ion conductor feet of switchboard cable. Five million underground splices hooked it all together. 30 trucking companies, 11 airlines, and 4,000 people were pressed into service. And just after midnight on March 21, 22 days fol- lowing the fire, service from the building was restored to 104,000 sub- scribers. Normally, the job would have taken more than a year. But because of the Bell System's remarkable ability to marshal resources during times of crisis, the building was restored in less than a month. AT&T Chairman John DeButts: In the last couple of weeks, I have had the opportunity to observe at first hand the strength of the organization structure that the Justice Department's antitrust suit seeks to destroy. This service restoration has been called a dramatic accomplishment-rightly. But only in its urgency does the teamwork demonstrated on this occasion differ from the teamwork that characterizes the Bell System's everyday job. Of course, the antitrust suit, now known universally as Divestiture, went forward as planned, beginning in 1984. The Bell System became a memory, with just as many people hailing its death as mourning it. And while there is much to be said for the innovation, competitive behavior and reduced prices for telecommunications services that came from the breakup of the Bell System, it is hard to read an account such as the pre- vious one without a small lump in the throat. In fact, most technology his- torians conclude that we could not build the Bell System network today. To understand the creation of a system that could accomplish some- thing as remarkable as the fire recovery described previously, let's take Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telephony Chapter 3 a few pages to describe the history of this marvelous industry. I think you'll find it rather interesting. The History of Telephony As early as