was received with what might be called—­putting it mildly—­vociferous discourtesy.  Nevertheless, I remember very well the impression which that old lady’s request made upon me; and I really did believe that, some day or other, in some way, we would be able to talk to Chicago.

By 1912 it was possible to talk from New York to Denver, a distance of 2,100 miles.  No European engineers had achieved any such results, and this feat brought to Carty and his wonderful staff the admiration of foreign experts.  But for the American engineers this was only a starting-point.

The next step was to link New York and California.  This was more than a matter of setting poles and stringing wires, stupendous though this task was.  The line crosses thirteen States, and is carried on 130,000 poles.  Three thousand tons of wire are used in the line.  The Panama Canal took nine years to complete, and cost over three hundred million dollars; but within that time the telephone company spent twice that amount in engineering construction work alone, extending the scope of the telephone.

The technical problems were even more difficult.  Carty and his engineers had to find a way to send something three thousand miles with the breath as its motive power.  It was a problem of the conservation of the tiny electric current which carried the speech.  The power could not be augmented or speech would not result at the destination.

Added to the efforts of these able engineers was the work of Prof.  Michael I. Pupin, of Columbia University, whose brilliant invention of the loading coil some ten years before had startled the scientific world and had increased the range of telephonic transmission through underground cables and through overhead wires far beyond what had formerly been possible.  Professor Pupin applied his masterful knowledge of physics and his profound mathematical attainments so successfully to the practical problems of the transmission of telephone speech that he has been called “the telephone scientist.”  It is impossible to talk over long-distance lines anywhere in America without speaking through Pupin coils, which are distributed throughout the hundreds of thousands of miles of wire covering the North American continent.  In the transcontinental telephone line Pupin coils play a most important part, and they are distributed at eight-mile intervals throughout its entire length from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  In speaking at a dinner of eminent scientists, Mr. Carty once said that on account of his distinguished scientific attainments and wonderful telephonic inventions, Professor Pupin would rank in history alongside of Bell himself.