There are residences in New York City that have private branch exchanges, like a bank or a newspaper office.Hostesses are more and more falling into the habit of telephoning invitations for dinner and other diversions.Many people find telephone conversations more convenient than personal interviews, and it is every day displacing the stenographer and the traveling salesman.
Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of the telephone is its transformation of country life.In Europe, rural telephones are almost unknown, while in the United States one-third of all our telephone stations are in country districts.The farmer no longer depends upon the mails; like the city man, he telephones.This instrument is thus the greatest civilizing force we have, for civilization is very largely a matter of intercommunication.
Indeed, the telephone and other similar agencies, such as the parcel post, the rural free delivery, better roads, and the automobile, are rapidly transforming rural life in this country.
In several regions, especially in the Mississippi Valley, a farmer who has no telephone is in a class by himself, like one who has no mowing-machine.Thus the latest returns from Iowa, taken by the census as far back as 1907, showed that seventy-three per cent of all the farms--160,000 out of 220,000--had telephones and the proportion is unquestionably greater now.Every other farmhouse from the Atlantic to the Pacific contains at least one instrument.These statistics clearly show that the telephone has removed half the terrors and isolation of rural life.Many a lonely farmer's wife or daughter, on the approach of a suspicious-looking character, has rushed to the telephone and called up the neighbors, so that now tramps notoriously avoid houses that shelter the protecting wires.In remote sections, insanity, especially among women, is frequently the result of loneliness, a calamity which the telephone is doing much to mitigate.
In the United States today there is one telephone to every nine persons.This achievement represents American invention, genius, industrial organization, and business enterprise at their best.
The story of American business contains many chapters and episodes which Americans would willingly forget.But the American Telephone and Telegraph Company represents an industry which has made not a single "swollen fortune," whose largest stockholder is the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor (a woman who, being totally deaf, has never talked over the telephone); which has not corrupted legislatures or courts; which has steadily decreased the prices of its products as business and profits have increased; which has never issued watered stock or declared fictitious dividends; and which has always manifested a high sense of responsibility in its dealings with the public.
Two forces, American science and American business capacity, have accomplished this result.As a mechanism, this American telephone system is the product not of one but of many minds.What most strikes the imagination is the story of Alexander Graham Bell, yet other names--Carty, Scribner, Pupin--play a large part in the story.
The man who discovered that an electric current had the power of transmitting sound over a copper wire knew very little about electricity.Had he known more about this agency and less about acoustics, Bell once said himself, he would never have invented the telephone.His father and grandfather had been teachers of the deaf and dumb and had made important researches in acoustics.
Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh in March, 1847, and educated there and in London, followed the ancestral example.
