be useful. Initial applications were portable radios, though tubes were continued to be used in consumer audio devices for years.

    When computers came along, computer makers found that tubes used in audio devices were not reliable enough for high speed digital service. Tiny faults that weren't noticed in audio service would cause computerbit errors. Computer makers developed premium grade tubes where the internal materials were of a higher quality and yield better performance, and also physical placement of the structures were more precise. Tubes were also made under cleaner conditions.

    Ad for RCA premium tubes

    GE

    1964 detailed article describing new voice and data communications on the New York Central railroad system. The system used mostly Bell System facilities, but had some Stromberg Carlson and Lenkurt equipment. (You may scroll through the rest of the magazine. This is a railroad communications magazine.)

    Telex

    Western Union offered a dialup teletypewriter service in competition with Bell's TWX. It was called Telex. It originated in Canada and spread to the U.S.

    Telex used Baudot. In later years it used a model 32 Teletype, which was a three-row Baudot (five-bit) machine.

    While Western Union offered facsimile transmissions for several decades, they required dedicated lines and special paper ("teledeltos").

    Xerox introduced a plain paper fax using xerography principles. It is advertised here.