Into the exchange pour all the throbbing messages of a great city.  Business propositions, political deals, scientific talks, and words of comfort to the troubled, cross and recross each other over the black switchboard.  The wonder is that each message reaches the ear it was meant for, and that all complications, no matter how knotty, are immediately unravelled.

In the cities the telephone is a necessity.  Business engagements are made and contracts consummated; brokers keep in touch with their associates on the floors of the exchanges; the patrolmen of the police force keep their chief informed of their movements and the state of the districts under their care; alarms of fire are telephoned to the fire-engine houses, and calls for ambulances bring the swift wagons on their errands of mercy; even wreckers telephone to their divers on the bottom of the bay, and undulating electrical messages travel to the tops of towering sky-scrapers.

[Illustration:  A FEW TELEPHONE TRUNK WIRES This shows a small section of a complicated telephone switchboard.]

In Europe it is possible to hear the latest opera by paying a small fee and putting a receiver to your ear, and so also may lazy people and invalids hear the latest news without getting out of bed.

The farmers of the West and in eastern States, too, have learned to use the barbed wire that fences off their fields as a means of communicating with one another and with distant parts of their own property.

Mr. Pupin has invented an apparatus by which he hopes to greatly extend the distance over which men may talk, and it has even been suggested that Uncle Sam and John Bull may in the future swap stories over a transatlantic telephone line.

The marvels accomplished suggest the possible marvels to come.  Automatic exchanges, whereby the central telephone operator is done away with, is one of the things that inventors are now at work on.

The one thing that prevents an unlimited use of the telephone is the expensive wires and the still more expensive work of putting them underground or stringing them overhead.  So the capping of the climax of the wonders of the telephone would be wireless telephony, each instrument being so attuned that the undulations would respond only to the corresponding instrument.  This is one of the problems that inventors are even now working upon, and it may be that wireless telephones will be in actual operation not many years after this appears in print.

A MACHINE THAT THINKS

A Typesetting Machine That Makes Mathematical Calculations

For many years it was thought impossible to find a short cut from author’s manuscript to printing press—­that is, to substitute a machine for the skilled hands that set the type from which a book or magazine is printed.  Inventors have worked at this problem, and a number have solved it in various ways.  To one who has seen the slow work of hand typesetting as the compositor builds up a long column of metal piece by piece, letter by letter, picking up each character from its allotted space in the case and placing it in its proper order and position, and then realises that much of the printed matter he sees is so produced, the wonder is how the enormous amount of it is ever accomplished.