AT&T Archives: The Phone Boom of the 1950s

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During World War II, not only were a vast majority of the Bell System's facilities and resources diverted to the war effort, but customers' reliance on and acceptance of a nationwide telephone network also increased dramatically. Demand for new domestic telephone service during the war was huge, and the Bell System had no supply to fulfill those requests. To catch up to the demand when the war ended, the Bell System had to amp up productions and installations. Most of that growth happened during the following decade.

This Technicolor film, from the 1950s, was filmed during that extreme growth period — during the late 1940s, the System added approximately 10,000 telephones per DAY. The number of telephones in the U.S. increased by 50% between 1945 and 1949. And by 1950, the companies within the Bell System employed over 550,000 people in America alone.

The film follows a structure that, once it gets past the 1950s tropes, is familiar to watchers of other Bell System films. The storyline follows a telephone order from start to finish, visiting all of the offices involved. The film then diverges into exposition on post-war military efforts and then-recent technological advances at Bell Labs.

By 1954, the Bell System caught up with the backlog of post-war telephone orders, and AT&T had turned its marketing efforts to selling telephone extensions and colored telephones. But behind the scenes, the company was improving the network's capabilities through a period of accelerated network technologies, including finding uses for the newly-invented transistor and starting work on electronic switching systems.

Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ

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