l factory in Richmond, but
after a trial it proved to be too flimsy. If such paper could be put
on flat, he reasoned, it would be stronger. Just then he heard of an
erratic genius who had an invention for winding paper tape on wire for
the use of milliners.

Paper-wound bonnet-wire! Who could imagine any connection between this
and the telephone? Yet this hint was exactly what Barrett needed. He
experimented until he had devised a machine that crumpled the paper
around the wire, instead of winding it tightly. This was the finishing
touch. For a time these paper-wound cables were soaked in oil, but in
1890 Engineer F. A. Pickernell dared to trust to the tightness of the
lead sheathing, and laid a "dry core" cable, the first of the modern
type, in one of the streets of Philadelphia. This cable was the event
of the year. It was not only cheaper. It was the best-talking cable that
had ever been harnessed to a telephone.

What Barrett had done was soon made clear. By wrapping the wire with
loose paper, he had in reality cushioned it with AIR, which is the
best possible insulator. Not the paper, but the air in the paper, had
improved the cable. More air was added by the omission of the oil. And
presently Barrett perceived that he had merely reproduced in a cable,
as far as possible, the conditions of the overhead wires, which are
separated by nothing but air.

By 1896 there were two hundred thousand miles of wire snugly wrapped in
paper and lying in leaden caskets beneath the streets of the cities, and
to-day there are six million miles of it owned by the affiliated Bell
companies. Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the
telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the
basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are
so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons
and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its
resting-place. As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched into
one sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a little duct of its own.
It is reached by manholes where it runs under the streets and in little
switching-boxes placed at intervals it is frayed out into separate pairs
of wires that blossom at length into telephones.

Out in the open country there are still the open wires, which in point
of talking are the best. In the suburbs of cities there are neat green
posts with a single gray cable hung from a he