A telephone is not impressive.

It has no bulk.

It is not like the Singer Building or the Lusitania.

Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scattered and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all their complexity.

If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two thousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girl operators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners, then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness by which any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind.
For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-cent telephony even in the largest American cities.