tric factories are
too many for any mere outsider to remember. Some wire is wrapped with
paper tape at a speed of nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashioned
into fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which in
reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted
into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, as
each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the fact
that a cable's inevitable enemy is moisture, each cable is wound on an
immense spool and rolled into an oven until it is as dry as a cinder.
Then it is put into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both ends,
and trundled into a waiting freight car.

No other company uses so much wire and hard rubber, or so many tons of
brass rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is more
expensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the making
of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains.
The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, from
Norway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America;
and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least seven
countries must cooperate to make a telephone message possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the Western Electric factories
is the multitude of its inspectors. No other sort of manufacturing, not
even a Government navy-yard, has so many. Nothing is too small to escape
these sleuths of inspection. They test every tiny disc of mica, and
throw away nine out of ten. They test every telephone by actual talk,
set up every switchboard, and try out every cable. A single transmitter,
by the time it is completed, has had to pass three hundred examinations;
and a single coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels before it
graduates into the outer world. Seven hundred inspectors are on guard in
the two main plants at Chicago and New York. This is a ruinously large
number, from a profit-making point of view; but the inexorable fact is
that in a telephone system nothing is insignificant. It is built on such
altruistic lines that an injury to any one part is the concern of all.

As usual, when we probe into the history of a business that has grown
great and overspread the earth, we find a Man; and the Western Electric
is no exception to this rule. Its Man, still fairly hale and busy after
forty years of leadership, is Enos M. Barton. His career is