The German engineers have not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in the United States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, and so have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and indifferent. All told, there is probably an investment of seventy-five million dollars and a total of nine hundred thousand telephones.
Telephony has always been in high favor with the Kaiser. It is his custom, when planning a hunting party, to have a special wire strung to the forest headquarters, so that he can converse every morning with his Cabinet. He has conferred degrees and honors by telephone. Even his former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his title of Count in this informal way. But the first friend of the telephone in Germany was Bismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its value in holding a nation together, and ordered a line between his palace in Berlin and his farm at Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty miles apart. This was as early as the Fall of 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line in Europe.
In France, as in England, the Government seized upon the telephone business as soon as the pioneer work had been done by private citizens.
In 1889 it practically confiscated the Paris system, and after nine years of litigation paid five million francs to its owners. With this reckless beginning, it floundered from bad to worse.
It assembled the most complete assortment of other nations' mistakes, and invented several of its own. Almost every known evil of bureaucracy was developed. The system of rates was turned upside down; the flat rate, which can be profitably permitted in small cities only, was put in force in the large cities, and the message rate, which is applicable only to large cities, was put in force in small places. The girl operators were entangled in a maze of civil service rules.
They were not allowed to marry without the permission of the Postmaster General; and on no account might they dare to marry a mayor, a policeman, a cashier, or a foreigner, lest they betray the secrets of the switchboard.
There was no national plan, no standardization, no staff of inventors and improvers. Every user was required to buy his own telephone. As George Ade has said, "Anything attached to a wall is liable to be a telephone in Paris." And so, what with poor equipment and red tape, the French system became what it remains to-day, the most conspicuous example of what NOT to do in telephony.
There are barely as many telephones in the whole of France as ought normally to be in the city of Paris. There are not as many as are now in use in Chicago. The exasperated Parisians have protested. They have presented a petition with thirty-two thousand names. They have even organized a "Kickers' League"--the only body of its kind in any country--to demand good service at a fair price. The daily loss from bureaucratic telephony has become enormous. "One blundering girl in a telephone exchange cost me five thousand dollars on the day of the panic in 1907," said George Kessler.
But the Government clears a net profit of three million dollars a year from its telephone monopoly;and until 1910, when a committee of betterment was appointed, it showed no concern at the discomfort of the public.
There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Paris received in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire.
"To build a new switchboard," said European manufacturers, "will require four or five months."A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene. "We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty days," he said; "and agree to forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had never been known. But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do. Paris and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days' journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in three weeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on the French steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days; so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running full speed with a staff of ninety operators.
Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-five thousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that has not at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has been a neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the business with a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it. Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are no wire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austria and Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for the telephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently been a change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now being offered to one private company in each city, in return for three per cent of the revenue.
By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to the front and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe.
In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from the first, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here the officials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. They have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages together;and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a year. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers, have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths.
