Time and again the unified service of supply within the Bell System has proved to be a national asset. After hurricanes, floods and fires, when telephone company people go “all out” to restore service, Western Electric swings into action to deliver the needed equipment and supplies. And this equipment is standardized. It is familiar to all telephone people and can be installed quickly anywhere. Western’s productive capacity is ready also in any national defense emergency. Throughout World War II all of the company’s resources were devoted to the needs of the United States and its allies for electronic and communications equipment, including radar, sonar and various types of radio equipment. In the present national defense program, Western is not only helping to expand and improve America’s telephone system, but is using experience gained in its regular telephone job to supply specialized military equipment to the armed forces. After World War II Western Electric produced record-breaking quantities of equipment to meet America’s telephone needs. It increased its production tremendously to meet the big demand for telephones, willingly undertaking the financial risks of a big expansion program so that the operating companies could serve millions of people faster than otherwise possible. Since the end of World War II, prices of manufactured goods of all kinds have gone up, but Western Electric prices have gone up far less than the average—as of the end of 1954, they had gone up less than half as much. Because it works as a unit of the System rather than toward a separate end of its own. Western Electric plays an essential part in furnishing Americans with the best telephone service at the lowest possible cost. From Bell to Bell System [Illustration: This model of Bell’s first telephone is a duplicate of the instrument through which speech sounds were first transmitted electronically, 1875.] The telephone we use today is very different in design from the first instrument invented by Alexander Graham Bell, but it works on the same principle. As soon as Bell proved his invention practical, he foresaw it could link homes with offices, sweep aside the isolation of farms, and bind together cities and nations with electrically transmitted speech. Alexander Graham Bell had prepared himself to follow the professional footsteps of his father and grandfather in the teaching of proper articulation and the correction of speech defects. He became a teacher of speech to the deaf. Early in his training, his investigations into the nature of sound led him to study electricity. It was out of this work, together with his understanding of the organs of speech and hearing, that his invention grew.