UNDERGROUND WIRES. 555 



allowed to erect or maintain on telegraph poles, piers, abutments, wires or other 

 ^xtures upon, along or across any of the public roads, streets, and alleys of any 

 city having a population of over 100,000 souls. The companies will be given 

 one year after the passage of the act to take down their poles and wires, the pen- 

 alty for the maintenance of such after that time to be the payment of $1,000 a 

 day into the State Treasury until the poles and wires have been taken down. 

 Mr. Bond says that wires are now being put under ground in Chicago, as they 

 have been in New York and Philadelphia, and that his bill will be similar to the 

 one passed by the New York Legislature, and decided as valid by the Supreme 

 Court of that State. 



We find in the G/t'^^-Z'^w^^r^/the following article, which doubtless expresses 

 the popular feeling upon this subject: 



New York has a law ordering that all telegraph, telephone and electric light 

 wires in New York City and Brooklyn shall be put under ground by the ist of 

 next November, or else be torn down by the city authorities. The passage of this 

 law last spring filled the managers of the electric companies with consternation, and 

 they have from time to time been loud in their protestations of inability to conform 

 with the order, though* professing themselves to be only too anxious to have some 

 feasible method of doing so. The honesty of these declarations receives a severe 

 shock now from two eminent experts in electricity. Prof. Bell, who invented 

 the telephone, not only believes that every city ought to insist upon the burial 

 of telephone wires, but says that the service would thus be greatly inproved; 

 while Sir William Thomson, in an elaborate report upon the telegraph service, 

 affirms as the result of his experiments that " there is no doubt whatever that 

 any amount of traffic could be worked through a system of underground wires at 

 the usual rates of hand sending." Nor, he adds, " is it any more difficult to work 

 lines composed partly of underground and partly suspended wires. The cost of 

 maintaining underground wires would compare favorably with that of aerial lines, 

 though the first expense would of course be vastly greater. But, on the other 

 hand, " underground wires will be almost free from interruptions due to storms 

 or to extremes of heat and cold, whereas aerial lines, however well constructed, 

 must always be subject to injuiy ''•orr wind, snow and extreme cold." 



These opinions are worth emphasizing because the subject is being mooted 

 in almost every city of importance in the land, and is everywhere met by the 

 electric companies with the same profession of helplessness. Of the desirability 

 of the change there can hardly be two opinions. The forests of wires which fill 

 many of the streets of every city are not only an offense to the sight, but a source 

 of annoyance and frequently of danger. They present one of the confessed hind- 

 rances to the best efficiency of the fire department service, and in the case of 

 electric light the wires are a constant menace to property and life. Cases of death 

 and of the burning of buildings from contact with the electric light wires are not 

 unknown and electricians have testified that this danger is by no means small. 

 A storm which throws the wire to the ground might easily make it an instrument 

 of death; a stream of water from a hose-pipe striking an abraded insulation 



