g their water-front, and
have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred
square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it
with these poles.

Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This city of Telephonia would
be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State
could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people
of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the
wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place,
the Illinoisans would be in the air.

What would this city do for a living? It would make two-thirds of
the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly
one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others
would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the
people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN
THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.

The pay-envelope army that moves to work every morning in Telephonia
would be a host of one hundred and ten thousand men and girls, mostly
girls,--as many girls as would fill Vassar College a hundred times and
more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in
line, march them ten abreast, and six hours would pass before the last
company would arrive at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng
of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven.

Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the
only resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of any
great bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it,
no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even now
only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of
the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of
unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With
very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the
United States. No other industrial organism of equal size owes foreign
countries so little. Alike in its origin, its development, and
its highest point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is as
essentially American as the Declaration of Independence or the monument
on Bunker Hill.

CHAPTER VI. NOTABLE USERS OF THE TELEPHONE

What we might call the telephonization of city life, for lack of a
simpler word, has remarkably altered our manner of livin