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Though the telephone circuits were now protected from the earth, telephone-users, at times when the lines were busy, were still troubled with roarings and strange cross-talk. Though busy with the many engineering problems which the telephone heads had assigned to him, Carty found time for some original research.
All telephone-users are familiar with it. It consists entirely of the word "Hallo!" repeated crescendo and furioso until exhaustion supervenes. Presently Mr. Cockerell reports to the Captain "Telephone out of order, sir." "I never knew a range telephone that wasn't," replies the Captain, inspecting the instrument. "Still, you might give this one a sporting chance, anyhow.
In Europe my curiosity would probably never have been excited by the thought of that organization at home one accepts everything as of course! but, in the United States, partly because the telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and partly because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed at the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the high protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to a telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-users seldom think about and will never see.
Of course every telephone-user desired to be able to converse with any other who had a telephone in his office or residence. The development of the switchboards had been comparatively slow in the past, and the service rendered by the boys proved far from satisfactory. The average boy proved himself too little amenable to discipline, too inclined to "sass" the telephone-users, and too careless.
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