AT 1.30pm on Saturday, March 1, 1941, 500 people in Glasgow were talking over the telephone when the line briefly appeared to go dead. Before any callers could tell the operator that they had been cut off, the line reappeared as quickly and smoothly as it had disappeared.

In the space of 30 seconds, six of the busiest telephone exchanges in the city - Central, City, South, Bell, Douglas and Paisley - switched from manual to director automatic working, something that this newspaper described as the ‘very latest system of telephonic communication’. The image shows a lone operator at the Central exchange after the big switchover.

Some 1,400 engineers were standing by at various points across the city that Saturday afternoon. Lord Provost Sir Patrick Dollan completed the first automatic link-up, and Post Office experts quickly had the 20,000 subscribers on the new system. Years of careful planning, and the expenditure of millions of pounds, had gone into the switchover, which also affected 30,000 telephones.

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Herald Diary

All told, 16 of the 27 exchanges were now on automatic working. Glasgow had just over 100,000 telephones at that time, and 40 per cent of subscribers could now dial their calls rather than asking to be connected. The remaining 11 exchanges, which were still on manual, would not, the Herald added, be modernised until after peace returned with the end of the war, whenever that might be.

The timetable for the completion of the switchover had been affected, as had so many other things, by the outbreak of war, and the loss of hundreds of key men; fortunately, work on the six busiest exchanges was sufficiently well advanced to allow it to go ahead.