Incredible as it may seem to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single building in New York, the Hudson Terminal, there are more telephones than in Odessa or Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of Greece and Bulgaria combined.
Merely to operate this system requires an army of more than five thousand girls.

Merely to keep their records requires two hundred and thirty-five million sheets of paper a year.

Merely to do the writing of these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils.
And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels the Bell Company to buy yearly six thousand pounds of tea, seventeen thousand pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk, and one hundred and forty barrels of sugar.
The myriad wires of this New York system are tingling with talk every minute of the day and night.

They are most at rest between three and four o'clock in the morning, although even then there are usually ten calls a minute.

Between five and six o'clock, two thousand New Yorkers are awake and at the telephone.