It lasts twelve years only, so that the one item of poles is still costing the telephone companies several millions a year.

The total number of poles now in the United States, used by telephone and telegraph companies, once covered an area, before they were cut down, as large as the State of Rhode Island.
But the highest triumph of wire-laying came when New York swept into the Skyscraper Age, and when hundreds of tall buildings, as high as the fall of the waters of Niagara, grew up like a range of magical cliffs upon the precious rock of Manhattan.

Here the work of the telephone engineer has been so well done that although every room in these cliff-buildings has its telephone, there is not a pole in sight, not a cross-arm, not a wire.

Nothing but the tip-ends of an immense system are visible.

No sooner is a new skyscraper walled and roofed, than the telephones are in place, at once putting the tenants in touch with the rest of the city and the greater part of the United States.