Therein she embodies the spirit of the times. Our ancestors were content to jog along for days in a stuffy stage-coach; we complain that the train which accomplishes the same distance in a few hours is too slow. We act more quickly; we think more quickly. We have to if we want to keep within earshot of the band.
This speeding up makes itself quite obviously most apparent in our business processes. No body of business men need be told how much keener competition is becoming daily, how much narrower the margin by which success must be won. Familiar phrases, these. But behind them lies a wealth of tragedy. How many have fallen by the way? It is estimated that something less than ten per cent. of those who engage in business on their own account succeed. How terrible the percentage of those who fail! The race has become too swift for them. Driven by the lash of competition, business must perforce move faster and faster. Time is becoming ever more precious. Negotiations must be rapidly conducted, decisions arrived at quickly, transactions closed on the moment. What wonder that all this makes for a vastly increased use of the quickest method of communication?
That is but one of the conditions which accounts for the growing use of the telegraph. Another is to be found in the recognition of the convenience of the night letter and day letter. This has brought about a considerable increase in the volume of family and social correspondence by telegraph, which will grow to very much greater proportions as experience demonstrates its value. In business life the night letter and day letter have likewise established a distinct place for themselves. Here also the present development of this traffic can be regarded as only rudimentary in comparison with the possibilities of its future development, indications of which are already apparent. It has been discovered that the telegram, on account of its peculiar attention-compelling quality, is an effective medium not only for the individual appeal, but for placing business propositions before a number of people at once, the night letters and day letters being particularly adapted to this purpose by reason of the greater scope of expression which they offer.
Again, business men are developing the habit of using the telegram in keeping in touch with their field forces and their salesmen and encouraging their activities, in cultivating closer contact with their customers, in placing their orders, in replenishing their stocks, and in any number of other ways calculated to further the profitable conduct of their enterprises.
All this means that the telegraph is increasingly being utilized as a means of correspondence of every conceivable sort. It means also that with the growing appreciation of its adaptability to the every-day needs of social and business communication a very much larger public demand upon it must be anticipated, and it is to meet this demand with prompt and satisfactory service that the telegraph company has been bending its efforts to the perfection of a highly developed organization and of operating appliances of the most modern and efficient type.
APPENDIX B
Through the courtesy of J.J. Carty, Esq., Chief Engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, there follows the clean-cut survey of the evolution of the telephone presented in his address before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, May 17, 1916, when he received the gold medal of the Institute.
More than any other, the telephone art is a product of American institutions and reflects the genius of our people. The story of its wonderful development is a story of our own country. It is a story exclusively of American enterprise and American progress, for, although the most powerful governments of Europe have devoted their energies to the development and operation of telephone systems, great contributions to the art have not been made by any of them. With very few exceptions, the best that is used in telephony everywhere in the world to-day has been contributed by workers here in America.
It is of peculiar interest to recall the fact that the first words ever transmitted by the electric telephone were spoken in a building at Boston, not far from where Benjamin Franklin first saw the light. The telephone, as well as Franklin, was born at Boston, and, like Franklin, its first journey into the world brought it to Philadelphia, where it was exhibited by its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, held here to commemorate the first hundred years of our existence as a free and independent nation.
It was a fitting contribution to American progress, representing the highest product of American inventive genius, and a worthy continuance of the labors of Franklin, one of the founders of the science of electricity as well as of the Republic.