When you want a thing, you must pay for it. The Americans want the telephone, and they pay for it. In London people grumble very much at having to pay £20 to the Telephone Company for the use of a telephone. I question very much whether £20 a year is quite enough; at any rate, it is not enough if the American charge is taken as a standard. The charge in New York is of two classes—one for a system called the law system, which is applied almost exclusively for the use of lawyers, which is £44 a year; the other being the charge made to the ordinary public, and which will compare with the service rendered in London, which is charged for at £35 a year, against £20 a year in London. The charge in Chicago is £26 a year; in Boston, Philadelphia, and a great many other places it is £25 a year. At Buffalo a mode of charging by results is adopted; everybody pays for each oral message he sends—every time he uses the telephone he pays either four, five, or six cents, according to the number for which he guarantees. Supposing any one of us wanted a telephone at Buffalo, the company will supply it under a guarantee to pay for a minimum of 500 messages per annum. If 1,000 messages are sent, the charge is less pro rata, being six cents, if I remember rightly, for each message under 500, and five cents up to 1,000 messages, four cents per message over 1,000 messages; and so everybody pays for what work he does. It is payment by results. The people like the arrangement, the company like it because they make it pay, and the system works well. But I am bound to say that, up to the present moment, Buffalo is the only city in the United States where that method has been adopted.
The instruments used in the States are no better—in fact, in many cases they are worse—than the instruments we use on this side of the Atlantic. I have heard telephones in this country speak infinitely better than anything that I have heard on the other side of the Atlantic. But they transact their business in America infinitely better than we do; and there is one great reason for this, which is, that in America the public itself falls into the mode of telephone working with the energy of the telegraph operator. They assist the telephone people in every way they can; they take disturbances with a humility that would be simply startling to English subscribers; and they help the workers of the system in every way they can. The result is, that all goes off with great smoothness and comfort. But the switch apparatus used in the American central offices is infinitely superior to anything that I have ever seen over here, excepting at Liverpool.
A new system has just been brought out, called the "multiple" system, which has been very lately introduced. I saw it at many places, especially at Indianapolis, at Boston, and at New York, where three exchanges were worked by it with a rapidity that perfectly startled me. I took the times of a great many transactions, and found that, from the moment a subscriber called to the moment he was put through, only five seconds elapsed; and I am told at Milwaukee, where unfortunately I could not go, but where there is a friend of ours in charge, Mr. Charles Haskins, who is one of our members, and he says he has brought down the rate of working to such a pitch that they are able to arrange that subscribers shall be put through in four seconds.
You will be surprised to learn that there are 986 exchanges at work in the United States. There are 97,423 circuits; there are nearly 90,000 miles of wire used for telephonic purposes; and the number of instruments that have been manufactured amounts to 517,749. Just compare those figures with our little experience on this side of the Atlantic. I have a return showing the number of subscribers in and about New York, comprising the New Jersey division, the Long Island division, Staten Island, Westchester, and New York City, and the total amounts to 10,600 subscribers who are put into communication with each other in the neighborhood of New York alone; and here in England we can only muster 11,000. There are just as many subscribers probably at this moment in New York and its neighborhood as we have in the whole of the United Kingdom.
I am sorry to delay you so long. I have very few more points to bring before you. I spoke only last week so much about the electric light that I have very little to say on that point. High-tension currents are used for electric lighting in America, and all wires are carried overhead along the streets. A more hideous contrivance was probably never invented since the world was created than the system of carrying wires overhead through the magnificent streets and cities in America. They spend thousands upon thousands of pounds in beautifying their cities with very fine buildings, and then they disfigure them all by carrying down the pavements the most villainous-looking telegraph posts that ever were constructed. The practice is carried to such an extent, that down Broadway in New York there are no less than six distinct lines of poles; and through the city of New York there are no less than thirty-two separate and distinct companies carrying all their wires through the streets of the city. How the authorities have stood it so long I cannot make out. They object to underground wires—why, one cannot tell. It is something like taking a horse to the pond—you cannot make him drink. So it is with these telephone companies: the public of America and the Town Councils have been trying to force the telephone and telegraph companies to put their wires underground, but they are the horses that are led to the pool, and they will not drink. It is said that the Town Council of Philadelphia have issued most stringent orders that on the first of January next, men with axes and tools are to start out and cut down every pole in the city. It is all very well to threaten; but my impression is that any member of Town Council or any individual of Philadelphia who attempts to do such a thing will be lynched by the first telephone subscriber he meets.
This practice of running overhead wires has great disadvantages when the wires are used for electric-lighting purposes as well as for ordinary telephone or telegraph purposes. No doubt the high-tension system can be carried out overhead with economy; but where overhead wires carrying these heavy currents exist in the neighborhood of telephone circuits, there is every possible liability to accident; and in my short trip I came across seven distinct cases of offices being destroyed by fire, of test boxes being utterly ruined, of a whole house being gutted, and of various accidents, all clearly traceable to contacts arising from the falling of overhead wires, charged with high-tension current, upon telegraph and telephone wires below. The danger is so great and damage so serious that, at Philadelphia, Mr. Plush, the electrician to the Telephone Company, has devised this exceedingly pretty cut-out. It is a little electro-magnetic cut-out that breaks the telephone circuit whenever a current passes into the circuit equal to or more than an ampere. The arrangement works with great ease. It is applied to every telephone circuit simply, to protect the telephone system from electric light wires, that ought never to be allowed anywhere near a telephone circuit.
Fire-alarms are used in America; but in England, also, the fire systems of Edward Bright, Spagnoletti, and Higgins have been introduced, and in that respect we are in very near the same position as our friends on the other side of the Atlantic. Some members present may remember that, when I described my last visit to America, I mentioned how in Chicago the fire-alarm was worked by an electric method, and I told you a story then that you did not believe, and which I have told over and over again, but nobody has yet believed me, and I began to think that I must have made a mistake somewhere or other. So I meant, when at Chicago this time, to see whether I had been deceived myself. There was very little room for improvement, because, as I told you before, they had very near reached perfection. This is what they did: At the corner of the street where a fire-alarm box is fixed, a handle is pulled down, and the moment that handle is released a current goes to the fire-station; it sounds a gong to call the attention of the men, it unhitches the harness of the horses, the horses run to their allotted positions at the engine, it whips the clothes off every man who is in bed, it opens a trap at the bottom of the bed and the men slide down into their positions on the engine. The whole of that operation takes only six seconds. The perfection to which fire-alarm business has been brought in the States is one of the most interesting applications of electricity there.
Of course during this visit I waited on Mr. Edison. Many of you know that a difference took place between Mr. Edison and myself, and I must confess that I felt a little anxiety as to how I should be received on the other side. It is impossible for any man to receive another with greater kindness and attention than Mr. Edison received me. He took me all over his place and showed me everything, and past differences were not referred to. Mr. Edison is doing an enormous amount of work in steadily plodding away at the electric light business. He has solved the question as far as New York is concerned and as far as central station lighting is concerned; and all we want on this side is to instill more confidence into our capitalists, to try and induce them to unbutton their pockets and give us money to carry out central lighting here.
I met another very distinguished electrician—a man who has hid his light under a bushel—a man whose quiet modesty has kept him very much in the background, but who really has done as much work as any body on that side of the Atlantic, and few have done more on this—and that is Mr. Edward Weston. He is an Englishman who has established himself in New York. He has been working steadily for years at his laboratory, and works and produces plant with all the skill and exactitude that the electrician or mechanic could desire.
Another large factory I went over was that of the Western Electric Company of Chicago, which is the largest manufactory in the States. That company has three large factories. While I was there, the manager, just as a matter of course, handed me over a message which contained an order for 330 arc lamps and for twenty-four dynamo machines. He was very proud of such an order, but he tried to make me believe that it was an every-day occurrence.