new switchboard in sixty days," he said; "and agree to
forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had never
been known. But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do. Paris
and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days'
journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length,
with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in three
weeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on the
French steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days;
so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running full
speed with a staff of ninety operators.

Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-five
thousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that has
not at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has been
a neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the business
with a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it.
Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are no
wire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austria
and Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for the
telephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently been
a change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now being
offered to one private company in each city, in return for three per
cent of the revenue. By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to the
front and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe.

In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from the
first, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here the
officials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. They
have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages
together; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat
flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a
year. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers,
have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths.

The highest telephone in the world is on the peak of Monte Rosa, in the
Italian Alps, very nearly three miles above the level of the sea. It is
linked to a line that runs to Rome, in order that a queen may talk to
a professor. In this case the Queen is Margherita of Italy and the
professor is Signor Mosso, the astronomer, who studies the heav