ment 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.

At the beginning of 1910, there were in service by the Bell
organization about 3,633,900 telephones. These with the 3,911,400
independent telephones, make a total of 7,545,300, or about
one-twelfth as many telephones as there are inhabitants of the United
States. The influence of this development upon the lives of the people
has been profound. Whether the influence has been wholly for good may
not be so conclusively apparent. Lord Bacon has declared that,
excepting only the alphabet and the art of printing, those inventions
abridging distance are of the greatest service to mankind. If this be
true, it may be said that the invention of telephony deserves high
place among the civilizing i