For once the world realised immediately the importance of a revolutionising invention, and telephone stations soon began to be established in the large cities.  Quicker than the telegraph, for there was no need of an operator to translate the message, and more accurate, for if spoken clearly the words could be as clearly understood, the telephone service spread rapidly.  Lines stretched farther and farther out from the central stations in the cities as improvements were invented, until the outlying wires of one town reached the outstretched lines of another, and then communication between town and town was established.  Then two distant cities talked to each other through an intermediate town, and long-distance telephony was established.  To-day special lines are built to carry long-distance messages from one great city to another, and these direct lines are used entirely except when storms break through or the rush of business makes the roundabout route through intermediate cities necessary.

As the nerves reaching from your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station.  And as it is necessary for your right hand to communicate with your left through your brain, so it is necessary for one telephone subscriber to connect through the central station with another subscriber.

The telephone has become a necessity of modern life, so that if through some means all the systems were destroyed business would be, for a time at least, paralysed.  It is the perfection of the devices for connecting one subscriber with another, and for despatching the vast number of messages and calls at “central,” that make modern telephony possible.

To handle the great number of spoken messages that are sent over the telephone wires of a great city it is necessary to divide the territory into districts, which vary in size according to the number of subscribers in them.  Where the telephones are thickly installed the districts are smaller than in sections that are more sparsely settled.

Then all the telephone wires of a certain district converge at a central station, and each pair of wires is connected with its own particular switch at the switchboard of the station.  That is simple enough; but when you come to consider that every subscriber must be so connected that he can be put into communication with every other subscriber, not only in his own section but also with every subscriber throughout the city, it will be seen that the switchboard at central is as marvellous as it is complicated.  Some of the busy stations in New York have to take care of 6,000 or more subscribers and 10,000 telephone instruments, while the city proper is criss-crossed with more than 60,000 lines bearing messages from more than 100,000 “’phones.”  Just think of the