The organization of the Bell System has grown up in a natural way over a period of many years. The American Bell Telephone Company, predecessor of AT&T, owned the original Bell patents. It licensed local companies to rent Bell telephones to their subscribers. Ownership of the operating companies by the headquarters organization came about because of their need to finance expanding service, and as a means of providing the best service at lowest cost. AT&T bought Western Electric in 1882 because it was the best manufacturer of telephone apparatus and because a dependable source of supplies was essential. The Bell Laboratories stemmed from the shop where Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone. The work of the Laboratories is a continuation, on a much larger scale, of early efforts to discover improvements in the art of telephony. [Illustration: _Motor launches pull first segment of the new transatlantic telephone cable toward the Newfoundland shore from HMTS_ Monarch, _world’s largest cable ship. The new underseas cable will link this continent with Great Britain._] Long Lines—When you call across the land Within its own territory your local telephone company provides inter-city service. But when you make a call that crosses the territories of various Bell companies, you are served also by the facilities of the Long Lines Department. This organization is responsible as well for overseas telephone service to points in countries abroad. More than 337,000,000 conversations a year are handled over Long Lines facilities. To handle this volume of conversations and its various other services, Long Lines requires: ■ About 27,000 highly trained telephone employees, including operators, engineers, maintenance men, construction forces, Commercial and Accounting people in 40 states and the District of Columbia. ■ Telephone central office forces in 233 cities and towns. ■ Telephone equipment and plant, including almost 2,400 buildings, in all but one state. ■ About 27,000,000 miles of talking circuits. Nine years after the telephone was invented, when the farthest one could talk was from New York to Boston, AT&T announced in its charter its plan to connect every place in the country “by cable and other appropriate means with the rest of the world.” Long distance lines reached Chicago in 1892. Gradually, telephone scientists solved the technical difficulties of transmitting speech over still greater distances. By 1915, Bell engineers had developed vacuum tube amplifiers to step-up fading voice currents, and the human voice spanned the miles between New York and San Francisco. [Illustration: _Calls to overseas points are handled by operators at three terminals. This Long Lines operator at the overseas switchboard in New York City is putting through a call to Paris._] When you call across the sea