286 Telephone Systems of the Continent of Europe 



exchanges have been re-established, and are worked at a profit. 

 At the end of this section will be found the accounts and balance- 

 sheet of the Christiania Telephone Company for 1893, which 

 cannot fail to be instructive to telephone managers who doubt 

 the vitality of a 4/. 8s. \\d. rate. 



The Norwegian Government held aloof from matters tele- 

 phonic until a proposal was made to connect Christiania with 

 Drammen, when, in 1881, it passed a law conferring on the State 

 the exclusive right to establish inter-town communication. This 

 effectually put a stop to the projected trunk lines, as the State had 

 no funds available wherewith to undertake the construction itself, 

 and, influenced by the usual bogle of competition with the Go- 

 vernment telegraphs, refused to license the companies to do the 

 work. It granted permission for each to operate within a radius 

 of eleven kilometers of its central office, and so secured reasonable 

 facilities for communication between a town and its suburbs and 

 immediate surroundings, but no two such radii were allowed to be 

 joined ; and if two eleven-kilometer radii each containing a telegraph 

 office chanced to overlap, the radius of each was to % be restricted 

 on the overlapping side in such a manner that two kilometers of 

 neutral ground were to intervene between them. However, by 

 1885 the local telephonic systems had multiplied and grown to 

 such an extent that the Government was no longer able to escape 

 from the necessity of either constructing or licensing, and in that 

 year it allowed the local telephone companies of Skien and 

 Porsgrund to join their systems by a trunk line conditionally on 

 their paying to the State an annual sum of 257., the estimated loss 

 of telegraphic revenue between the two places. Other trunks soon 

 followed, and it was not long before Christiania had joined ears 

 with Drammen, Gjovik, and twenty other towns in its vicinity. To 

 show how groundless was the fear for the telegraphic revenue, it 

 may be mentioned that in 1891 the amount payable to the Go- 

 vernment (on its own valuation be it remembered, as the companies 

 had to pay whatever the State demanded) was only 489^ for the 

 twenty-two trunk lines radiating from Christiania, some of which 

 extended to a distance of 120 kilometers. On only one of these 

 trunks, that to Drammen, the conversations had averaged 100 per 

 working day, which, at the tariffof 6^., meanta telephonic revenue 



