. As if these troubles were not enough, there were
the storms of winter, which might wipe out a year's revenue in a single
day. The sleet storms were the worst. Wires were weighted down with ice,
often three pounds of ice per foot of wire. And so, what with sleet, and
corrosion, and the cost of roof-repairing, and the lack of room for
more wires, the telephone men were between the devil and the deep
sea--between the urgent necessity of burying their wires, and the
inexorable fact that they did not know how to do it.

Fortunately, by the time that this problem arrived, the telephone
business was fairly well established. It had outgrown its early days
of ridicule and incredulity. It was paying wages and salaries and
even dividends. Evidently it had arrived on the scene in the nick of
time--after the telegraph and before the trolleys and electric lights.
Had it been born ten years later, it might not have been able to
survive. So delicate a thing as a baby telephone could scarcely have
protected itself against the powerful currents of electricity that came
into general use in 1886, if it had not first found out a way of hiding
safely underground.

The first declaration in favor of an underground system was made by the
Boston company in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire system
underground," said the sorely perplexed manager, "whenever a practicable
method is found of accomplishing: it." All manner of theories were
afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructive
imagination in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual experiments
at Attleborough, Massachusetts, to find out exactly what could, and what
could not, be done with wires that were buried in the earth.

A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway track. The work was done
handily and cheaply by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive to
a plough. Five ploughs were jerked apart before the work was finished.
Then, into this trench were laid wires with every known sort of
covering. Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber or
gutta-percha, after the fashion of a submarine cable. When all were in
place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, which
threw the ploughed soil back into the trench and covered the wires a
foot deep. It was the most professional cable-laying that any one at
that time could do, and it succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enough
to encourage the telephone engineers to go a