ecessitated several complete
rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The
New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a
costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years of
age. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the various
Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000 in the first ten years
of the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless
torrent of electrical conversation.

The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much the
simple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but
rather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard. This is the part that
will always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and it
remains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who
have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to
learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making
a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else
that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors
and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in
moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden
body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries
except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants.

A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown,
it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny
electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York
to Berlin. It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three
square miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of its
head are not only numbered, but enswathed in silk, and combed out in so
marvellous a way that any one of them can in a flash be linked to any
other. Such hair-dressing! Such puffs and braids and ringlet relays!
Whoever would learn the utmost that may be done with copper hairs
of Titian red, must study the fantastic coiffure of a telephone
Switchboard.

If there were no switchboard, there would still be telephones, but not a
telephone system. To connect five thousand people by telephone requires
five thousand wires when the wires run to a switchboard; but without
a switchboard there would have to be 12,497,500 wires--4,999 to every
telephone. As well might there be a nerve-system without a brain, as a
t