This was the famous "Room Nine." By such and many other allurements a larger idea of telephone service was given to the public mind; until in 1909 at least eighteen thousand New York-Chicago conversations were held, and the revenue from strictly long-distance messages was twenty-two thousand dollars a day.
By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company had grown to be a ten-million-dollar enterprise.

It began at Salt Lake City with a hundred telephones, in 1880.

Then it reached out to master an area of four hundred and thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone Land of undeveloped resources.

Its linemen groped through dense forests where their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars.
They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the lonely places were brought together and made sociable.

They drove off the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for ear-rings and bracelets; and the bears, which mistook the humming of the wires for the buzzing of bees, and persisted in gnawing the poles down.