. Bell telephone magazine . oated messen-gers scurried In and out. To one whocan never understand why a telephoneworks anyway. It looked like multipleconfusion. But we could see that Itwas getting results. Establishing Emergency Service CoMPANiY OFFICIALS found time toexplain that a 50-pair cable led intothis office. While the fire embers cooled, a two-position PBX had beenlocated in a nearby warehouse andmoved in. By about 9 :^o theRiver Grove police and fire phoneshad been connected by magneto serv-ice. Before noon the first trunk lineswere working of[ the PBX. While these were being ho
. Bell telephone magazine . oated messen-gers scurried In and out. To one whocan never understand why a telephoneworks anyway. It looked like multipleconfusion. But we could see that Itwas getting results. Establishing Emergency Service CoMPANiY OFFICIALS found time toexplain that a 50-pair cable led intothis office. While the fire embers cooled, a two-position PBX had beenlocated in a nearby warehouse andmoved in. By about 9 :^o theRiver Grove police and fire phoneshad been connected by magneto serv-ice. Before noon the first trunk lineswere working of[ the PBX. While these were being hooked up,Illinois Bell station wagons stood out-side and mobile radio telephone unitswere working in them. For severalhours they provided the only com-munications links between the on-the-ground and headquarters groups indowntown Chicago, and thereforewere Invaluable. Even after the firstPBX lines were in, the units con-tinued to handle part of the traffic Inand out of River Grove until late inthe afternoon of the first Eight positions of PBX switchboard turn the telephone business office^ a block from thedestroyed central office, into a temporary operating room 1946-47 Crisis in River Grove 241 Later, more cable and six rrforePBX units were added in the busi-ness office until finally a total of 286lines were available for emergencyservice. Of these, more than 30lines were for emergency outdoorpublic telephones. The booths werestrategically located on street cor-ners, near filling stations and otherpublic places throughout the affectedarea for customers convenience andprotection. This could take care of much ofthe essential business of the com-munity, but home telephones re-mained silent. For them the com-pany set up the messenger servicemanned by traffic and commercialpeople. The crises of day-to-day liv-ing continued to occur—deaths, births,accidents, empty fuel bins. A snow-storm with near-zero temperaturecontributed Its bit to the emergency,and, incidentally, added g
Size: 1820px × 1373px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthoramerican, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, bookyear1922
