When you talk on the telephone, the signal that carries your voice travels over wires from your phone to an outlet in the wall of your house. If you remove the cover of that outlet, you will find a number of colorfully-covered wires.

From your house, the wires flow to a junction box where they tie into a much larger cable containing more wires. From there they make their way to switching and control mechanisms at phone company facilities. Simply put, telephone wires actually connect people and make distances seem small.

The quality of your voice over the phone lines and how well you connect is largely dependent on the quality of the wires and cables used to transmit the signal. And there is a company in Fort Mill that specializes in producing top quality wires that bring people closer together.

Belden Wire and Cable is located in a large facility off Hwy. 160 outside Fort Mill's town limits. This plant makes telephone wires and cabling for the telecommunications industry, and lead wires for use in high-temperature motors, marine motors, and places where the wires might encounter caustic chemicals.

Production started at the Belden plant in early 1999. The company has about 170 employees in Fort Mill and about 4,000 globally. The building encompasses 250,000 square feet, with 230,000 of that devoted to manufacturing.

The company prefers a small town environment. Most of the company's facilities are located in or near small towns. But they needed to be close to a large metro area to attract a variety of managers and information technology personnel.

Belden as a company has one of the largest product lines in the industry, and the Fort Mill plant is a major producer of wire and cable. To measure the plant's output in feet requires plenty of zeros. The plant produces more than 50 million feet of insulated wire per week. On a yearly basis, the finished wire and cable cranked out of the plant can approach six billion feet!

When making cable, Belden takes wire, typically copper, of one thickness and draws it down to a smaller diameter or gauge. Each wire is then covered with insulation. Numerous types of insulation, colors and combinations of colors are used when insulating wire, which are standard throughout the telecommunications industry.

One insulated wire is then paired with another wire and twisted together to form a twisted pair. These two wires have different colors of insulation and different uses by the phone company. How the wires are twisted is very important. Incorrect twisting can create crosstalk--when phone conversations become mixed with other conversations.

Cables are made from twisted pairs of wire. The cables made at the Fort Mill plant have from two pairs to 150 pair of wires. The wires are bundled together, a metal jacket is wrapped around the bundle, acting as a ground and protection from rodents and small animals, and the entire cable is finished with an outside insulating layer.

The process of making wire and cable is more complicated than it sounds. Every foot of the product made in the plant is electrically tested to make certain that there are no unexpected breaks. Underwriter Labs also inspects the operation to ensure the wires and cables meet their standards.

Belden makes products that the average person does not usually see or encounter. Their cables and wires are typically hidden. But you might see or hear the effects.

Chances are, when you use a phone, your conversation travels through a Belden cable at some point on its journey. And the Olympics have always used Belden cables for communications.

Major television studios are often wired with Belden cables, and a number of emergency response and rescue systems use Belden cables to connect antennae and other parts of the system.

The Fort Mill plant has some fairly high flying wire to its credit. Wire made in Fort Mill is in use in a space suit on the International Space Station. This plant in Fort Mill not only has a national and global reach, it has a reach that extends beyond our planet.

Bill Henson is a technical writer and marketing copywriter living in Rock Hill. You can reach him by e-mail at writer@cetlink.net.