ork, which used dials at first and afterwards printing machines. These
little exchanges had set out to do the work that is done to-day by
the telephone, and they did it after a fashion, in a most crude and
expensive way. They helped to prepare the way for the telephone, by
building up small constituencies that were ready for the telephone when
it arrived.

Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephone
exchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, he
said: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factory
with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his
neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be
laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with
private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable
with a central office." This remarkable prophecy has now become stale
reading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin of Species," or Adam Smith's
"Wealth of Nations." But at the time that it was written it was a most
fanciful dream.

When the first infant exchange for telephone service was born in Boston,
in 1877, it was the tiny offspring of a burglar-alarm business operated
by E. T. Holmes, a young man whose father had originated the idea of
protecting property by electric wires in 1858. Holmes was the first
practical man who dared to offer telephone service for sale. He had
obtained two telephones, numbers six and seven, the first five
having gone to the junk-heap; and he attached these to a wire in his
burglar-alarm office. For two weeks his business friends played with the
telephones, like boys with a fascinating toy; then Holmes nailed up a
new shelf in his office, and on this shelf placed six box-telephones in
a row. These could be switched into connection with the burglar-alarm
wires and any two of the six wires could be joined by a wire cord.
Nothing could have been simpler, but it was the arrival of a new idea in
the business world.

The Holmes exchange was on the top floor of a little building, and
in almost every other city the first exchange was as near the roof as
possible, partly to save rent and partly because most of the wires were
strung on roof-tops. As the telephone itself had been born in a cellar,
so the exchange was born in a garret. Usually, too, each exchange was
an off-shoot of some other wire-using business. It was a medley of
makeshifts. Almost every part o