Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1894 — Telephone Doctors. [ARTICLE]

Telephone Doctors.

In a telephone plant for a big citylike Chicago there are cables containing upward of 130,000 miles of copper wire. Complete records are kept of the position of every wire, and the men in charge can pick out at once the line of any subscriber whenever it is necessary to inspect it or work on it. When a line gets into trouble it can be tested in both directions from the switchboard and out toward the subscriber’s station.

At every exchange there is an official called the “wire chief,” whose special duty is to overlook the making of connections between the subscriber’s line and the switchboard, to inspect the wires, and to test them electrically in order to determine the position of any defect that may occur in a subscriber’s line or instruments. The wire chief sits at a special desk, from which wires run to various parts of the system, and he is provided with electrical instruments with which to make tests on lines that develop “trouble.” He is the ambulance surgeon of the telephone plant, and his wires give him the advantage of bejng truly übiquitous. He receives complaints and reports of “trouble,” and enters on special slips every “trouble” reported or discovered. These slips are handed to “trouble men,” who search out the cause, and,, finding it, apply the proper remedy,' They then enter an account of what they found and what they did on the slip and return it. In this way a close and comprehensive check is kept on the operation of the telephone plant, which, on account of its complexity and of the number of small paints that go to make it up, is peculiarly liable to trifling but troublesome defects. Returns are made up periodically from the “trouble slips,” and these form a continuous record of the efficiency both of the plant and of those immediately in charge of it.—[Chicago News.