rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days.
Who, for instance, until the arrival of the telephone girl, appreciated
the difference between "Who are you?" and "Who is this?" Or who else has
so impressed upon us the value of the rising inflection, as a gentler
habit of speech? This propaganda of politeness has gone so far that
to-day the man who is profane or abusive at the telephone, is cut
off from the use of it. He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-using
community.

And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone
development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation
of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone
apparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of this
globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious
back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her
children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its
totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and
40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in
half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way,
as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877.

The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire
of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without
celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. None
had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms,
electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western
Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the
Western Electric agreed to make its telephones. Three years later, when
the brief spasm of competition was ended, the Western Electric was
taken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the great
workshop of the telephone.

The main plant in Chicago is not especially remarkable from a
manufacturing point of view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards and
foundries and machine-shops. Here is the mad waltz of the spindles that
whirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar to
what may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric lamps are made,
five thousand of them in a day, in the same manner as elsewhere, except
that here they are so small and dainty as to seem designed for fairy
palaces.

The things that are done with wire in the Western Elec