Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/696

1088 you would find those silent lines a perfect babel of noise—a sample of every tongue on earth, from to, shouting and scolding, laughing and weeping maybe. Very likely fortunes are being made and lost over these wires at this very moment, for we are very close to the financial district of the city. But we are stone-deaf to it all until the electrical waves are turned into air waves by the telephone receiver. Possibly some of these lines are carrying urgent messages as far as or, or even. I figured out that it takes twenty carloads of copper to carry your voice from New York to Chicago. So, you see, minutes are precious on our long-distance lines, and when wire thieves cut our wires, the interruption of business means more to us than the loss of the copper.”

We stepped out of the cable vault into a room filled with coils and coils of cable and wire that reminded me of the tangle we had seen in the subway. Mr. Burt informed us that this was the wiring for the. “We used to do all the work at the building,” he said, “but now we save time and expense by making our layout here, and then the whole cable, with all its tap-offs, is taken to the top of the building and dropped down the cable shaft. We have it so fixed that there are the proper outlets at each floor, so that all the men have to do at the building is to make the connections at each office, as required. In a building like that, we have two hundred and thirty miles of telephone wiring, enough to reach from New York to, and, as you can imagine, it takes some careful estimating to get the wires in just the right place.” On the third floor of the building, we saw how the cables open out into myriads of wires and are connected to a perfect maze of safety devices on the distributing frames. Even here, the system was perfectly cold and silent, and it was difficult to realize the feverish activity that was throbbing through those “copper nerves,” as Mr. Burt called them, The distributing frames fairly dazzled us with their complexity,

“Will it sting me if I touch it?” asked Will, reaching his finger to one of the contacts.

He was rather daring, I thought, but Mr. Burt laughed. “Why, boy, you could n’t feel it, Don’t you know that the telephone is one of the most delicate of instruments? We use twenty-four volts to force the current through the miles of wire, but the talking currents themselves are so feeble that it takes a very sensitive apparatus to find them. They are measured in thousandths of an, and you know what that is, when you can get anywhere from six to thirty amperes out of an ordinary dry-battery cell.”

“But I got a pretty bad shock the other day,” said Will, “when I was using the ‘phone, and I felt as if I had been stung by a hornet.”

“That was the ringing current. Somebody was trying to ring your bell while you had your hand on the binding-posts at the end of the receiver.