The Osceola times., 1882-11-11

superintendent a very smooth silvery
tOnguod talker. He goes wherever he
wants to, and / don't believe he has
been mistaken for a burglar more than a
dozen times in all his experience"
ADO you hear many complaints about
the working of the telephones ?"
ado we? | should say So"
"What do you do with them?'
whenever the complaint is reasona-
bic we investigate it, You see, we keep
what we call complaint book where we
register the name and address of all
who send us information about the wires
being out of order"
"Wbat do you do with complaints
about the instruments ?"
"Well, that depends on circumstances.
There are great many defects that we
can't remedy. To tell you the fact, the
telephone enterprise is just as much of
an experiment now as it was four years
ago"
"When you get report that the wires
are out of order how do you keep the
record |"
Like this. Look at this entry, Ward
& Brady, number blank blank street, re-
port wire down. This report is mum.
bered 36.964, and here we have the cor
responding tag. You see the complaint
entry of this number is marked repaired.
The corresponding tag, you see, bears
this piece of information: October 2,
1882, Ward q Brady report trouble with
wire between them and the Fair Grounds
Office. at 1880 a. M" At 1870 a. IN. In
spector Casey started out to find the
cause and learned that the wire had
been crossed by kite tail on the top
of the house at Second and Locust streets
o. X. at $50. We have wires stretched
on poles and over house tops.
AT THE END OF EACH MONTH
we take these irregularities and make up
a total like this "Month of July-Line
troubles on housetops, lS9 line troubles
on poles, 81.
"From this we conclude that it is bet
ter to use the poles. The principal OBJ
lection to poles is their cost. An ordi-
nary sixty-foot pole is worth about S23."
"Dont your statistics show that it is
easier to 90 over the housetops than to
plant and climb polesT
"No, sir, we can 20 faster with poles"
"Why don't you use poles all the
| time?'
"The city won't let MS put them every
where. You know we had long con-
troversy with VIM. Barr & Co. recently
about putting up poles on Sixth street.
We won, but we had lots of trouble be-
fore we got through with it,"
"Why don't you lay wires under
ground? Does it cost too much ?"
"No that is not the reason. We will
give $40 900 to anybody who will demon
strate practical method of putting down
the wires in a way that they can be
reached when it is necessary, and Of
putting them together so that they will
not sympathize with one another and
interfere with the different messages
Here is a cable containing several in
sulated copper wires There are fifty
wires in the cable, each covered with a
coating of rubber and wrapped in tin
foil, the whole being encased in a rub
Der hose. 1t is one of the two hundred
devices upon which patents have been
issued. There are two objections to it
as far as we are concerned. The first of
these is that if fifty telephones were at
tached to the different wires, a person
using one wire and talking to one per-
son at the other end could be heard by
the whole forty nine, the coating of the
wires not being sufficient to protect one
from the secondary current Of the others.
TELEPHONE WIRES.
are very sensitive to each other. To
illustrate: We had two wires going to
Cheltenham stretched upon the same
line of poles, but at least three feet
apart. We discovered that they would
not work at all at times, and finally that
the time when one could be used was
when the other was idle So we scpar-
ated them altogether, putting one on
the poles along the Missouri Pacific and
the other along the Manchester Road.
| don't see any reason why telegraph
wires should not be stretched under
ground, except that you can not get at
them easily to repair them"
"Do your men meet with many acci-
dents in climbing the poles?"
1--WE had one killed in Carondelet not
long ago by the breaking of bracket
while the other members of the party
were trying to tighten it. When the
bracket broke the wire jerked him off
the pole and the fall broke his neck"