James Stillman, of New York, was first among bankers to foresee the telephone era. As early as 1875, while Bell was teaching his infant telephone to talk, Stillman risked two thousand dollars in a scheme to establish a crude dial system of wire communication, which later grew into New York's first telephone exchange. At the present time, the banker who works closest to his telephone is probably George W. Perkins, of the J. P. Morgan group of bankers. "He is the only man," says Morgan, "who can raise twenty millions in twenty minutes." The Perkins plan of rapid transit telephony is to prepare a list of names, from ten to thirty, and to flash from one to another as fast as the operator can ring them up. Recently one of the other members of the Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephone equipment. "What will we gain by more wires?"asked the operator. "If we were to put in a six-hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep it busy."The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the financial world was done during the panic of 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturday evening, the New York bankers met in an almost desperate conference. They decided, as an emergency measure of self-protection, not to ship cash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned this decision to the bankers of Chicago and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred by telephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the bankers of neighboring States. And so the news went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Monday morning all bankers and chief depositors were aware of the situation, and prepared for the team-play that prevented any general disaster.
As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they transact practically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchange stand six hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus of a private wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year's talking to send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last year sent twice as many. Of all brokers, the one who finally accomplished most by telephony was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In the mansion that he built at Arden, there were a hundred telephones, sixty of them linked to the long-distance lines. What the brush is to the artist, what the chisel is to the sculptor, the telephone was to Harriman. He built his fortune with it. It was in his library, his bathroom, his private car, his camp in the Oregon wilder-ness. No transaction was too large or too involved to be settled over its wires. He saved the credit of the Erie by telephone--lent it five million dollars as he lay at home on a sickbed.
"He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine writer. "Nonsense," replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me."The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from being unwieldy and aristocratic.
The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company may now stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president of the Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York skyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to be indispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered and geographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance, that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product to the Middle West.
To the companies that sell perishable commodities, an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has often saved a carload or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers, who were among the first to realize what Bell had made possible, have greatly accelerated the wheels of their business by inter-city conversations.
For ten years or longer the Cudahys have talked every business morning between Omaha and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy miles of wire.
In the refining of oil, the Standard Oil Company alone, at its New York office, sends two hundred and thirty thousand messages a year. In the making of steel, a chemical analysis is made of each caldron of molten pig-iron, when it starts on its way to be refined, and this analysis is sent by telephone to the steelmaker, so that he will know exactly how each potful is to be handled. In the floating of logs down rivers, instead of having relays of shouters to prevent the logs from jamming, there is now a wire along the bank, with a telephone linked on at every point of danger. In the rearing of skyscrapers, it is now usual to have a temporary wire strung vertically, so that the architect may stand on the ground and confer with a foreman who sits astride of a naked girder three hundred feet up in the air. And in the electric light business, the current is distributed wholly by telephoned orders. To give New York the seven million electric lights that have abolished night in that city requires twelve private exchanges and five hundred and twelve telephones. All the power that creates this artificial daylight is generated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storage centres. Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits at a telephone exchange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an ocean liner.
The first steamship line to take notice of the telephone was the Clyde, which had a wire from dock to office in 1877; and the first railway was the Pennsylvania, which two years later was persuaded by Professor Bell himself to give it a trial in Altoona. Since then, this railroad has become the chief beneficiary of the art of telephony.
It has one hundred and seventy-five exchanges, four hundred operators, thirteen thousand telephones, and twenty thousand miles of wire--a more ample system than the city of New York had in 1896.
