Waterbury evening Democrat., 1905-04-08
IOWA TELEPHONE HABIT
Practically All the Farmers Are
 Subscribers.
THE STATE A NETWORK OF WIRES

Rural Telephone Lines In Iowa Said
 to Outnumber Railway Lines In the
 United states-NoveI Uses to Which
 the Instrument Is Fut In the State
 In Some Cases It Is Used Instead oi
 Alarm Clocks.
 Iowa leads the nation in rural tele. phones, according to a dispatch from
 Sioux City. It has B per cent of all the rural telephone lines in the United States and 25 per cent of the mileage of wire used by rural telephones. There are more miles of rural telephone lines in Iowa than there are of railway lines in the United States. There is tele- phone instrument for every ten persons in the state, or one for every two fami- lies.
 These and other interesting facts have recently been gathered by the census officials. There are 21,577 sepa- rate rural lines in operation, using 259. .3O6 miles of wire and 266,96S in- struments. There are whole counties in which one may talk from the county seat to practically the entire farming population. Iowa farm telephones are very cheap, and the telephone habit'' is becoming stronger.
 Some amusing stories of the new uses to which the telephone is put in the farming sections of Iowa are told in the April Worlds Work by H. R. Mosnat. A few of them follow:
 Nearly every day some one invents or discovers a new use for it. One day the girl at central" received this mes sage: Hello! Say, central, have put the receiver of the phone in the baby's cradle, and if she wakes up and cries call me up at No. 71.'@
 It must have been an unusually ab- sentminded woman who sent in the message: "Oh, central: Ring me up in fifteen minutes so that I won't forget to take the bread out of the oven."
 If some one finds it necessary to take a night train the operator at the ex- change will receive some such mes- sage as this: Central. ring me up half an hour before the 2:17 train in the morning. See if it's late before you call me, please"
 Go into the exchange during rush period"-say, at 9 o'clok in the, morn ing-and you will see the telephone girl stand up. push her chair into a corner and throw" the plugs with which connections are made as fast as her arms can fly for an hour at stretch. All she will have time to say to you will be, Every woman in town is ordering things for dinner"
 There are about thirty subscribers who are called regularly every morning by the telephone instead of by an alarm clock. The "central' girl is supposed to know the time of all railway trains. and if train happens to be late how many minutes behind time. She is of- ten asked the time of day. because some one has let the clock run down. When there is an alarm of fire "cen- tral' is supposed to know where it is. The exchange is just across the street from the flrehouse, and fire alarms are often telephoned into the saving of time.
 Toward the end of a long, cold drive on raw day I was met at the gate by 2 farmer friend with the words: "Come right in. The wife has some hot coffee ready for you. We knew you were coming. Miss Rankin seen you go by, and she just telephoned to us."
 Sometimes the rural telephone has been used to stop travellers less willing to be stopped. There are sections where chicken stealing has become lost art because the rural telephones make it possible to block every avenue of escape as soon as the crime is dis covered. Many industrious chicken thieves and some bold offenders have been caught fred handed" through tele- phone messages which have prompted farmers to meet the malefactors with shotguns on the highway.
 A farmers wife on a rural telephone which had been in operation only few months was asked how she liked the telephone. She naively answered. Well. we liked it lot at first and do yet. only spring work is coming on so heavy now that we don't hardly have time to listen now" "