Another curious and interesting example of this reversion to type exists in the simple telephone receiver.  An early improvement in telephone receivers after Professor Bell’s original invention was to provide the necessary magnetism of the receiver core by making it of steel and permanently magnetizing it, whereas Professor Bell’s instrument provided its magnetism by means of direct current flowing in the line.  In later days the telephone receiver has returned almost to the original form in which Professor Bell produced it and this change has simplified other elements of telephone-exchange apparatus in a very interesting and gratifying way.

By reason of improvements in methods of line construction and apparatus arrangement, the radius of communication steadily has increased.  Commercial speech now is possible between points several thousand miles apart, and there is no theoretical reason why communication might not be established between any two points on the earth’s surface.  The practical reasons of demand and cost may prevent so great an accomplishment as talking half around the earth.  So far as science is concerned there would seem to be no reason why this might not be done today, by the careful application of what already is known.

In the United States, telephone service from its beginning has been supplied to users by private enterprise.  In other countries, it is supplied by means of governmentally-owned equipment.  In general, it may be said that the adequacy and the amount, as well as the quality of telephone service, is best in countries where the service is provided by private enterprise.

Telephone systems in the United States were under the control of the Bell Telephone Company from the invention of the device in 1876 until 1893.  The fundamental telephone patent expired in 1893.  This opened the telephone art to the general public, because it no longer was necessary to secure telephones solely from the patent-holding company nor to pay royalty for the right to use them, if secured at all.  Manufacturers of electrical apparatus generally then began to make and sell telephones and telephone apparatus, and operating companies, also independent of the Bell organization, began to install and use telephones.  At the end of seventeen years of patent monopoly in the United States, there were in operation a little over 250,000 telephones.  In the seventeen years since the expiration of the fundamental patent, independent telephone companies throughout the United States have installed and now have in daily successful use over 3,911,400 telephones.  In other words, since its first beginnings, independent telephony has brought into continuous daily use nearly sixteen times as many telephones as were brought into use in the equal time of the complete monopoly of the Bell organization.