These methods have helped telephone engineers and construction forces put in rural telephone facilities three times faster than ever before. Gradually, the telephone is eliminating the traditional isolation of farm life. Rural localities have been linked by literally tens of thousands of miles of new pole lines, by modern central office buildings, by the most up-to-date switchboards. Great strides are being made in improving the quality of rural telephone service. With the steady pressure of world tensions, the Bell System has taken many steps to make sure that America’s defense needs will be met. The telephone companies have a good foundation to build on. Telephone buildings are of unusually strong construction. The entire United States is blanketed by a network of telephone circuits. American cities are underlaid by networks of underground cables, which, as wartime experience in Japan showed, would not generally be destroyed even by atom bombs. The nation is now spanned—coast to coast, and north to south—by “backbone” communication routes. Calls between cities can be routed over many alternate paths, and destruction of telephone facilities at one point would be like throwing a pebble through a huge spider web. While service at the one point might be temporarily interrupted, the nation-wide communications web would continue to function. Because of the strength and flexibility of the telephone network, the basic means of communication in the nation’s Civil Defense setup has been built around the telephone. Throughout America the work of improving and strengthening the telephone system goes on. The goal is to help make the nation invulnerable against attack, and to provide the public with the best possible service, at reasonable cost, in rural communities, in cities, and on intercity routes. [Illustration: _Power driven augers help speed construction of rural telephone lines._] [Illustration: _Civil Defense air raid warning network relies mainly on telephone communications._] Story without an ending Neither chance nor mere good fortune has brought this nation the finest telephone service in the world. Americans enjoy this service as a result of their own enterprise and common sense. The people of this nation have found more and more ways to use the telephone in their daily lives. They have encouraged initiative and invention. They have made the job of providing telephone service a public trust. At the same time, they have given the telephone companies, under regulation, the freedom and resources to do their job as well as possible. In this climate of freedom and responsibility, the Bell telephone companies have provided service of steadily increasing value. And the quality of service has been steadily improved.