--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. Car