eady
developed to a remarkable degree his natural genius for telephony.

Since then, Carty and the telephone business have grown up together,
he always a little distance in advance. No other man has touched the
apparatus of telephony at so many points. He fought down the flimsy,
clumsy methods, which led from one snarl to another. He found out how
to do with wires what Dickens did with words. "Let us do it right, boys,
and then we won't have any bad dreams"--this has been his motif. And,
as the crown and climax of his work, he mapped out the profession of
telephone engineering on the widest and most comprehensive lines.

In Carty, the engineer evolved into the educator. His end of the
American Telephone and Telegraph Company became the University of the
Telephone. He was himself a student by disposition, with a special taste
for the writings of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder; and
Spencer, the philosopher. And in 1890, he gathered around him a winnowed
group of college graduates--he has sixty of them on his staff to-day--so
that he might bequeath to the telephone an engineering corps of loyal
and efficient men.

The next problem that faced the young men of the telephone, as soon
as they had escaped from the clamor of the mysterious noises, was the
necessity of taking down the wires in the city streets and putting them
underground. At first, they had strung the wires on poles and roof-tops.
They had done this, not because it was cheap, but because it was the
only possible way, so far as any one knew in that kindergarten period.
A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling. To bury it was to
smother it, to make it dull or perhaps entirely useless. But now
that the number of wires had swollen from hundreds to thousands, the
overhead method had been outgrown. Some streets in the larger cities had
become black with wires. Poles had risen to fifty feet in height, then
sixty--seventy--eighty. Finally the highest of all pole lines was built
along West Street, New York--every pole a towering Norway pine, with its
top ninety feet above the roadway, and carrying thirty cross-arms and
three hundred wires.

From poles the wires soon overflowed to housetops, until in New York
alone they had overspread eleven thousand roofs. These roofs had to be
kept in repair, and their chimneys were the deadly enemies of the iron
wires. Many a wire, in less than two or three years, was withered to the
merest shred of rust