rn and
efficient type.

APPENDIX B

Through the courtesy of J.J. Carty, Esq., Chief Engineer of the
American Telephone and Telegraph Company, there follows the clean-cut
survey of the evolution of the telephone presented in his address
before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, May 17, 1916, when he
received the gold medal of the Institute.

More than any other, the telephone art is a product of American
institutions and reflects the genius of our people. The story of its
wonderful development is a story of our own country. It is a story
exclusively of American enterprise and American progress, for,
although the most powerful governments of Europe have devoted their
energies to the development and operation of telephone systems, great
contributions to the art have not been made by any of them. With very
few exceptions, the best that is used in telephony everywhere in the
world to-day has been contributed by workers here in America.

It is of peculiar interest to recall the fact that the first words
ever transmitted by the electric telephone were spoken in a building
at Boston, not far from where Benjamin Franklin first saw the light.
The telephone, as well as Franklin, was born at Boston, and, like
Franklin, its first journey into the world brought it to Philadelphia,
where it was exhibited by its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, at
the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, held here to commemorate the first
hundred years of our existence as a free and independent nation.

It was a fitting contribution to American progress, representing the
highest product of American inventive genius, and a worthy continuance
of the labors of Franklin, one of the founders of the science of
electricity as well as of the Republic.

Nothing could appeal more to the genius of Franklin than the
telephone, for not only have his countrymen built upon it an
electrical system of communication of transcendent magnitude and
usefulness, but they have made it into a powerful agency for the
advancement of civilization, eliminating barriers to speech, binding
together our people into one nation, and now reaching out to the
uttermost limits of the earth, with the grand aim of some day bringing
together the people of all the nations of the earth into one common
brotherhood.

On the tenth day of March, 1876, the telephone art was born, when,
over a wire extending between two rooms on the top floor of a building
in Boston, Alexander Graham