The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-09-30
MANY THINGS NEEDED
 IN MAKING A TELEPHONE
Materials Gathered from he Four Quarters o the GlobeWhere the Instruments Installed Today Actually Was Three Years AgoTh
 Sources of the Vulcane, Carbon Aluminium and Bass-The
 Present Enormous Output Index of National Prosperity

New York, Sept. 29 1906-"There's an epitome of our present prosperity in the cross section of every tele- phone receiver or transmitter that goes out from this town. said tele- phone engineer the other day Tt ries all over the country are working overtime in the effort to keep up with their orders, for the current demand for telephonic a; 2aratus is, suppose a fair criterion"
 The engineer went on to call atten- tion to recent figures of the output of instruments. showing that in the first six months of 1906 the gross output Of Bell telephones was nearly l,2O0,OO returned instruments deducted, more than S00,000. As telephone transmit ter and receiver are accounted sepa- rate instruments, the statement means that in the first half of 1906 about 100000 telephones, as the word Is ordinarily understood, were added to the Bell system--a much greater num- Der than was ever added in the cor responding period of any other year. The output, furthermore, even during the warm months when industrial strenuosness everywhere lets up lit- tie, has kept right on, so that long before the current year closes there must be in operation considerably more than 3,000,000 stations of the
 
 which was first to occupy the tele- phone field.
 And little imagination, based on plain fact. reveals remarkable story of the ransacking of four quarters of the globe in order that every Ameri- can may 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 To- calities-under the earth in Montana, Michigan and Pennsylvania; at the bottom of the bogs fin Sweden; in hot. miasmic swamps of South America and Central Africa; in beds of beauxite of northeast Georgia; in the spruce for ests of the great northwest. The di verse clements finally come together in the New York and Chicago facto- ries of the Western Electric Company, the manufacturing auxiliary of the Bell companies of the United States.
 In the New York establishment alone after all the rarts have been as- sembled eighty eight people give their entire time to putting to- gether the finished pieces of the transmitters eighty-four people to the pieces of the receivers, while eighty six killed artisans dismantec instru- ments that need repair, often through the insertion of scme minute part which has worn out before the rest of the apparatus. In the total work of preparing these and other portions of the familiar telephone system, more than 10000 people in the United states alone are employed. constitut- ing the greatest s!rgle electrical com pany in the world-one having at present on its payroll. including the establishments in foreign countries. about 28,s50 persons.
 Look for a momeny at the materials of the receiver as 1t hangs on its hook The most apparent part of 1t consists of three rubber moulded parts made from vuicanite, a material which recalls the story or the endeavors of Charles Goodyear 70 discover a pro- cess of hardening the raw rubber which he had been using for covering overshoes. Goodyear had learned that sulphur powder could be used as a dying agent. and. by accident one day. some sulphur-dried rubber falling from his hands upon the red stove har- dened there instead of melting as he would have expected. Forthwith the inventor had the long sought for clue. and speedily patented the process of vulcanizing. without which the tels-