The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-08-12
OVER l5,OOO,OOO
 MILES OF WIRES
What We Use for Tele- phones and Tele-
 graphs
S6S, ,4O7, ,5O9 MESSAGES IN 'O7

More than 5000, 900 miles of single wire are used by the people of the United States in communicating with each other over the various telephone and telegraph systems. Of this num- Der, 12, 999, ,369 are operated by the tele- phone systems and 2.072,S51 miles by the telegraph companies. This length of single wire would encircle the earth at the equator more than 600 times.
 These and many other facts of in- terest to the public as well as to sta tisticians and scientists, are to be found in the advance proof pages of United States Census Bulletin 102. on the general subject of telegraph sys- tems in the United States in 1907, pre- pared by William M. Steuart, chief statistician for manufactures under the direction of United States Census Director E.. Dana Durand. It will come from the press of the government printing office within a week
 There are in the bulletin forty-seven pages of text, summaries, and tables, forming an extensive compilation of statistics and information concerning the telegraph industry. It is prepared as a part of the Census of Electrical Industries for 1907. There have been but three censuses of the telegraph systems of the United States. The first formed a part of the census of 1880; the others. in 1902 and 1907, were provided for by special acts of Con- gress. The last two were taken and the results compiled by Chief Statis- tician Steuart, with T. Commerford expert special agent. Other bulletins and reports for the 1907 census will give the statistics for street and cleo tric railways, central electric light and tems.
 The bulletin points out that for cen sus purposes the telegraph industry of the United States is divided into five ocean cable, wireless telegraph, rail- road telegraph, governmental tele- graph. and municipal electric fire alarm and police patrol signalling sys- tems.
 Over, the telegraph wires in 1907 there were flashed 3ss, ,509 messages. of which 5,869, ,317 were cablegrams. Going into comparisons between the statistics of the twenty-five commer- ciaI land line and. ocean cable teie- graph systems and of the telephone systems, the bulletin refers to the fact that the first telegraph line in the United States was opened for business in 1s44, and thirty-two years later the 1880 census the telephone companies reported 34,305 miles of wire about one-ninth of the mileage of the tele-i graph companies. In 1902 the tele-
 
 times as great as that used for tele- graph purposes. In 1907 the telephone was eight times as great as the telegraph. -s In the amount of business done, the sum paid in, salaries and wages, and the capital invested in 1907, the tele-] phone business was a little over three and one-half times as extensive as the year it furnished employment for more than five times as many persons,
 E Between 1902 and 1907 there was an addition of S,09S, SIS miles of wire for the use of the telephone systems, as with an increase of but ell in the mileage of owned and leased wire for commercial telegraph purposes. The increase in the wire mileage of the telephone systems dur ing the five years referred to was more than six times as great as the total amount of wire added to the telegraph business since 1880. N