as he lay at home on
a sickbed. "He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine writer.
"Nonsense," replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me."

The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from being
unwieldy and aristocratic. The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company may
now stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president of
the Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York
skyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to be
indispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered and
geographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance,
that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product to
the Middle West. To the companies that sell perishable commodities,
an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has often
saved a carload or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers, who were
among the first to realize what Bell had made possible, have greatly
accelerated the wheels of their business by inter-city conversations.
For ten years or longer the Cudahys have talked every business morning
between Omaha and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy miles of wire.

In the refining of oil, the Standard Oil Company alone, at its New York
office, sends two hundred and thirty thousand messages a year. In the
making of steel, a chemical analysis is made of each caldron of molten
pig-iron, when it starts on its way to be refined, and this analysis is
sent by telephone to the steelmaker, so that he will know exactly how
each potful is to be handled. In the floating of logs down rivers,
instead of having relays of shouters to prevent the logs from jamming,
there is now a wire along the bank, with a telephone linked on at every
point of danger. In the rearing of skyscrapers, it is now usual to have
a temporary wire strung vertically, so that the architect may stand on
the ground and confer with a foreman who sits astride of a naked girder
three hundred feet up in the air. And in the electric light business,
the current is distributed wholly by telephoned orders. To give New York
the seven million electric lights that have abolished night in that
city requires twelve private exchanges and five hundred and twelve
telephones. All the power that creates this artificial daylight is
generated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storage
centres. Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits at
a telephone exc