e chief of the telephone engineers. The eternal
struggle remains between the large and little ideas--between the men who
see what might be and the men who only see what IS. There is still the
race to break records. Already the girl at the switchboard can find the
person wanted in thirty seconds. This is one-tenth of the time that was
taken in the early centrals; but it is still too long. It is one-half of
a valuable minute. It must be cut to twenty-five seconds, or twenty or
fifteen.

There is still the inventors' battle to gain miles. The distance over
which conversations can be held has been increased from twenty miles
to twenty-five hundred. But this is not far enough. There are some
civilized human beings who are twelve thousand miles apart, and who have
interests in common. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, for instance,
there were Americans in Peking who would gladly have given half of their
fortune for the use of a pair of wires to New York.

In the earliest days of the telephone, Bell was fond of prophesying that
"the time will come when we will talk across the Atlantic Ocean"; but
this was regarded as a poetical fancy until Pupin invented his method
of automatically propelling the electric current. Since then the
most conservative engineer will discuss the problem of transatlantic
telephony. And as for the poets, they are now dreaming of the time
when a man may speak and hear his own voice come back to him around the
world.

The immediate long-distance problem is, of course, to talk from New York
to the Pacific. The two oceans are now only three and a half days apart
by rail. Seattle is clamoring for a wire to the East. San Diego wants
one in time for her Panama Canal Exposition in 1915. The wires are
already strung to San Francisco, but cannot be used in the present stage
of the art. And Vail's captains are working now with almost breathless
haste to give him a birthday present of a talk across the continent from
his farm in Vermont.

"I can see a universal system of telephony for the United States in the
very near future," says Carty. "There is a statue of Seward standing in
one of the streets of Seattle. The inscription upon it is, `To a United
Country.' But as an Easterner stands there, he feels the isolation of
that Far Western State, and he will always feel it, until he can
talk from one side of the United States to the other. For my part,"
continues Carty, "I believe we will talk across continents