Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/501

That some among the principal Bell licensees had much to learn concerning telephone problems is well illustrated by the published statement of the president of one of the most prominent companies. In 1883, he was quoted concerning the need of long-distance service, as follows:

In the first place it has never been demonstrated that a continuous wire of one hundred miles is necessary. Such a wire has never been called for or demanded for any purpose, financial or otherwise. How could it pay? You may accept as a fact that no system of telephony which extends beyond a radius of twenty or thirty miles from any city, however large, will prove a paying investment. For purely commercial or financial interests, the telephone will not come into favor as a medium of direct transmission between large cities. The telephone, like any other enterprise, is valuable so long as it pays, and when it ceases to prove profitable in a pecuniary point of view, its scientific uses will not avail much. To sum up the whole matter, the value of the telephone is confined, as I have mentioned, within a certain radius—that is where it has many lines, and beyond that it has no money earning-capacity.

Yet within a year from the publication of that statement a number of toll lines, each more than a hundred miles in length, were in operation, notably one from Denver to Pueblo, in Colorado, one hundred and eleven miles long. This line was built with only 2,619 poles, and cost only about $13,000. Under present methods of construction a line of corresponding length and built in that section of country would probably include 4,900 poles and would cost about $90,000, including a heavy copper circuit.

Another apt illustration is found in the interview given in 1883, by the president of two large Bell companies, and who was called 'the leading practical expert of the country.'

To talk over the 1,200 miles between Chicago and New York there must be used either a compound wire or an iron one several times as heavy—an impracticable size. The copper wire would require about 36 poles to the mile, and I have roughly estimated its cost at $400,000. Only one wire could be used upon one set of poles, for even at the extreme ends of long cross arms, at such a distance what was said to one wire would be heard on the other and vice versa, owing to induction. In fact we find it impracticable for this reason to put more than one wire on one set of poles for distances greater than three miles—four miles being the very limit, even if far apart.

 

V. The First Mutual Telephone Exchange

On Friday evening, April 27, 1877, twenty-nine years ago, Alexander Graham Bell delivered a lecture on his electric-speaking telephone at the opera house in New Haven, Connecticut, and also addressed audiences in Hartford and in Middletown, with the aid of telephones connected to a telegraph circuit loaned by the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company. Mr. Frederick Gower delivered the lecture in Hartford, and Mr. Thomas A. Watson was in charge in Middletown. After giving a number of interesting illustrations of the serviceability of the telephone, and the ease with which conversation could be carried on over considerable distances, Dr. Bell claimed that the time was coming when a telephone in every house would be considered