telephone to talk, Stillman
risked two thousand dollars in a scheme to establish a crude dial system
of wire communication, which later grew into New York's first telephone
exchange. At the present time, the banker who works closest to his
telephone is probably George W. Perkins, of the J. P. Morgan group
of bankers. "He is the only man," says Morgan, "who can raise twenty
millions in twenty minutes." The Perkins plan of rapid transit telephony
is to prepare a list of names, from ten to thirty, and to flash from one
to another as fast as the operator can ring them up. Recently one of
the other members of the Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephone
equipment. "What will we gain by more wires?" asked the operator. "If
we were to put in a six-hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep it
busy."

The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the financial world was
done during the panic of 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturday
evening, the New York bankers met in an almost desperate conference.
They decided, as an emergency measure of self-protection, not to ship
cash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned this decision to
the bankers of Chicago and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred by
telephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the bankers of neighboring
States. And so the news went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Monday
morning all bankers and chief depositors were aware of the situation,
and prepared for the team-play that prevented any general disaster.

As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they transact
practically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchange
stand six hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus of a
private wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year's talking
to send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last year
sent twice as many. Of all brokers, the one who finally accomplished
most by telephony was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In the mansion that
he built at Arden, there were a hundred telephones, sixty of them linked
to the long-distance lines. What the brush is to the artist, what the
chisel is to the sculptor, the telephone was to Harriman. He built his
fortune with it. It was in his library, his bathroom, his private car,
his camp in the Oregon wilder-ness. No transaction was too large or too
involved to be settled over its wires. He saved the credit of the
Erie by telephone--lent it five million dollars