[The History of the Telephone by Herbert N. Casson]@TWC D-Link bookThe History of the Telephone CHAPTER VI 11/28
He saved the credit of the Erie by telephone--lent it five million dollars as he lay at home on a sickbed.
"He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine writer. "Nonsense," replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me." The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from being unwieldy and aristocratic.
The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company may now stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president of the Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York skyscraper.
The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to be indispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered and geographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance, that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product to the Middle West.
To the companies that sell perishable commodities, an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has often saved a carload or a cargo.
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