Whoever pushes into Central Africa will still hear the beat of the wooden drum, which is the clattering sign-language of the natives. One strand of copper wire there is, through the Congo region, placed there by order of the late King of Belgium. To string it was probably the most adventurous piece of work in the history of telephone linemen. There was one seven hundred and fifty mile stretch of the central jungle.
There were white ants that ate the wooden poles, and wild elephants that pulled up the iron poles.
There were monkeys that played tag on the lines, and savages that stole the wire for arrow-heads. But the line was carried through, and to-day is alive with conversations concerning rubber and ivory.
So, we may almost say of the telephone that "there is no speech nor language where its voice is not heard." There are even a thousand miles of its wire in Abyssinia and one hundred and fifty miles in the Fiji Islands. Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in all countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiring twenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversations a year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of the in-fant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old.
No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. The United States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while no other country has one-half as many. Canada stands second, with almost four per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany has as many telephones as the State of New York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio.
Chicago has more than London; and Boston twice as many as Paris. In the whole of Europe, with her twenty nations, there are one-third as many telephones as in the United States.
In proportion to her population, Europe has only one-thirteenth as many.
The United States writes half as many letters as Europe, sends one-third as many telegrams, and talks twice as much at the telephone. The average European family sends three telegrams a year, and three letters and one telephone message a week; while the average American family sends five telegrams a year, and seven letters and eleven telephone messages a week. This one na-tion, which owns six per cent of the earth and is five per cent of the human race, has SEVENTYper cent of the telephones. And fifty per cent, or one-half, of the telephony of the world, is now comprised in the Bell System of this country.
There are only six nations in Europe that make a fair showing--the Germans, British, Swedish, Danes, Norwegians, and Swiss. The others have less than one telephone per hundred. Little Denmark has more than Austria. Little Finland has better service than France. The Belgian telephones have cost the most--two hundred and seventy-three dollars apiece; and the Finnish telephones the least--eighty-one dollars. But a telephone in Belgium earns three times as much as one in Norway. In general, the lesson in Europe is this, that the telephone is what a nation makes it. Its usefulness depends upon the sense and enterprise with which it is handled. It may be either an invaluable asset or a nuisance.
