Word: switchboards
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...York. There she evolved the "Buffalo Plan" that became the national model for the manipulation of manpower shortages, from Connecticut to California (TIME, Sept. 27). She is an old hand at soft-soaping labor and management into agreements; a 1038 New Yorker profile said, "She is ... a kind of switchboard through which enemies can make connections." In all such operations she has managed to earn the trust of the unions at the same time that she was earning large fees from their employers. Said one businessman who learned his labor lesson a harder way: "Half an hour of her time...
...which must be relayed along a maze of loops and trunk lines, usually involves several skilled operators and a number of complex connections. In the new system, an operator in the town where the call originates calls the number by dialing or punching keys on a new kind of switchboard. Instead of plugs, this has a numbered keyboard like an adding machine. The message goes to the mechanical brain, called a "marker," which hunts out an available trunk line, tests a path to the destination and electrically sets up all connections-all within one second. If all lines are busy...
...before New Year's a tubby, clear-eyed old man shuffled out of Manhattan's Hotel Irving to mail a bundle of 28 identical New Year's cards of his own making. Soon he shuffled back in, went up to his room. Few minutes later, his switchboard light blinked red; but there was no answer on his phone. The desk clerk and a resident doctor found him face down, unconscious, across his bed. Half an hour later, Art Young, one of the great U.S. cartoonists, was dead...
Spang, Glunlc, Oomph. "And who wants to see Miss West?" says the switchboard operator of Los Angeles' Ravenswood Apartments, with an air of tired nobility. At the end of a somewhat musty sixth-floor corridor alight-coffee-colored, middle-aged maid opens Mae's door, and ushers visitors into the Venusberg...
Behind them, the "stage electrician" manipulated his switchboard. He could simulate every effect they might see on a war patrol: dawn, eastern horizon (the thin line of light which justifies the phrase "crack of dawn"); dawn, western horizon (an upper glow, quite different); fire at sea (a glow unmistakable once seen); thunder showers far off; gunfire ("Here's a cruiser coming at you," explained the CPO instructor, and the class watched the tiny, stabbing flashes grow brighter...