as a young Hungarian
immigrant not many years earlier. From this professor, Michael J.
Pupin, came the idea of "loading" a telephone line, in such a way as to
reinforce the electric current. It enabled a thin wire to carry as far
as a thick one, and thus saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile.
As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold fell upon Pupin, and
made him in an instant as rich as one of the grand-dukes of his native
land.

It is now a most highly skilled occupation, supporting fully fifteen
thousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect them
against innumerable dangers. This is the profession of the wire chiefs
and their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threads
under streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and the
slopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out among
farms and villages. To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course
of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book
of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical
clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble
with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as
much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apiece
to every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuated
with clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments.

The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps
a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into
a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone
from one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its
fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has
been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter
what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs.
It cannot be picked up and put into a dry-dock. It must be repaired
or improved by a sort of vivisection while it is working. It is an
interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half
machine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to
its whole vast body.

And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven
years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone
systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic.
The constant flood of new inventions has n