re until that number is assigned to a new subscriber.

The operators sit before the switchboard in high swivel chairs in a long
row, with their backs to the centre of the room.

From the rear it looks as if they were weaving some intricate fabric
that unravels as fast as it is woven. Their hands move almost faster
than the eye can follow, and the patterns made by the criss-crossed
cords of the connecting plugs are constantly changing, varying from
minute to minute as the colours in a kaleido-scope form new designs with
every turn of the handle.

Into the exchange pour all the throbbing messages of a great city.
Business propositions, political deals, scientific talks, and words of
comfort to the troubled, cross and recross each other over the black
switchboard. The wonder is that each message reaches the ear it was
meant for, and that all complications, no matter how knotty, are
immediately unravelled.

In the cities the telephone is a necessity. Business engagements are
made and contracts consummated; brokers keep in touch with their
associates on the floors of the exchanges; the patrolmen of the police
force keep their chief informed of their movements and the state of the
districts under their care; alarms of fire are telephoned to the
fire-engine houses, and calls for ambulances bring the swift wagons on
their errands of mercy; even wreckers telephone to their divers on the
bottom of the bay, and undulating electrical messages travel to the tops
of towering sky-scrapers.

[Illustration: A FEW TELEPHONE TRUNK WIRES
This shows a small section of a complicated telephone switchboard.]

In Europe it is possible to hear the latest opera by paying a small fee
and putting a receiver to your ear, and so also may lazy people and
invalids hear the latest news without getting out of bed.

The farmers of the West and in eastern States, too, have learned to use
the barbed wire that fences off their fields as a means of communicating
with one another and with distant parts of their own property.

Mr. Pupin has invented an apparatus by which he hopes to greatly extend
the distance over which men may talk, and it has even been suggested
that Uncle Sam and John Bull may in the future swap stories over a
transatlantic telephone line.

The marvels accomplished suggest the possible marvels to come.
Automatic exchanges, whereby the central telephone operator is done away
with, is one of the things that inventors are now at work