Half an hour later there are twice as many.

Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the Revolutionary period.

Even this is only the dawn of the day's business.
By half-past eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it is multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has become an incredible babel of one hundred and eighty thousand conversations an hour, with fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every second.
This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost pinnacle of talk.

It is the utmost degree of service that the telephone has been required to give in any city.

And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and women of imagination, as the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean in four and a half days.
As to the men who built it up: Charles F.Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are still alive and busy.