The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-03-06
UNDERGROUND
 TELEPHONY.
452 Miles of Cable, Boston to Washington, Now in Suc-
 cessfuI Use.


 The bold statement may now be made that this year of 1913, is in all human probability destined to witness the most remarkable and far-reaching improvement in telephone service since Professor Bell devised his orig inaI instrument
 It will be recalled that at the time President Taft was fnaugurated the Atlantic seaboard suffered from a
 prostrating s1eet and snow storm
 which for hours isolated Washington and made comm unication of any sort with the rest of the country fmpos- sibIe. -1
 The problem thus created was not a new one. It had occurred elsewhere
 before and would occur again.
 But it furnished an inspiration to
 President Theodore N Vail of Ameri- can Telephone Go. He handed a sort
 of. message to Garcia to his chief
 engineer with the instruction, Put
 those wires under ground. know.
 that the present development of the
 art of telephony does not make such
 wire-buryipg possible But experi-
 n1ent. We will furnish the money.
 You work out the mechanical discov-
 cries and perfections which will solve this problem for all time to scome.' 7 And the result of that command of President Vail, is that for the first time underground conversation by
 
 Boston to Washington.
 The problem Of underground te1e- phone conversation is a peculiar one. The retarding effect of the earth upon the telephone wires is so great that one mile of underground wire was for
 merly considered as troublesome in cutting down speech as 100 miles of overhead. In fact, until 1906 there was nowhere in the world a loaded underground cable over 20 miles in length. Steady, persistent effort by the corps of engin eers constantly in the service Of the Bell Co, has been pushing back the frontiers from year
 to year and iengthening the reach of the human voice underground until in 1911 it was possible to talk from New York to Washington, a distance of about 23O miles. Now the public miles between Boston and Washington a distance which 20 years ago would have been deemed equal to 10000 miles of aerial line.
 There were stretches between New York and New Haven, between New
 York and Philadelphia and between Boston and Providence where old ca
 ble was in successful daily use- The A T. & T. engineers developed a new type of cable to fill in the links be- tween Providence and New Haven and between Philadelphia and Washing | been used the entire distance the problem would have been less difficult. | But to scrap some 220 miles of cable was an expense which seemed hardly justified By means of some highly | complicated mechanism the Bell ex- perts overcame the difficulties of this 1 dual type of construction, welding the i complete line into a working unit which has given satisfactory results and which can be accepted to-day as a proven scientific success. As 1t is, l. AT per cent. of this 452 miles consists 1 of the previous type of cable, and 1 53 per cent. of the new type, equip 1 ped on the new phantom principle.
 There is no underground telephone 1 conversation in the world comparable to this oston-SVasz1inGton service. Il l is 1-2 times as long as the longest l European servsce. Even the New l rk-VVashfngt gton underground is l more than twice as long as the longest 1 European underground.
 Not only is there this 452 miles o1 l underground, but it is merely tho backbone of great sub-surface net 1 work of connecting veins and capil- | iaries. There are 1s,000 miles of un- 1 derground duct which connect witF | this Boston W ashington line. They 1 spread like vast net from the Mer- riraac to the Potomac. They serve l the densest population in the United 1 States. They traverse most of the l great cities on tHde Atlantic seaboard | It is subterranean protection 1 against storm and disaster such al l has never been created in the history l of the world.
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