The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-10-20
TELEPHONE WIRE CONQUERS WORLD Enormous Increase in the Wire
 Service AMERICA HAS THE MOST There Will Probably Be Eight Mill lion Telephones in Operation
 at the End of This
 Year.


 cult between earth and the sun there
 would be telephone station every twelve
 miles. This, is. of course, only a begin ming, according to the enthusiastic tele- phone engineers, who foresee a time
 when practically everybody everywhere
 will be in telephonic communication with l everybody else.
 But it Is a pretty good beginning, when
 one considers that hardly thirty years have elapsed since Dr. Bells invention began to be commercially useful and that 1 the most important improvements, those
 making long distance telephony possible,
 have been made in more recent years {, It is just thirty years ago, for example,
 this coming winter, when Alexander Gra-
 ham Bell and that vivacious American
 journalist, Miss Kate Field first intro-
 duced the telephonic marvel to the public
 of Great Britain, securing an enthusi-
 astic letter of approval from Queen Vic
 toria who was present at one of the
 early demonstrations. Today the utility
 which annihilates space and time is mak-
 ing it's way into the most distant parts
 of the earth. it has almost everywhere
 beaten out the telegraph in popular favor
 and in many countries it's records are
 rapidly overhauling those of the post
 office.
 | All the while the telephone remains
 peculiarly American utility, one in which
 our people take especial pride because
 it was invented here and because we still
 use more telephones than all the rest of
 mankind put together. A careful esti-
 mate of the worlds telephones at the
 beginning of the present year indicated
 that at that time they numbered alto
 gether about 100000. This figure con-
 oerns. of course, what the engineers call
 stations" that is combinations of trans hitter and receiver, from which one may
 receive message-the telephone as meant in common parlance. Of these sub i scribers stations" approximately 5,0Oo,000 1 were found in the United States on Jan
 nary 1. 1907, 100000 of them belonging to
 the Bell system and 100000 representing
 the aggregate strength of a very large | number of independent companies Two
 million more telephones were in Europe
 and about 2OO.00O elsewhere.
 | These figures are very favorable to our | national pride but because Americans ! have been so much more progressive | than any other people in adopting the
 most important of time saving conven- | fences. it must not be inferred that other | countries are now standing still There ! have been many drawbacks to the gene | ral adoption of the telephone in years past among foreign peoples. Europeans | ! vative than Americans. Then in many
 continental countries the right to ad- | minister telephonic service has been lodg | ed with governmental bureaus. That I means usually extreme inertia, insuf- | ficient appropriations and a general dis | position to wait until public demand has l become overwhelming before adequate facilities will be supplied Even where the telephone has been In private hands the growth of the business has been hin- dered in some cases by governmental in- | reference, as in Great Britain. where for | many years the post office department. which administers the telegraphic sys- l tenn, was party to attempts to strangle | the telephonic industry.
 l In spite of hindrances. however, the use of the telephone is now increasing | rapidly in practically all countries where | 1t has been introduced. Business men l have become so convinced that this is | one of the most indispensable of modern l methods of communication that engineers l from various countries are constantly | coming to the United States to examine | the methods by which the Bell compa- nies transmit more than 5000,0 900 mes- sages a year. Not long ago John Hes 1 keith, engineer for the Australian tele- phone system, made a special study of 1 the engineering work of the American l Telephone and Telegraph company and
 it's allied companies and returned to the 1 commonwealth of the South Seas there
 to put into operation some of the lessons
 he had learned just as rapidly as the
 somewhat disturbed political conditions l of his home country permit.
 The Japanese, again, have been in- | stalling throughout their empire tele- phone system modelled directly upon that with which engineering skill has over 1 spread practically the entire United ! c Tha
 make mistakes in their choice of indus 1 trial models Sir William Preece, engi- | neer in chief and electrician of the 1 British government, which controls a portion of the long distance telephone | traffic of the British Isles, leaving the
 local traffic to the National Telephone | company, has for many years been a | keen and enthusiastic observer of the 1 telephone development of the uuited 1 States, has kept in touch with represen- l tative American telephone engineers and
 has visited this country hi quest of the
 latest information. Foreign scientists of | Sir Williams type who witness the re- | markable extent to which Americans em- 1 ploy the telephone in all the affairs of | daily life go back to their own countries
 and preach a doctrine which inevitably | results in improvement of conditions even
 though this improvement may be a little 1 slower than would be tolerated here.
  1 Tn most European countries statistics 1 are kept of the number of telephone 1 messages handled each year. It is obser- | vable that in the more progressive na- l tions the use of the telephone is doubling
 about once in six or seven years That seems to be pretty rapid rate of growth. | though it is undenably slower than in l this country. where for some years past the traffic of the Bell system has been l doubling at the rate of about once in | three and one-half years.
 | Germany, which Is the best telephone
 user among nations of continental Eu- rope increased the total of it's messages | from 766 226, 337 in 1901 to 1,207, ,446.753 in | 1905. At the same time the use of tele- | grams in the Fatherland increased only | from 45146.2sl to 50s37,3l5. In four years i from 1902 through 1906 the National Tele- | phone company of Great Britain, which 1 somewhat corresponds to the Bell system ! in this country. saw it's total of messages l mount from IS, 100000 to l.e0o. .o0o0o0- In | Austria from 1901 to 1905 the growth in | number of conversations was from 104.- | s4, 0s9 to 16s.477 1s3: in Belgium, between 1 1901 and 1905, from 3s,75S3o7 to 53,s1l '6eo; | in Denmark between 1901 and 1905, from | 59.a0S55 to 1os. .750035.
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