The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-04-29
TEIEpHoNE ANNIVERSARY.
Twenty-Five Years Since the Begin
 ming of Long Distance Telephony.


 ming of Long Distance Telephony. Boston Special to Springfield Republican.
 It is a quarter of a century since the beginning of long distance telephony. De fore 1879. no telephone message nad been transmitted from one city 70 ahotner. and the idea that the sound or the nu- man voice could be carried over wire forty or fifty miles in length was hot generally entertained. It was, however. firmly fixed in the nninds of the men who and they even then predicted that the time would come when the country would be covered by a harmonious network ot telephone wires, and the distance over which conversations could be carried on would be measured by hundreds and thousands of miles bringing the ent're population in communication through single universal system.
 Three years after the invention of Alex- ander Graham Bell had been exhibited at the Centennial Exposition, at Phila- delphia, and had excited the curiosity or the world. rather as a scientiic novelty than a practical utility. these men in the New England company authorized the construction of a line from Boston to Lowell. a distance of twenty-seyep miles. When the wire had been strung 1t expectations, and the voice of a per son speaking in Boston could be heard by the person at the receiver in Lowell Even then the public failed to grasp the sig
 
 regarded largely as an experiment until business transaction, involving several hundred thousand dollars, was brought to a successful consummation by confer snces over the line between the two Massachusetts cities. Papers were drawn at Boston. agreed to by those present and then read to the parties in Lowell. Amendments were suggested and dis cuSsed, until the document was satisfac- tory to all the persons interested
 The news of this transaction spread far and wide. and did much to awaken in the minds ot business men realiza- tion of the commercial possibilities of the telephone while 1t served to stimulate the engineers and experts employed by the company in their endeavors to per- feet the system. Although it was possi- ble tn use the Lowell line for business purposes, the apparatus was crude and imperfect in operation. But the begin ming had been made on that career of progress E n long distance aa, telephony ern industrial world. From the first it was evident that some better conductor must be found than the iron wire then in use. and within six years from the date of the Lowell experiment a hard- drawn copper wire had been made and tested in actual operation, and the abil- tty to converse over long distances, as the term is understood today, has been the result of the use of this medium.
 While the art of long distance tele- phony has not yet reached point where people on the Pacific Coast may talk to those on the Atlantic seaboard, and the news of towns on the great lakes be transmitted by telephone to the cities on the gulf, nevertheless 5O,000.e 200 of the 90,- 000.000 people in the United States are within reach of the telephone, and the close of the next quarter century. fifty years from the date of the opening of the twenty-seven-m line between Bos- ton and Lowell, is likely to see a tele- phone in every hamlet in the country, perhaps with power to transmit the sound of the human voice from one end of the land to the other.