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XVII. NORWAY 



HISTORY AND PRESENT POSITION 



NORWAY, with a capital about the size of Dundee, half a dozen 

 towns which may rank with Colchester, a multiplicity of villages, 

 and a total population of 2,000,917, could not have presented 

 itself to the imagination of the original pioneers of Bell's wonder- 

 ful speaking trumpet precisely as a fountain of telephonic milk 

 and honey. But it is rarely given to pioneers to realise the 

 ultimate importance of their work ; and when the International 

 Bell Telephone Company went to Christiania in 1880 intent on 

 inducing the hardy Norseman to have his ears lengthened as it 

 alone (as was then thought) could lengthen them, the task must 

 have appeared (in view of the inertia exhibited in many far 

 wealthier and more populous countries) an up-hill one indeed. 

 It looked like sowing in ice with a prospect of reaping in snow- 

 balls ; but the event proved otherwise, for the Norse spirit of 

 enterprise, which erstwhile discovered America, peopled Green- 

 land and Iceland, and conquered Normandy and England, proved 

 quite equal to the assimilation of the telephonic exchange idea. 

 America may have discovered the telephone indeed, but had not 

 Norway discovered America ? So it came about that, within a 

 year of the International Bell Company's start in Christiania, a 

 local company was formed to oppose it, and oppose it it did in a 

 hammer-and-anvil fashion that was all Norwegian. Indeed, so 

 energetic was the battle so frequent the encounters of legions of 

 wiremen on the roofs so exasperating the 'cross-talk' (both on 

 the roofs and on the wires) to which it gave rise, that the 

 Municipality intervened and threatened to cancel the concessions 

 it had granted to the combatants unless peace could be success- 



