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Updated: May 6, 2025
This idea made the "party line" practicable, and at once created a boom in the use of the telephone by enterprising farmers. In 1896 there came a most revolutionary change in switchboards. All things were made new. Instead of individual batteries, one at each telephone, a large common battery was installed in the exchange itself. This meant better signalling and better talking.
It was a very impressive sight rows on rows of switchboards, hundreds of girls, thousands of little flashing lights, millions of clickety-clicks and not enough conversation to run a sewing circle up to refreshment time. The company was very proud of it, and I suppose it was good enough for a city but, pshaw, it wouldn't do Homeburg for a day.
As the final result of all these varying changes in switchboards and signals and batteries, there grew up the modern Telephone Exchange. This is the solar plexus of the telephone body. It is the vital spot. It is the home of the switchboard. It is not any one's invention, as the telephone was.
Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to four other manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth. By this time the Western Electric Company of Chicago had begun to make the infringing Gray-Edison telephones for the Western Union, so that there were soon six groups of mechanics puzzling their wits over the new talk-machinery.
First of all a visit was paid to Simpson's Corner, where numerous shelves laden with a profusion of self-recording instruments, electric batteries and switchboards were to be seen, and the tickings of many clocks, the gentle whir of a motor and occasionally the trembling note of an electric bell could be heard.
Along the walls were the switchboards, dozens of them, all sizes, all types of instruments, strange to the eyes of the terrestrians, and in practically all the light-beam indicator system was used, no metallic pointers, but tiny mirrors directing a very fine line of brilliant light acted as a needle. The system thus had practically no inertia.
It would make two-thirds of the telephones, cables, and switchboards of all countries. Nearly one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it possible for the people of the United States to talk to one another at the rate of SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.
Some is fashioned into fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which in reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums a dizzying sight, as each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions.
We visit the dynamos and a vast organisation of switchboards.... These things are more familiar to M. Citroen than they are to me. He wants me to understand, but he does not realise that I would like a little leisure to wonder. What is interesting him just now, because it is the newest thing, is his method of paying his workers.
But you might have them bring in a few of the armored bodies, a couple of those switchboards and panels floating around out there, and half a dozen miscellaneous pieces of junk the nearest things they get hold of, whatever they happen to be." "Then back to Tellus at maximum?" "Right back to Tellus, as fast as we can possibly go there."
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