Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/496

492 The terms for leasing two telephones for social purposes connecting a dwelling-house with any other building will be $20 a year, for business purposes

$40 a year, payable semiannually in advance, with the cost of expressage from Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco. The instruments will be kept in good working order by the lessors, free of expense, except from injuries resulting from great carelessness.

Several telephones can be placed on the same line at an additional rental of $10 for each instrument; but the use of more than two on the same line where privacy is required is not advised. Any person within ordinary hearing distance can hear the voice calling through the telephone. If a louder call is required one can be furnished for $5.

Telegraph lines will be constructed by the proprietors if desired. The price will vary from $100 to $150 a mile; any good mechanic can construct a line; No. 9 wire costs 8£ cents a pound, 320 pounds to the mile; 34 insulators at 25 cents each; the price of poles and setting varies in every locality; stringing wire $5 per mile; sundries $10 per mile.

Parties leasing the telephone incur no expense beyond the annual rental and the repair of the line wire. On the following pages are extracts from the press and other sources relating to the telephone.

The work of supplying to customers the hand telephones, referred to in the foregoing circular, was entrusted to Graham Bell's assistant, Mr. Thomas A. Watson, who had entered the employ of the proprietors of the telephone about April 1, 1876. He occupied a small amount of desk room and much bench room in the small factory of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston. Here Mr. Watson made up and assembled the parts, as the telephones were called for. Naturally, improvements were the order of the day, and soon a smaller and more attractive mahogany handle magneto-telephone was adopted.

How rapidly 'Bell's toy* began to win its way into public favor is indicated by the statement that on July 31, 1877, or less than four months from the day the first circular was sent out by Mr. Hubbard, 778 telephones had been leased, while in all probability an equal number of experimental telephones had been made by mechanics and scientists who thought that it would be an easy matter to improve upon Bell's method. When the year 1877 closed, there were 5,491 Bell telephones in use.