The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-09-30

phone industry might have been se-
 riously hampered these many years. Into the making of about 4.000 of these receivers a day, which are for , marded to Bell subscribers in every nook and cranny of the United States, a good quantity of vulcanite goes as one might learn by weighing the
 material in the receWer and multi plying 1t by, say. 3,000.000. the approx innate number of telephone stations l in the system The previous history
 of the hard, dark substance covering
 the delicate apparatus of a given re-
 ceiver would be difficult to trace. Such | Is the subdivision of production in
 modern industry that the telephone
 manufacturer has no direct concern with the processes or manufacture of Vulcanite or the source of the supply of crude rubber whether it comes from l the Congo States, where the negro rub
 her gatherer working among long ca
 ble-like vines. smears his body with
 sap, which, drying on, is pulled off at the tax collecting station in thin sheets; or whether it arrives here from
 the desolate swamps of the Amazon.
 haunted by the silent Guaranis, or from the aguebreeding woodland of
 Central America. All that is required of the vulcanite. which is purchased from the largest producer of the ma terial in the United States, Is that 1t shall conform to certain exacting
 standards which engineering necessity
 has imposed.
 The same truth applies to the other
 clements Of the receiver-as to the permanent magnet made of a special grade of magnet steel. rolled in Pennsylvania mills and bought for the New York factory in 50-ton lots with surprising frequency. In each receiver the pole pieces at the ap5 Nf ba Ak
 sent a fine quality of what Is known in the trade as Norway iron-though 1t Is actually for the most part produced | in Sweden. The paper insulation of
 the spools demands the finest kind of
 bond made in the Berkshire Hills. in
 the home town of the junior senator | from Massachusetts,
 Many a telephone subscriber has
 wondered what Is in the centre of the
 receiver. If he looked inside he would 1 find there a plummet, weighing about one-thrd of a pound-a small weight in the single instrument, but one that
 must reach a total of in the neighbor- hood Of 100000 pounds tied up in the receivers of the Bell system. Nearly
 all this is American lead mined in H. | linois Missouri and other states. Then there Is the ferrotype dia- l phragm which conveys vibrations to
 the air It is simply a very thin sheet | of japanned iron. In each of the bt- polar coils are found 230 feet of mag
 net wire insulated with silk. About 1 ITS miles of this tiny thread is sent I out daily or more than enough in the
 receivers of one years production to
 stretch twice around the globe. This
 wire is insulated with the best silk
 obtainable in the market. The little
 brass screws used in the receiver do credit to the clever workmanship of
 the factories of a Connecticut corpora | ton
 A similar tale is to be told of the contents of the transmitter, with diff I Efererces, for these two Instruments, which are made for use of the com panies of the Bell system. have of course. differing characteristics accord l ing to their employment. The mouth pieces for example, of the transmitter are no longer of vulcanite, as they were some years ago. They are fash iioned from a composition of the same general characteristics and appearance. 1 but superior in certain respects for the purposes of the instrument. Then, too, there is a diaphragm made of