The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-09-24

Including all hands, from pretty girl
operators" TO bTawny "groundsmen, .
it takes 10000 persons to keep the tele-
phone business of the United States
moving. Twenty thousand are
employed in the operation and main
tenance of the completed lines; the
other 1000 are hustling constantly in
the stretching OF new lines. There is
much Of the humdrum and the monoto-
nous in the life of the $4,000, for their
duties. mostly of a routine nature, are
gone through with week after week
and year after year, without much va
Ration of method or change of scene.
Monotony is an unknown quantity
among the 1000; they are continually
on the move, for telephone extension
is going on in nearly every state of
the Union, and they encounter new
combinations and novel problems AL
most daily.
The laying out and building of a line
Of speaking wire requires the services
of individuals following many different
occupatione-men of profound scien-
tific and technical knowledge, shrewd
professional men with political apti-
tudes, men trained to a dozen different
trades and common laborers-not
counting those who draw the wire for
the line or those who make the instru-
nlents and the numerous minor es-
Sentials of construction
1t would not be easy to say along
which line of activity the energies Of
the telephone men are first exerted in
actual construction, but, logically, the
man who lays out the line makes the
start, with a great number of county
and city maps, covering the territory
TO be crossed, spread out before him.
When the line is several hundred miles
in length his examination of these maps
is long and tedious. Both telegraph
and telephone wires are almost invari-
ably strung along either railroads or
HIGHWAYS that repairing linemen may
reach then. readily. Railroads offer the
shorter routes. as rule, but telephone
lines generally follow the highways, be-
cause the telegraph, being earlier on
the ground, had pre-empted most of
the railroad lines before ever a teie-
phone wire was strung. 1t is the duty
of the man who lays out the llne-his
title is engineer of construction-to de-
termine what roads shall be followed
in order to get the shortest route and
professionally to indicate its exact loca-
fion in vivid red ink lines on the map
of every city and county between ter
minal points.
Advance Couriers.
A thousand men are preparing the
materials for construction, meanWhlle,
but the work next in order. logically,
is that of those advance couriers of
the telephone, the ''right-of-way men.
Their first task is the securing OF
franchises or other legal permits from
all the local authorities to go ahead.
These were often overlooked in the
early days of telephone construction,
but never are now, lack of formal per-
mits having been taken advantage of
in some places by the ill-diSpoSed, to
the great inconvenience of the public,
as well as the telephone folk 1t is in
doing ldght-of-way work that the pro-
fessional men with political ATTITUDES
are. employed. They are generated by
a man who has had much previous
r-ight-of-way experience in various
parts of the country, but local char
acters, possessed of pull" with coun-
cilrnen, town boards and other home
authorities are necessarily taken on,
from one end of the route to the other.