probably not
more than thirty thousand. Dom Pedro of Brazil, who befriended Bell at
the Centennial, introduced telephony into his country in 1881; but it
has not in thirty years been able to obtain ten thousand users. Canada
has exactly the same number as Sweden--one hundred and sixty-five
thousand. Mexico has perhaps ten thousand; New Zealand twenty-six
thousand; and Australia fifty-five thousand.

Far down in the list of continents stands Africa. Egypt and Algeria have
twelve thousand at the north; British South Africa has as many at the
south; and in the vast stretches between there are barely a thousand
more. Whoever pushes into Central Africa will still hear the beat of the
wooden drum, which is the clattering sign-language of the natives. One
strand of copper wire there is, through the Congo region, placed there
by order of the late King of Belgium. To string it was probably the most
adventurous piece of work in the history of telephone linemen. There was
one seven hundred and fifty mile stretch of the central jungle. There
were white ants that ate the wooden poles, and wild elephants that
pulled up the iron poles. There were monkeys that played tag on the
lines, and savages that stole the wire for arrow-heads. But the line
was carried through, and to-day is alive with conversations concerning
rubber and ivory.

So, we may almost say of the telephone that "there is no speech nor
language where its voice is not heard." There are even a thousand miles
of its wire in Abyssinia and one hundred and fifty miles in the Fiji
Islands. Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in all
countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiring
twenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred
million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversations
a year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of the
infant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old.

No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. The
United States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while no
other country has one-half as many. Canada stands second, with almost
four per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany has as many telephones
as the State of New York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio. Chicago
has more than London; and Boston twice as many as Paris. In the whole of
Europe, with her twenty nations, there are one-third as many telepho