624 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING 



the result will, in all probability, come out right no matter in what 

 direction the legislative cat may decide to jump. 



The European engineer is much more fortunate in this respect. 

 The telephone system belongs to the government. The charge is 

 fixed, and if it brings a profit to the state, well and good; if it does not, 

 the taxpayer makes it right. If some taxpayer kicks because he has 

 to pay for somebody else's telephoning, he is told that the existence 

 of the telephone system is of general benefit to the state. It develops 

 commerce and industry and this improves the moral and material 

 condition of all, both of those who telephone and of those who do not 

 telephone. This sounds like good philosophy, and shifts the burden 

 of the argument upon the taxpayer who, for self-evident reasons, 

 generally prefers to argue no further. The permissible charge is, 

 therefore, eliminated from the engineering problems of telephony, in 

 Europe, because it is a fixed quantity; in America, because it depends 

 upon an unknowable quantity, the legislator and the demagogue, the 

 last one often in form of some sensational newspaper which spares 

 no pains to persuade its readers that the telephone industry in this 

 country is the same kind of an institution as the beef trust, the coal 

 trust, the gas trust, etc., etc. 



If there is any technical advance of which this country ought to 

 be proud, it is indeed the art of telephony. In no other branch of 

 engineering or technology has this country maintained its lead as 

 easily as in this, so much so that there is no second, although there is 

 no other kind of engineering which is as highly scientific and tech- 

 nical as telephone engineering; and yet the demagogue paints it in 

 the colors of a beef trust, a coal trust, or some other social aberration 

 of this degenerate age. 



Two more essential quantities are left which the telephone engin- 

 eer weighs in determining the solution of the telephonic problems; 

 these are, first, the maximum amount of time; secondly, the 

 maximum amount of personal convenience which the subscriber will 

 sacrifice in order to communicate with another subscriber. The 

 better the service the more will the subscriber sacrifice for it, but at 

 best he is not willing to give up much, and so the final problem of the 

 telephone engineer reduces itself to this : 



To provide a first-class service, which will be at all hours and 

 under all conditions of w r eather at the subscriber's disposal, at a 

 moment's notice and anywhere and with anybody. This problem 

 has been solved in this country and in Germany, as far as local 

 service is concerned, and the great problem in telephone engineer- 

 ing to-day is to do the same thing for the interurban telephonic 

 communication. For example, a telephone subscriber in New York 

 should be able to call up any other telephone subscriber in New York, 

 Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Trenton, 



