America Leads in Telephone Growth.

It is a far cry from Bell’s first telephone to Universal Service.

Bell’s invention had demonstrated the practicability of speech transmission, but there were many obstacles to overcome and many problems to be solved before the telephone could be of commercial value and take its place among the great public utilities.

Professor Bell had demonstrated that two people could talk to each other from connected telephones for a considerable distance. In order to be of commercial value, it was necessary to establish an intercommunicating system in which each telephone could be connected with every other telephone in the system. This has been accomplished through the invention of the multiple switchboard and a great number of inventions and improvements in all the apparatus used in the transmission of speech.

But it was an unexplored field into which the telephone pioneers so courageously plunged. There were no beaten paths, and the way was beset with unknown perils; there was no experience to guide. A vast amount of educational work had to be done before a skeptical public would accept the telephone at its true value, yet courage and persistency triumphed. Discoveries and inventions followed scarcely less important than Professor Bell’s original discovery.

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A Typical American Central Office Building, Showing the Efficient Arrangement of the Various Departments

That the United States has from the beginning far outstripped the rest of the civilized world in the growth of the telephone is shown by comparison.

In all Great Britain there are but 700,000 telephones as against 10,000,000 in the United States. France has slightly more than half as many as Greater New York. In Germany the telephone development is only one-fifth of that of the United States. Italy has not as many telephones as San Francisco, and all Russia, fewer than Chicago. Sweden, Norway and Denmark show a higher telephone development than the other European countries, but even in Denmark, where the telephone development is highest, we find but 3.9 telephones per hundred population—less than half the development in the United States.

The total number of telephones in all other European countries is considerably less than may be found in two American cities, Chicago and Philadelphia; all of South America has less than Boston, and the remainder of the world, including Asia, Africa and Oceanica, has less than the City of New York.


Pole Line Running Through Principal Street in an Italian Town	A Typical Example of American Pole Line Construction