at overlooked the town of Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests to the massive bulk of Burke Mountain. His farm, very nearly ten square miles in area, lay back of the house in a great oval

one many other things. The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merely for giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the United States had paid him f

Most of them belonged to the "Old Guard" of telephony. They had fought under Vail in the pioneer days; and now they

torm-cloud of panic and the need of another strong hand at the wheel until the crisis was over, but Vail still refused.

getic and prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of Frederick P. Fish, it had grown by leaps and bounds. But it was still far from being the SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger days; and so, when th

d. The Bell System was brought through the panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at

$11,579,000 for the same period in 1906. We have now in the banks ove

turally grown to be a habit in the days of patent litigation. Visitors and reporters found an open door. Educational advertisements were published in the most popular magazines. The corps of inventors was spurred up to conquer the long

o existence thirty years ago, except in the imagination of Vail, seems to be at hand. The very newsboys in the streets are crying it. An

zing a complete Bell System for the same reason that he built one big comfortable barn for his Swiss cattle and his Welsh ponies, instead of half a dozen small uncomfortable sheds. He has never been a "high financier" to juggle p

on competitive lines. It will have a staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase. Each local company will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise to the full the basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be, as no

not mean that the private companies will have absolute power. Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years' experience shows that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the will of the people than if it were a Government department. But it is an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be permitted to control

for ten years or more on an anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owned a cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete with the locomotives. There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons, all held

general good, he was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had been squeezed out of a bad job into a good one

is now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times been exclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein o

Western Union; and every Bell telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires: that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried

marched with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of expense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought to a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received

st country that has succeeded in putting both

lementary. The one is a supplement to the other. The post office sends a package; the telegraph sends the contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an apparat

as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWO TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegrap

trong without losing quickness, to become systematic without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the bird's-eye view of the whole situation,-th

etween the men who see what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still the race to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the person wanted in thirty seconds

red. But this is not far enough. There are some civilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who have interests in common. During the Boxer

a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the most conservative engineer will discuss the proble

g for a wire to the East. San Diego wants one in time for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915. The wires are already strung to San Francisco, but cannot be used in the prese

t is, `To a United Country.' But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation of that Far Western State, and he will always feel it, until he can talk from one side of the United States to

speech. He may perfect a third-rail system for use on moving trains. He may conceive of an ideal insulating material to supersede glass, mica, paper, and enamel. He may e

s with the art of telephony. He will know the gossip of the street, the demands of the labor unions, and the policies of governors and presidents. The psychology of the Western farmer will concern him, and the tone of the daily press, and the meth

ustrate this motto in all its practical variations. They will cater and explain, and explain and cater. They will educate and educate, until they have created an expert public. They will teach by pictures and lectures and exhibitions. They will have

reasonably be expected to happen in fifteen or twenty years. Invariably they are optimists. They make provision for growth, but none at all for shrinkage. By their advice, there is now twenty-five million dollars' worth of reserve plant in the various Bell Companies, waiting for the country to grow up to it. Even in the city of Ne

It will prepare a "fundamental plan" of the whole United States, showing the centre of each industry and the main runways of traffic. It will act upon the basic fact that WHEREVER THERE IS INTERDEPENDENCE, THERE

e a thousand miles between. Neither can it seem credible that a man in a distant city may be located as readily as though he were close at hand. It is too amazing to be true, and possibly a new generation will have to arrive before it will be ta

on the high bridge at Poughkeepsie, swing southwest through a dozen coal towns to the outskirts of Philadelphia, leap across the Susquehanna, zigzag up and down the Alleghenies into the murk of Pittsburg, cross the Ohio at Wheeling, glance past Columbus and Indianapolis, over the Wabash at Terre Haute, into St. Louis by the Eads b

e, the earth has travelled thirty miles through space. But this, in telephony, would be slow travelling. It is simple ev

eth of our national wealth-is at the present time invested in electrical development. The Electrical Age has not yet arrived; but it is at hand; and no one can tell how brilliant the result ma

piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetry rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves into

ny definite knowledge of electrical energy. His lightning-rod was regarded as an insult to the deity of Heaven. It was blamed for the earthquake of 1755

, but neither he nor any one else had conceived of flying conversation. In all the literature of ancient days, there is not a line that will apply to the telephone, except possibly that expressive phrase in the Bible, "And there came a voice." In these more privilege

aid to do nothing else but try out all new ideas and inventions; and before these words can pass into the printed book, new uses and new methods will have been discovered. There is therefore no immediate danger that

r system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as many different things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting with every tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires and wireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between two separated minds. He

le energy. No other thing is more enswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have lived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their prote

les away, perhaps twenty-five hundred miles away. Between the two discs runs a copper wire. As I speak, a thrill of electricity flits along the wire. This thrill is moulded by the sh

al thing in the material universe"; but no one knows. There is nothing to guide us in that unknown country except a sign-post that points upwards and bears the one word-"P

remble with the secrets of a great city. Already Puvis de Chavannes, by one of his superb panels in the Boston Library, has admitted the telephone and the telegraph to the world of art. He has embodied them as two fl

by which the very oceans are all aquiver with the news of the world? When Fulton's tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson to Albany in two days, who could have foreseen the steel leviathans, one-sixth of a mile in length, that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean in halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy workshop in Boston and heard the clang of a clock-spring come over an electric wire, who could have f