In a single year of sweating and breathless activity, 65,000 new telephones were put on desks or hung on walls--an average of one new user for every two minutes of the business day.
Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of telephones were hauled in drays from the factory and put in place in New York's homes and offices.

More and more were demanded, until to-day there are more telephones in New York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined.

As a user of telephones New York has risen to be unapproachable.

Mass together all the telephones of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol, and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as many as are carrying the conversations of this one American city.
In 1879 the New York telephone directory was a small card, showing two hundred and fifty-two names; but now it has grown to be an eight-hundred-page quarterly, with a circulation of half a million, and requiring twenty drays, forty horses, and four hundred men to do the work of distribution.

There was one shabby little exchange thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-million-dollar system.