N 1875 there were no telephone users in the United States or anywhere else. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell recited "To be or not to be" to Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, over a telephone at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia and so made Hamlet's eternal question the first recorded telephone message. In 1905 there are in this country more than two million subscribers to the Bell system alone, to say nothing of the various independent companies whose statistics are practically impossible to bring together. These figures are more than merely interesting statistics. They are literally the bald statement of a revolution in American daily living so complete that not one telephone user in thousands, despite the fact that telephony figures so constantly in our daily newspapers, realizes its full significance or ever stops to think of the thousands of persons employed to keep it in daily operation, the other thousands busily engaged in supplying its endless demand for materials, or the millions whom it assists in the carrying out of pretty nearly every form of human activity. It helps operate a farm, a presidential election, or a financial combine, and it proposes marriage or purchases a spool of cotton with equal impartiality. On the first of January, 1905, the reports of the original Bell company showed the existence of 4,080 exchanges and branch offices, connecting 30,000 cities, towns and villages, and requiring the constant use of 3,549,810 miles of

wire.

Through these wires travels a yearly total of over 3,500,000,000 telephone calls-that is to say, a daily average of over 11,000,000 handled by something over 20,000 switchboard operators. To this number the short-line calls of the independent companies would add materially were it possible conveniently to summarize them; and it is a further significant fact that the engineers of this largest company are even now working upon the premise that within twenty years there will be one telephone in operation for every five men, women and children in the United States.

Such a growth means simply that more and more Americans will do exactly what so many Americans are doing already. A general view of the present uses of this familiar instrument is a constant series of surprises at the completeness with which it has become part of the typical life of every typical American community. New uses can hardly be imagined. for it. Its importance in isolated country districts is to-day even greater, perhaps, than in the crowded centers of population where the men of business save incalculable shoe leather for their employees -to say nothing of countless minutes of time for themselves-by cutting hours of messenger service to seconds of telephone communication. The connecting link that it supplies between city and country is unquestionably no small factor in the present healthful movement of the city countryward. And this in all parts of the country. Throughout New England, for example, one finds everywhere tangible evidence of the importance of this everpresent convenience in the taking up of "abandoned farms" and the reawakening of the soil to new agricultural uses, born in response to the profitable openings that a telephonic connection with the city markets makes for "truck gardening." Human life in these agricultural

districts, which is a mighty important factor in bringing folks to live in them, is also taking on an altogether different aspect since neighbors, merchants, the doctor and the minister have been brought within conversational distance.

In these small, widely scattered New England neighborhoods, as in the farming regions of the West and South, hundreds of telephone lines have been established on the initiative of local societies organized for the purpose, whose members cut the poles along the road where they now stand and practically built their way, under the supervision of a few trained telephone experts, to the nearest connection with the general system. In some cases such local development has been brought about entirely by the enterprise of a single individual, sometimes by that of one far-sighted woman. An element of rural picturesqueness is often added by the location of "central" in the local grocery store, where the grocer himself performs the offices of chief operator and all the "hello girls." Here the uses of the telephone are part social and part severely practical.

The farmer, removed even

from the sphere of the daily newspaper, is kept in touch with the weather bureau for information touching the growth day by day of his farm produce, and with the latest market quotations for pointers touching the final selling of it. On its social side the instrument brings each farm in speaking distance of its neighbors and, in a thousand and one ways, lessens the sense of isolation that has so long been the bane of the woman living in a lonely farmhouse.

Beyond these typical American farming regions, the lines have gone further, penetrating the great timber districts of the United States even to the remote camps of practically every center of the modern. lumber industry. They have been carried into mines, the lowest telephone in the world being hidden away in the depths of the Calumet and Hecla copper mine in Montana, and they have climbed to the tops of mountains, the highest being at the summit of Pike's Peak, Colorado. They creep from shore to shore on the muddy bottoms of our great rivers and they cross the Rockies on poles that incline outward from the sides of precipices

and on which the adventurous lineman, fixing a wire, hangs like a spider literally suspended above the abyss. And when the miles of wire already put in commission are all added together the human voice can travel more than five times as far and countless millions of times more rapidly than the owner's body can journey over the existing United States railway mileage.

Under each of these conditions the instrument finds new and divergent fields of utility-more, indeed, than could possibly be enumerated in the space of this single article. Scattered throughout the timber regions it becomes a wonderful safeguard against that greatest danger of the American forest, the forest fire, for it

ing lumber supply. It keeps the camp in the wilderness on speaking terms with the company's city offices and is of infinite value in summoning help in case of serious accident. Men working in the depths of a mine are thus also in constant touch with conditions at the surface; warnings of impending danger may be flashed to them with the quickness of the spoken word; and if accident happens, the scene of it is located with a rapidity that has added materially to the reputation of the telephone as a life-saver.

There is, perhaps, no better indication of the thoroughly American character of this passing of our vocal apparatus from the bonds of time and space that still hold our bodies than the surprised delight of

foreign visitors to America upon first "discovering" it. Britishers especially have gone back home and written articles to the Times, and Sir Philip Burne-Jones, after his recent visit to "the States" mourned publicly in a printed volume over

men representing the interests of various continental railways, and there is some. thing almost cheerfully ludicrous in the fact that they are said to have been constantly inventing reasons to play with the telephone, simply for the fun of itthe instrument itself being part of the special Pullman train on which they traveled and temporary connections being

five miles at home, and then only about something unimportant."

The "telephone habit" once acquired by the use of the instrument in business offices gained unquestionably a tremendous impetus when womankind discovered that the instrument is equally available for social purposes-to say nothing of the sweet delight of shopping or the sad

necessity of going to market. In New York and Boston important department stores have lately been finding profit in taking telephone orders during the night and delivering the goods early in the morning. The arrangement is the latest expression of what has been called the "telephone door" of business. And in nearly every retail industry in our larger cities there are from one to several employees who might well be called "telephone clerks" and whose special qualification is a working familiarity with the telephone as a shopping medium. Not only do the large modern hotels carry a telephone instrument in every room, but department stores are even now inaugurating a system of telephones at every counter, thus putting the distant customer in immediate verbal touch with the clerk with whom he or she is accustomed to doing business-a system that includes hundreds of instruments in each department store that employs it. In these same cities, and in many smaller ones, grocers call up their customers by telephone and take the daily order without the expendi

ture of time needed for a personal visit. The large city restaurant does much of its marketing in the same fashion and often uses the instrument at rush hours to obtain a given article of food, temporarily exhausted from its larder, even while the prospective eater is only beginning the first course of his dinner. And the man of business in New York or Boston, as he sits at his hotel table, may order a telephone and transact business with a man who is lunching in Chicago. Police departments employ it to capture criminals and railroads are making it an important part of their signal service.