Shamokin Changes to Dial Service

September 27, 1952 marked a major change in Shamokin's telephone service, according to the News-Dispatch's 1964 Centennial history. The feature dated the conversion of all units to dial service to that day. Its chronology singled out the change as one of the important later milestones of the local exchange.

The same account looked back to an office in which an operator at a switchboard handled calls and had other company duties as well. It described a Williams switchboard entering service in 1884. Against that earlier account, the 1952 conversion marked a different way for subscribers to place their calls.

The local system had also grown greatly in scale. The retrospective listed 8,320 telephones for 1950 and 10,265 for 1955, placing the conversion between those two snapshots. These are figures and dates reported in the later history, not a count of instruments changed on the cutover day; the feature gives no detailed account of that day's installation work.