"One blundering girl in a telephone exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the day of the panic in 1907," said George Kessler.

But the Government clears a net profit of three million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly; and until 1910, when a committee of betterment was appointed, it showed no concern at the discomfort of the public.
There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Paris received in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire.
"To build a new switchboard," said European manufacturers, "will require four or five months." A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene.
"We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty days," he said; "and agree to forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had never been known.

But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do.

Paris and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days' journey.

The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with ten thousand wires.