Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1882-01-06
FOES OF THE TELEGRAPH.
Ho,c Btfdlos, Bears, Monkeys, Elephants,
Worms and Spiders Destroy the Wires.


If you will kick or pound on a telegraph
pole or place your ear against one ON windy
day what will the noise remind you of? A
hive of bees? Precisely. So it does the bears
in Norway. Bears are passionately fond OF
honey, and when in one of the wind districts
bruln hears the humming of the wires he fol-
lows the sound to the post where 1t Is loud
est and begins to tear away the stones heaped
round the poles in rocky soil to steady them, in
order to get at the hive which he imagines to be
there. In his disappointment and disgust he
usually leaves savage marks of his claws In
the wood. Nor is he the only victim of the
wires. In the electric exhibition at Paris, they
show the top Of thick pine telegraph post,
through which a wood-pecker has drilled a
hole several inches In diameter. The bird had
apparently perched on the pole and taken the
numming of the wires for the buzzing of
nest of insects in the wood, and had set him
self manfully-or birdfully-to dig them
out. Wolves will not stay in
Norway where q telegraph line has
been built. 1t was formerly the custom to
protect farms by planting poles around them
strung with cords, something like rabbit
snares, and gradually the wolves came to re-
spect these precautions SO that a line stretched
across the neck of peninsula wOuld protect
the whole district. The wolves take the tele-
graph for new improved snare, and prompt
ly leave the country when line is built. On
our own treeless plains the buffalo halls the
telegraph pole as an ingenious contrivance for
his own benefit. Like all cattle,
he delights in scratching himself,
and he goes through the performance SO en-
ergetically that he knocks down the post. An
early builder of telegraph lines undertook to
protect the posts by inserting brad-awls into
the wood, but the thick Skinned buffalo found
the brad awl an improvement, as affording
him new sensation, and scratched down
more poles than ever. In Sumatra the ele-
plants are systematically opposed to telegraph
lines, and at least twenty times year raid on
them. In May, 1878, the elephants tore
down the poles for distance of several fur
longs and hid the wires and insulators in the
cane jungle, and for three nights in succession
the repeated the performance as regularly as
the repairers rebuilt the line during the day.
The monkeys and apes are about as fOrmida-
BILE enemies, as they use the wires for swings
and trapezes and carry of the glass insulators
as valuable prizes; then, when the repairer
goes to correct the mischief he
may be pounced upon by tiger
or driven up the post by a
mad buffalo. In Japan the special enemies Of
the telegraph are the spiders, which grow to
an immense size, and avail themselves of the
wires as excellent framework for their webs.
SO thick are the CORDS the Japanese spiders
spin that often, especially when they are COW
cred with dew, they serve to connect the wires
with each other on the ground, and SO stop
them from working. In the sea the wires are
not any safer, as small worm has devel-
oped itself since cables came into fashion
which bores its way through iron wire and
gutta- percha, let's in the water and SO destroys
a line worth millions of dollars. When a
great storm comes on in the center Of the
ocean, and the cable breaks while 1t is being
laid, or threatens to break, no one is alarmed.
They fasten the cable to buoy and come
back afterward and pick it up; or if it is at the
bottom of the sea they drop dredge, with a
mile or so of rope, and fish out the precious
thread, as large as one of your fingers, almost
as easily as you would fish up penny from
the bottom of tub of water with the tongs.
But the little worm, no bigger than needle,
is more formidable than the elements on the
hurricane,