panies in this
period of expansion, that by 1905 they had swept past all European
countries combined, not only in the quality of the service but in the
actual number of telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of public
money, or the protection of a tariff, or the prestige of a governmental
bureau.

By 1892 Boston and New York were talking to Chicago, Milwaukee,
Pittsburg, and Washington. One-half of the people of the United States
were within talking distance of each other. The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had
ceased to be a fairy tale. Several years later the western end of the
line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska, enabling the spoken word in
Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were
taught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance
salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit
of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one
arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded booth, draped
with silken curtains. This was the famous "Room Nine." By such and many
other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the
public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago
conversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distance
messages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day.

By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be a
ten-million-dollar enterprise. It began at Salt Lake City with a hundred
telephones, in 1880. Then it reached out to master an area of four
hundred and thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone Land of
undeveloped resources. Its linemen groped through dense forests where
their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars.
They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the
lonely places were brought together and made sociable. They drove off
the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets;
and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzing
of bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down. With the most heroic
optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered until, in 1906, it had
created a seventy-thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.

Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-sand telephones in use, in
her two hundred square miles of area. The business had been built up by
General Anson Stager, who was himself wealthy, and able to attract the
support