Before Your Telephone Rings is a short educational film from 1948, presented by Western Electric, that shows the existing groundwork necessary to connect a phone number up to the telephone system when someone moves to a new home. The film opens with a shot of a people walking down a sidewalk in a neighborhood. A man carries in an oak barrel into a house. Inside the house, a telephone installer dials on a rotary phone, the final step in installing the Durant family’s new phone. Mrs. Durant walks into the office of Western Electric, a telephone company, to request the installation of a phone at her new home (02:08). The woman who helps Mrs. Durant talks to the camera about the process of setting up a new phone. Footage shows telephone lines strung from homes, running to the main telephone cables that run to the central office (03:45). A telephone employee in a lift examines suspended telephone cables. At a construction site for new homes, men set up new telephone poles and cables (04:50). Two men service an underground cable, accessed through a manhole (05:25). Viewers see how the cables run from underground through the central office and to the main frame. A man connects wires on the main frame to the new number assigned to Mrs. Durant (06:20). Men and women build telephone equipment in an assembly plant (07:35). Two men drive a truck overnight to bring supplies for telephone installation jobs. An installer (the man who set up Mrs. Durant’s phone in the beginning of the film) walks out of his house and drives his convertible to work. The installer greets his fellow installers (10:25), then they all get their work orders for the day. They check the supplies in their truck before heading to their respective jobs. The installer climbs the telephone pole and looks in the terminal box for the Durant’s new phone line to connect (11:24). The film shows a number of women who work in the telephone company’s information department, directory department, and as intercepting operators on the call board. An intercepting operator receives a call to the Durants’ old number and reroutes it to the new number (13:40). There is a shot of people working in the Accounting Department of the telephone company (14:00). The film closes with shots of the various people working to enable a telephone to be installed in a home, using the same shots of the different telephone company employees featured throughout the film.

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com