hange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an ocean
liner.

The first steamship line to take notice of the telephone was the Clyde,
which had a wire from dock to office in 1877; and the first railway was
the Pennsylvania, which two years later was persuaded by Professor Bell
himself to give it a trial in Altoona. Since then, this railroad has
become the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony. It has one hundred
and seventy-five exchanges, four hundred operators, thirteen thousand
telephones, and twenty thousand miles of wire--a more ample system than
the city of New York had in 1896.

To-day the telephone goes to sea in the passenger steamer and the
warship. Its wires are waiting at the dock and the depot, so that a
tourist may sit in his stateroom and talk with a friend in some distant
office. It is one of the most incredible miracles of telephony that
a passenger at New York, who is about to start for Chicago on a fast
express, may telephone to Chicago from the drawing-room of a Pullman. He
himself, on the swiftest of all trains, will not arrive in Chicago for
eighteen hours; but the flying words can make the journey, and RETURN,
while his train is waiting for the signal to start.

In the operation of trains, the railroads have waited thirty years
before they dared to trust the telephone, just as they waited fifteen
years before they dared to trust the telegraph. In 1883 a few railways
used the telephone in a small way, but in 1907, when a law was passed
that made telegraphers highly expensive, there was a general swing
to the telephone. Several dozen roads have now put it in use, some
employing it as an associate of the Morse method and others as a
complete substitute. It has already been found to be the quickest way of
despatching trains. It will do in five minutes what the telegraph did
in ten. And it has enabled railroads to hire more suitable men for the
smaller offices.

In news-gathering, too, much more than in railroading, the day of the
telephone has arrived. The Boston Globe was the first paper to receive
news by telephone. Later came The Washington Star, which had a wire
strung to the Capitol, and thereby gained an hour over its competitors.
To-day the evening papers receive most of their news over the wire a
la Bell instead of a la Morse. This has resulted in a specialization of
reporters--one man runs for the news and another man writes it. Some of
the runners never come to the office. They re