of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln.
Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock
soared to four hundred dollars a share. The old-timers--the men who
clambered over roof-tops in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they
could without being chased off--are still for the most part in control
of the Chicago company.

But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the
record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the
flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number
of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single
year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were
put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two
minutes of the business day.

Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays
from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. More
and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New
York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and
Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be
unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow,
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and
Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the
conversations of this one American city.

In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing
two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an
eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and
requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the
work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years
ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of
a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to
foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York,
the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid,
more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.

Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five
thousand girls. Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and
thirty-five million sheets of paper a year. Merely to do the writing of
these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils.
And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels