avy wire. Usually, a
telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut,
or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is
still costing the telephone companies several millions a year. The
total number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone and
telegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, as
large as the State of Rhode Island.

But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into the
Skyscraper Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fall
of the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs upon
the precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of the telephone engineer
has been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildings
has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not
a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. No
sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are
in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the
city and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of these
monstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runs
from basement to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks.
This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, if
straightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yet
it is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body.

During this evolution of the cable, even the wire itself was being
remade. Vail and others had noticed that of all the varieties of wire
that were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for a telephone system.
The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least the
primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger but
less durable. But these wires were noisy and not good conductors of
electricity. An ideal telephone wire, they found, must be made of either
silver or copper. Silver was out of the question, and copper wire was
too soft and weak. It would not carry its own weight.

The problem, therefore, was either to make steel wire a better
conductor, or to produce a copper wire that would be strong enough. Vail
chose the latter, and forthwith gave orders to a Bridgeport manufacturer
to begin experiments. A young expert named Thomas B. Doolittle was at
once set to work, and presently appeared the first hard-drawn copper
wire, made tough-skinned by a fairly