The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-04-30

1901. Americans hear much about the way in which the Scotch metTopoie has gone into business, ana there a
 many on this side of the water wno talk of Glasgow as a model TOT AnneLl can municipalities, but it's town-latn- CTS did not distinguish thehseiVes when they embarked in the telephone enterprise. The city has about SOO'ooo inhabitants, and is consequently pret tv nearly the same size as Boston. t ni0bt have been supposed that when HlasRlow built new telephone system only four years ago. 1t would nave taken pains to get the best there was vet 1t succeeded in securing sonetnlhs worse than the plant already in opera lion bv the National Telephone Com pany. .o .oi,, when the Boston man wants to talk through his telephone, he merely lifts the receiver from the hook ana Cen | traI" does the rest in putting him m communication with the person "nohi
 he desires to reach. The canny S Scot over in GlasgIow communicates with
 the central office by means or whae ..e,II ID
 known to the engineers as the caii
 wire" system After the operator, sit-
 ting at the switchboard of kind aoan- | doned in America twenty years ago. has found out what Is wanted she con-
 nects the lines and then the calllnB subscriber turns a crank which rings
 the telephone bell at the other end or
 the wires. In other words. ne ls per forming with what Is known as ring through" apparatus and doing con
 siderable work which here Is done for | him. When the conversation is over ne
 must ring off, and so negligent are the 1 subscribers in this particular that the municipal telephone directories are filled with warnings, printed Tn req ink, notifying the Scots that they must | not be forgetful in attending to this
 part of their telephonic duties. While | the Glasgow plant of the National Telephone Company is not by any means up to American standards, It Is
 still sav much better than the municipal
 system that the company Is gaining subscribers five times as fast as the { city.
 1 Glasgow stfll sticks to the telephone
 enterprise, but one English town which | tried 1t soon gave 1t up as a bad job. | American readers of the works of En- glish novelists have been made familiar | with Tunbridge Wells, one of the old
 est of English watering places. Tun- | bridge Wells built a telephone plant
 operated 1t about a year, and was then
 glad to sell out to the National Com
 pany. For seven years British cities
 have had the privilege of going into
 the telephone business if they SO de-
 sired, yet today there are municipal
 plants in only five towns-Glasgow
 Portsmouth, Swansea, Hull and Brigh-
 ton There is also a publicly owned
 system in Guernsey, one of the Chan
 nel Islands. and the British Post Office
 Department controls a small number of lines.
 England stands well up in the list of
 European countries in the matter of | telephone development. Among the larger nations, only Germany has more
 telephones in proportion to population The people of the Old World who use telephones the most are those of Swed- en and Norway. Denmark and Switzer- land. European telephone statistics reveal some interesting things. For
 instance. in persecuted Finland there is ] a telephone to one in every 220 of the population. In Russia, the seat of the power which holds the Films in sub- ] lection. there is one telephone to every 2600 people Southern Europe does
 not make an extensive use of the tele- phone as do the northern sections and from all Europe the telephone builders come to this country for their models
 when they undertake to improve theiI systems. The extensive reconstruction now in progress in England is planned
 to raise the service to the American | standard.