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BY

HILE the steam railroads are making great progress, the interurban trolley lines are rapidly taking on the very form at which the railroads are aiming. Their great empire is the Middle West, where, in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, they have been brought to their highest development. The older ones follow the highways. The newer ones are laid on their own right of way. Experience has proved that they can get just as much business, passenger, baggage, and freight, by cutting out a line of their own as by sticking close to the highway, and just as much by entering towns and villages at the back door, in the manner of the railroads, as by following the main street. There are commodious terminals in a number of cities where several of the interurban lines meet. Cleveland has a union freight station.

The best cars are from fifty to sixty feet long. They all have features resembling those of the most luxurious cars of the Lima and Toledo line, which have outside seats on a long platform, high-backed plush seats for the regular passengers, upholstered seats and a couch in the smoking compartment, and a baggage room. At first the baggage and express compartments were omitted from the limited cars to save space, but it was found that most of the passengers taking the long rides—especially drummers going from town to town-required baggage facilities. A toilet room is, of course, a necessary adjunct. Many of the cars are single ended, a form of construction which gives the motorman a definite cab which is connected with the baggage room, so that he can act as baggage-master.

There is a growing tendency to abandon the rule of starting cars from terminals every hour in favor of the railroad method of starting them at irregular times to secure the maximum of traffic. Cars are frequent at busy times and infrequent at the hours when travel is light.

In the seasons of greatest traffic some of the roads have a half-hourly service. Many lines have gradually lengthened the distance between stopping points until now it is a regular practice to have stations a mile apart; though many roads still have them closer together. The limited cars, of course, make fewer stops than the locals with shorter runs. The "Marion Flyer," for an extreme example, makes only two scheduled stops between Marion, Ind., and Anderson, a run of 72 miles. On some of the limited cars an excess fare is charged; on some the fare is the same proportionately as on the local cars. The longest runs are made over the tracks of several companies. Six limited cars a day, for example, run the 162 miles between Dayton, O., and Toledo in six hours over the Dayton and Troy, the Western Ohio, and the Toledo and Interurban roads. The 138 miles between Indianapolis, Ind., and Fort Wayne are covered in 4 hours and 40 minutes over the Indiana Union Traction line and the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley. On this run lunch is served in a buffet compartment. On the Lake Shore Electric line, and on two or three others, the cars are run in trains-the development that is the last step in transforming the street-car into the transportation device of the future.

Most of the roads in Ohio charge two cents a mile for a one way fare. The lines in Michigan and Indiana charge from one to two cents. Competition with the steam railroads, which has cut down the steam railroad passenger traffic enormously in many places, is made successful by charging less than the steam railroad charges for a round trip. It costs $3.05 to go from Toledo, O., to Dayton by steam train, and $3.05 to return. The fare on the electric limited is $3.00 for the single trip and $5.25 for the round trip. There are all sorts of mileage books, commutation books, school children's tickets, family tickets, workingmen's tickets, good at certain hours, and all

the well-known railroad devices in use on the various lines, which bring down the fare for most of those who travel to one cent a mile and often lower.

These advantages have led the people in the manufacturing towns in Ohio and in the rural districts of Indiana and Michigan into the traveling habit. Traffic from city to city is heavy. Nearly 113,000,000 passengers were carried in Indiana alone in 1905. Travelers go every day from Cleveland, O., to Detroit, Mich., a run of 180 miles. Tickets are often sold for a trip from Dayton, O., to Detroit, Mich., nearly 300 miles. It is possible to travel four hundred miles from Cleveland, O., to Indianapolis in a day by interurban limited cars. Many trips of 200 miles and more can be made more quickly than by steam train, simply because electric service is so frequent that long waits for trains are not necessary. When all the lines now under construction and projected are completed, it will be possible to go from Portland, Me., to Lincoln, Neb., by trolley.

The freight and express business has been developed to a high point of efficiency. Not only do the farmers come down to the crossings with their milk and other farm produce to send them rapidly to town, but, curiously, an even heavier traffic is being kept up from town to town. It has been found more profitable to have the farmers drive to the towns and villages and sell their produce to shippers, and to load the cars heavily at these central points. The farmers are willing and the freight cars can operate more economically through making fewer stops.

At first it was feared that the interurban lines might destroy the small towns by making it too easy for the farmers to do business in the great cities. But, on the contrary, it has been found that a large and increasing part of the interurban freight business consists of shipments of goods made from the big cities to the country stores. Investigation has proved that the little and big towns of Indiana served by the interurban lines are growing faster than those served by the steam railroads.

GREENSBURG

CORNELLSVILLE

A

T MIDNIGHT on December 31, 1903, the ticking of a clock in the United States Observatory in Washington was transmitted over the telegraph wires and heard at the Observatory in Greenwich, England; in Rome; in Adelaide, Australia; in the Fiji Islands; at Manila; at Sitka, and as far south as Buenos Ayres. The telegraph carried the beats second by second for five minutes to two-thirds of the civilized world. The transmission to San Francisco took half a second; to Rome, 1.10 seconds; to the Coast Survey Station in Alaska, 1.70 seconds. The beats reached the Survey Office in Brisbane, Australia, in 2.45 seconds after they were sent; and Cordoba Observatory, Argentina, in 7.70 seconds. The day is not far off when the ticking of this clock will be heard around the world. Even now, for the five minutes just before noon, the time-clocks in Washington and the Mare Island (California) Navy Yards automatically send the exact time to practically every telegraph station in the United States, to Havana, and to Panama; and, in all the principal ports, time-balls are dropped so that the ship chronometers may be corrected.

We have become so accustomed to the telegraph and its feats that they seem commonplace; it is difficult, even by considering the magnitude of the business that we do by wire, to realize its wonder and the important part it plays in modern life.

THE PRINTING-TELEGRAPH SYSTEM

We have a million and a half miles of telegraph wire; and one of the main offices in New York-The Postal Telegraph Companyhandles 75,000 messages a day. In these large offices any wire can be automatically connected with any other wire-a local wire from a near-by town, for example, with a main wire to Chicago. And, if need be, a repeating machine can be

attached so that if the ticks come on one wire feebly they can go out on the other invigorated, the repeating being instantaneous, automatic, and infallible. To catch possible errors of operators, there is a machine that automatically records on a spool of paper every dot and dash that comes into the office. But such devices are being rendered obsolete by printing-telegraph systems. Under the Rowland method, operators can send thirty words a minute by playing a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter. Within a quarter of a second, the characters are printed at the receiving station. They also appear on a strip of paper in front of the operator for reference.

In the main Western Union office in New York, with its seventy trunk lines to Chicago, Mr. John C. Barclay's machine is taking the place of the old system. Guided by a strip of paper which has been perforated by a typewriter, it automatically telegraphs, and another typewriter automatically writes the message down at the office where it is received. All these machines lessen the chance of error, which is one of the great problems of the telegraph companies. Once, a telegram which started across the continent as "Gott sei mit dir" and finished its journey as "Go to see mit sis," required twenty-one reports to show how the transformation had occurred. At another time, a telegram reached a Louisville newspaper from its Washington correspondent, saying that a prominent Kentucky politician was dead. The paper printed his portrait and a long and flattering obituary notice, which the man read on his way home the next day. The code word in the correspondent's telegram meaning "is here" had been changed somewhere in the transmission, to the somewhat similar word meaning "is dead."

The rapidity of these Barclay machines increases the earning power of the wires.

it an average of one hundred messages an hour can be sent over a wire, which means that over the seventy Western Union trunk wires from New York to Chicago, 7,000 people in New York can telegraph to 7,000 others in Chicago and receive answers every sixty minutes; for the replies can come back on "phantom" wires. By the Rowland system, four operators on each end of the wire can together send nearly 600 messages an hour over a single wire. This is also by the use of the "phantom" wires. "Phantom" wires are the production of a system which makes it possible to send more than one message over the same metallic wire at the same time. Duplex, or sending one message in each direction over the same wire at the same time, is in common use. Quadruplex is not uncommon, and under the Rowland system it has four operators working over a wire from each end. The Phantoplex, a recent discovery being used by the Postal Telegraph Company, makes possible the combination of two duplex or multiplex systems over the same wire. As many as thirty-six simultaneous messages have been sent on one wire, but multiplex telegraphy to this extent has not yet been made commercially successful.

THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY AND RATES

A telegraph company is like the postal service in this way-to be at all satisfactory it must be practically universal. The public does not wish to go to one post-office to mail letters to San Francisco, and to another to mail letters to New Orleans. From the very nature of its business, a telegraph company looks toward monopoly. Practically all European telegraph systems are monopolies owned by the governments. In this country, the two great companies have wires covering practically the whole of the United States. The Western Union, by far the larger, was formed by the amalgamation of several small companies in the Middle West. By 1863 it had absorbed practically all the lines north of the Ohio River and west of the Mississippi. Other mergers and absorptions followed till in 1881 it was almost a complete monopoly. Five years later, Mr. Mackay got control of some small companies and combined them into the Postal Telegraph Company to work in harmony with the Commercial Cable Company. Since that time there has been a continual extension until the Postal Telegraph wires

reach all the more important points in the United States.

Because, perhaps, of this competition and of the great growth of the telephone, the receipts of the Western Union have been stationary for the last four years. The Postal Telegraph Company's receipts have increased somewhat, but the business as a whole is suffering under what the Census Bureau characterizes as arrested development. The criticism has often been made that the use of the telegraph in the United States has been restricted because the tolls are too high-that it might be popularized and greatly extended in use by fixing rates approximately as low as they are in some European countries; for instance, you can send a twelve-word message anywhere in the United. Kingdom for twelve cents; and the English send twice as many messages per capita as we send. On the other hand, the companies maintain that the cost of covering so wide a territory prevents radical reductions, and they point to the reductions that have been made, as shown by this table of rates from New York:

Since 1891 the rates have remained the same. In 1905 the average rate per message was 31.6 cents. The American companies have almost 1,500,000 miles of wire in operation for the sending of about 90,000,000 messages a year, or an average of about sixty messages for every mile of wire, while in England there are more than 150 messages per mile of wire. In spite of the lack of density in population, long distances to be covered, and the resulting high rates, the per capita use of the telegraph in this country is about as high as it is in Germany and France. There is no question, however, that the duplication of plant by the two rival companies is more costly than one single complete system would be, and it seems that although the public may derive some benefit by the competition in service, it does not in rates. The charges of both companies are practically identical, and the secretary of the Western Union said that the competition of the Postal

THE TELEGRAPH'S WHOLESALE BUSINESS But whether the companies have developed the business of the general public well or not, what may be called the wholesale uses of the telegraph are more in use in this country than in any other. One of these is the use made by Wall Street. Private wires of brokers cost about $4,000 a year between New York and Boston, and about. $25,000 between New York and Chicago. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company has taken much of the business from the two telegraph companies. From this company some brokers lease a combination telephone and telegraph line. During rush hours the abbreviated dialect of "te street" is telegraphed, for the telegraph for short messages is about as quick as the telephone, and far more accurate. When the rush is over and details and explanations are in order, the telephone connections are used over the same wires. Practically every broker's office has a ticker, a little machine in a glass case which automatically punches on a strip of paper the news that comes over the wire. The Stock Exchange maintains a service of this kind for its members, and in one year sent out more than thirteen million impressions. Two financial papers in New York maintain similar services for the transmission of general financial news. When the Southern Pacific Railroad Company declared its famous dividend during the past summer, the tickers announced it in hundreds of offices within sixty seconds after it was given out. One reporter had gotten the news. At the nearest telephone, another had telephone connection with his news office ready. At the news office they had already sent over the ticker wires the name of the company and the word "dividend." As soon as the all-important figure reached the office, it was sent out; hundreds of tickers completed the announcement. Within a minute after many a directors' meeting, their action is spread throughout a whole district. In another minute it is in Chicago, and the tickers there are spreading it. The decision by the United States Court in the famous Northern Securities case was announced at just one o'clock in St. Paul, Minn. A reporter sat at an open telephone in the court room and telephoned to a banking house which had a private telegraph wire to Chicago.

house in New York, and telephoned thence to the Wall Street Journal. The two words, "Government wins" were printed on the tape all over the financial district within two minutes after the decision was announced in St. Paul, some 1,500 miles away. The stock of the Northern Securities Company fell six points between sales. So quick is this service that men reporting for it by telephone have seen the first part of their message appear on the ticker before they could give the last of it.

The service of the newspapers is another wholesale use of the telegraph. Every large newspaper office receives telegraphic news from all over the United States, and their correspondents can get a direct wire to their office at any time. Most telegraphic news comes over wires leased to the Associated Press. These wires cover the whole country, and at central points are offices where the news is collected and rearranged in a form suitable to the section to which it is destined. All day and all night, year in and year out, the "A. P." dispatches are started from every section of the United States for every other section, and as they go almost automatically they assume the size and shape best suited to the locality to which they are going. By this endless system, foreign news from the "A. P." correspondents in other parts of the world is received and disseminated. The large newspapers receive their messages off wires almost alongside the presses that print it. The press rates in general are little over one-fifth of the regular commercial rates in the daytime and half of that at night.

Perhaps the greatest users of the telegraph are the railway companies. The use of the telegraph has made "phantom" railroad tracks also, for without it it would be impossible to run the number of trains that now go, particularly over the single-track roads.

CABLING AROUND THE WORLD

President Roosevelt opened the Pacific Cable with a message around the world. It went from Oyster Bay to San Francisco by telegraph, over the new cable to Honolulu, Guam, and Manila; by the old Spanish cable from Manila to Hong Kong; then around southern Asia via Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, to Aden and Suez, and via Gibraltar and Lisbon to the Azores. From the Azores back to America, it was taken up again by the Commercial Cable Company lines. The mes