Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be record-breaker when the era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing minutes of the business day. work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined. eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the conversations of this one American city. put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices. More requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredible as it may seem to But as might have been expected, it was New York City that was the flood of big business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New unapproachable. Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York,