Introduction 27 



in their infancy of the late Dr. Lardner's rash undertaking to 

 eat the first steamer, cargo and all, that succeeded in crossing the 

 Atlantic. The author believes that Mr. Morley will live to be 

 wiser. If not, then Stockholm with its 1 1,534 exchange telephones 

 and Berlin with its 25,000 and odd subscribers exist in vain. 



We are all addicted to accept our own individual experiences 

 as guides, and the fact probably is that Mr. Morley, not un- 

 naturally perhaps, but still with a limitation of vision rather amaz- 

 ing in a Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, is basing his belief on 

 home, nay London, experience. He believes that the presently 

 existing system is the best possible, and he deduces (and with in- 

 finite correctness) that no possible modification of it can bring the 

 telephone home to the masses. Pursuing the same line of argu- 

 ment, but substituting provisions for telephones, Mr. Morley 

 would be equally safe in declaring that the large mass of the 

 population of London or Glasgow could not, and never would be, 

 provided with daily bread. And- he would be right, assuming 

 that the distribution of food were carried out on a plan analogous 

 to that on which telephones are now supplied. If all provisions 

 brought into a large town were carried to one central site and thence 

 distributed direct to the house of each individual consumer, with- 

 out the intervention of markets, of shops, of costermongers, or any 

 of the usual intermediaries, the task involved would border on the 

 impossible. Division of labour is imperative in such a case. When 

 the labourers are many and work intelligently on an organised 

 plan, each in his own sphere, a very minute sphere perhaps too, 

 the bread and the milk and the meat will find its way almost, to 

 appearances, automatically to the remotest capillaries of the city's 

 anatomy. So it is with telephones. 



Take a town, however immense, and realise that at no very 

 remote period telephones will be numerous in many parts of it 

 and totally wanting in none, and the task of devising a plan for 

 an exchange to meet all possible requirements becomes an easy 

 one. Such a plan the author laid before the British Association 

 in 1891, l and such a plan has recently been adopted in the recon- 

 struction of the General Telephone Company's system at Stock - 



1 On the Telephoning of Great Cities, pamphlet by the present author. 

 Whittaker & Co. is. 



