ystems. But it was inevitable; and in 1883, while the dispute about it
was in full blast, one of the young men quietly slipped it into use on
a new line between Boston and Providence. The effect was magical. "At
last," said the delighted manager, "we have a perfectly quiet line."

This young man, a small, slim youth who was twenty-two years old
and looked younger, was no other than J. J. Carty, now the first of
telephone engineers and almost the creator of his profession. Three
years earlier he had timidly asked for a job as operator in the Boston
exchange, at five dollars a week, and had shown such an aptitude for the
work that he was soon made one of the captains. At thirty years of age
he became a central figure in the development of the art of telephony.

What Carty has done is known by telephone men in all countries; but the
story of Carty himself--who he is, and why--is new. First of all, he is
Irish, pure Irish. His father had left Ireland as a boy in 1825. During
the Civil War his father made guns in the city of Cambridge, where young
John Joseph was born; and afterwards he made bells for church steeples.
He was instinctively a mechanic and proud of his calling. He could
tell the weight of a bell from the sound of it. Moses G. Farmer, the
electrical inventor, and Howe, the creator of the sewing-machine, were
his friends.

At five years of age, little John J. Carty was taken by his father to
the shop where the bells were made, and he was profoundly impressed by
the magical strength of a big magnet, that picked up heavy weights as
though they were feathers. At the high school his favorite study
was physics; and for a time he and another boy named Rolfe--now a
distinguished man of science--carried on electrical experiments of
their own in the cellar of the Rolfe house. Here they had a "Tom
Thumb" telegraph, a telephone which they had ventured to improve, and a
hopeless tangle of wires. Whenever they could afford to buy more wires
and batteries, they went to a near-by store which supplied electrical
apparatus to the professors and students of Harvard. This store, with
its workshop in the rear, seemed to the two boys a veritable wonderland;
and when Carty, a youth of eighteen, was compelled to leave school
because of his bad eyesight, he ran at once and secured the glorious job
of being boy-of-all-work in this store of wonders. So, when he became an
operator in the Boston telephone exchange, a year later, he had alr