Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy.

Some cables are so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place.

As many as twelve hundred wires are often bunched into one sheath, and each cable lies loosely in a little duct of its own.
It is reached by manholes where it runs under the streets and in little switching-boxes placed at intervals it is frayed out into separate pairs of wires that blossom at length into telephones.
Out in the open country there are still the open wires, which in point of talking are the best.

In the suburbs of cities there are neat green posts with a single gray cable hung from a heavy wire.

Usually, a telephone pole is made from a sixty-year-old tree, a cedar, chestnut, or juniper.