France 137 



the right to fix the charges, and reserved power to buy the 

 system at the value of the material employed on the termination 

 of the five-year concession. The exchange rate approved of was, 

 for Paris 2\L per annum, and for the provinces i6/. And so the 

 quest for the telephonic chestnuts was embarked upon, the 

 position at the start being that the company was willing to risk 

 its money and hoped to gain experience, while the State was 

 willing to risk nothing but still hoped for experience. Not 

 content with Paris, the company soon undertook the concessions 

 for Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons, Havre, Rouen, Lille, Nantes, 

 and several other leading towns, while it was not till 1883 that 

 the Department of Posts and Telegraphs timidly took its maiden 

 telephonic dip by opening exchanges at Tourcoing, Roubaix, and 

 Rheims. The plan adopted in these three towns was to make 

 the subscribers pay for their lines and instruments in consideration 

 of a reduced annual subscription. Paris was opened on Sep- 

 tember 30, 1879, an d ft i nere necessary and just to award to 

 our neighbours the credit of being the first to recognise the merits 

 of the metallic circuit (first pointed out by Hughes) for practical 

 exchange work by constructing Paris on that system. It is 

 probably true, since its provincial exchanges were made single- 

 wire, that the company was driven to metallic circuits in Paris by 

 the necessity it was under of going for the most part underground 

 by means of cables laid in the sewers (in which position, in those 

 days, before the ' anti-induction ' type of cable was known, the 

 overhearing between single wires would have been intolerable) ; but 

 nevertheless it remains a fact and a most important and credit- 

 able one it is that the first double-wire exchange was opened and 

 systematically developed in France. 



The Paris exchange soon acquired respectable proportions, 

 but those in the provinces hung fire, and even in Lyons and 

 Marseilles the increase was remarkably slow, doubtless due in a 

 large measure to the high rate of i6/. This rate, too, like the 

 Parisian one, was exclusive of the subscribers' transmitters and 

 receivers, which, strangely enough, it was decreed that they 

 should buy themselves. The intention of the State in authorising 

 this system is believed to have been a desire to obtain the most 

 perfect type of instrument possible by encouraging competition 



