primitive virtue of being cheap. Then came steel wire, stronger but The first telephone wire was of galvanized iron, which had at least the from basement to roof and ravels out to reach three thousand desks. This mighty geyser of wires is fifty tons in weight and would, if or juniper. It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is telegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, as it is as invisible as the nerves and muscles of a human body. monstrous buildings, the Hudson Terminal, there is a cable that runs that were for sale, not one was exactly suitable for a telephone system. Skyscraper Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fall posts with a single gray cable hung from a heavy wire. Usually, a still costing the telephone companies several millions a year. The sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the large as the State of Rhode Island. has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not the precious rock of Manhattan. Here the work of the telephone engineer telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, city and the greater part of the United States. In a single one of these total number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone and remade. Vail and others had noticed that of all the varieties of wire has been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildings a wire. Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible. No straightened out into a single line, connect New York with Chicago. Yet of the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs upon During this evolution of the cable, even the wire itself was being But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into the