in 1917, on an important governmental mission, had an almost sublime
illustration of the extent to which the telephone had developed on the
North American Continent. Sitting at a desk in a large office building
in New York, Lord Northcliffe took up two telephone receivers and placed
one at each ear. In the first he heard the surf beating at Coney Island,
New York, and in the other he heard, with equal distinctness, the
breakers pounding the beach at the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Certainly
this demonstration justified the statement made a few years before by
another English traveler. "What startles and frightens the backward
European in the United States," said Mr. Arnold Bennett, "is the
efficiency and fearful universality of the telephone. To me it was the
proudest achievement and the most poetical achievement of the American
people."

Lord Northcliffe's experience had a certain dramatic justice which
probably even he did not appreciate. He is the proprietor of the London
Times, a newspaper which, when the telephone was first introduced,
denounced it as the "latest American humbug" and declared that it "was
far inferior to the well-established system of speaking tubes." The
London Times delivered this solemn judgment in 1877. A year before, at
the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil,
picked up, almost accidentally, a queer cone-shaped instrument and put
it to his ear, "My God! It talks!" was his exclamation; an incident
which, when widely published in the press, first informed the American
people that another of the greatest inventions of all times had had its
birth on their own soil. Yet the initial judgment of the American people
did not differ essentially from the opinion which had been more coarsely
expressed by the leading English newspaper. Our fathers did not denounce
the telephone as an "American humbug," but they did describe it as a
curious electric "toy" and ridiculed the notion that it could ever have
any practical value. Even after Alexander Graham Bell and his associates
had completely demonstrated its usefulness, the Western Union Telegraph
Company refused to purchase all their patent rights for $100,000! Only
forty years have passed since the telephone made such an inauspicious
beginning. It remains now, as it was then, essentially an American
achievement. Other nations have their telephone systems, but it is
only in the United States that its possibilities have been even f