Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1906-11-11


 tome of 0ur present prosperity in the cross section ot every telephone fe- ceiyer= OF transmitter that goes ont from this town,' asid telephone en- ginccr the other day. Tt isn't won derful that all sorts of factories all over the country are working over time in the effort to keep up with their orders for the current demand for telephonic apparatus is, suppose, a fair criterion
 The engineer went on 10 call atten- tion to recent figures of the output of Instruments, showing that i'll the first six months of 1906 the gross output of Bell telephones was nearly 1,200, 900 and the net output, with the number more than 500 900. As telephone transmitter and receiver are account ed separate instruments, the state ment means that in the first half of 1906 about 40o,o0o telephones, as the word is ordinarily understood, were added to the Bell system-a much greater number than was ever added in the corresponding period of any other year The output, furthermore, even during the warm months when industrial strenuousness everywhere lets up a little, has kept right on, so that long before the current year clos es there must be in operation consd- erably more than 3,000,000 stations of the vast ilterconnected organizations phone field.
 And d little imagination, based on plain fact, reveals a remarkable story of the ransacking of four quarters of the globe in order that every Amer- can many talk with every other, how ever distant. The separate parts of the telephone that go to the subscrib- CT today were two or three years ago to be found in widely scattered locali- ties-under the earth in Montana, Michigan and Pennsylvania; at the
 
 miasmic swamps of South America and Central Africa; in beds of beanx= jte of northeast Georgia; in the spruce forests of the great northwest The diverse clements finally come togeth= CT in the New York and Chicago fac tories of the Western Electric com pany, the manufacturiu& auxiliary of the Bell companies of the Emitted States
 In the New York establishment alone. after all the parts have been assembled ciShty-eight people give their entire time to putting together the finished pieces of the tranSmtterS, eiShtN-iour people to the pieces of the receivers. while eiShty-siN skilled ar tisans disnantle instruments that ened repair, often through the insertion of some minute part which has worn out before the rest of the apparatus. In the tetal work of preparing these and other portions of the familiar tele- phone system, more than 20000 peo- pie in the United States alone are em- ployed, constituting the greatest sin gle electrical company in the world one having at present on it's payroll including the establishments in for eisn countries. about 2S, S50 persons
 Look for a moment at the materials of the receiver as it hangs on it's hook. The most apparent part of il consists of three rubber nlolded parts made from Nulcanite. q material which recalls the story of the rndeavors of Charles Goodyear to discover a pro cess of hardening the raw rubber which he had been using for covering oyershoe,s Goodyear had learned that sulphur powder could be used as a drying agent, and. by accident one day. some sulphur-dried rubber fall ing from his hands upou=a redhot stove hardened there instead of melt ing as he would have expected Fu5th- with the inventor had the lonS sought for clew, and speedily patented the W the telephone industry might have been seriously hampered these many years.
 Into the making of about +o.oo0 of these receivers d day. which are for- warded to Bell subscribers in every nook and cranny of the United States. q Goodly quantity of yuleanite goes as one might learn by weighing the material in the receiver, and multi plyins il hN, say, 3.ooooo the ap= proximate number of telephone stu= tions nl the system. The preyious history of the hard. dark substance covering the delicate apparatus of T given receiver would he difficult to trace. Such is the subdivision of production in modern indus try that the telephone manufactures