the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen
thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk,
and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.

The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every
minute of the day and night. They are most at rest between three and
four o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten
calls a minute. Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkers
are awake and at the telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as
many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called
up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people
talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the
Revolutionary period. Even this is only the dawn of the day's business.
By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is
multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible
babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with
fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.

This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost pinnacle of talk. It
is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to
give in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and
women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine
leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.

As to the men who built it up: Charles F. Cutler died in 1907, but
most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now
in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the
operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and
sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president
of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes
to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel
business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the
New Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's office to learn the
profession of telephony.

This unparalleled telephone system of New York grew up without having
at any time the rivalry of competition. But in many other cities and
especially in the Middle West, there sprang up in 1895 a medley of
independent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, and
the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation
only to be snarled up in a tang