To give New York the seven million electric lights that have abolished night in that city requires twelve private exchanges and five hundred and twelve telephones.

All the power that creates this artificial daylight is generated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storage centres.

Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits at a telephone exchange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an ocean liner.
The first steamship line to take notice of the telephone was the Clyde, which had a wire from dock to office in 1877; and the first railway was the Pennsylvania, which two years later was persuaded by Professor Bell himself to give it a trial in Altoona.

Since then, this railroad has become the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony.

It has one hundred and seventy-five exchanges, four hundred operators, thirteen thousand telephones, and twenty thousand miles of wire--a more ample system than the city of New York had in 1896.
To-day the telephone goes to sea in the passenger steamer and the warship.