. The history of the telephone . o had just been baptized as a new it was still an unsolved problem whether ornot the United States could be kept united,whether or not it could be built into an organicnation without losing the spirit of self-help anddemocracy. It is not easy for us to realize to-day howyoung and primitive was the United States of1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the pop-ulation that we had when the telephone wasinvented. We have twice the wheat crop andtwice as much money in circulation. We havethree times the railways, banks, libraries, news-papers, exports,
. The history of the telephone . o had just been baptized as a new it was still an unsolved problem whether ornot the United States could be kept united,whether or not it could be built into an organicnation without losing the spirit of self-help anddemocracy. It is not easy for us to realize to-day howyoung and primitive was the United States of1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the pop-ulation that we had when the telephone wasinvented. We have twice the wheat crop andtwice as much money in circulation. We havethree times the railways, banks, libraries, news-papers, exports, farm values, and nationalwealth. We have ten million farmers who makefour times as much money as seven millionfarmers made in 1876. We spend four times asmuch on our public schools, and we put fourtimes as much in the savings bank. We havefive times as many students in the we have so revolutionized our methods ofproduction that we now produce seven times asmuch coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig- [224] onn o ^. THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE iron, twenty-two times as much copper, andforty-three times as much steel. There were no skyscrapers in 1876, notrolleys, no electric lights, no gasoline engines,no self-binders, no bicycles, no was no Oklahoma, and the combined pop-ulation of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, andArizona was about equal to that of Des was in this year that General Custer was killedby the Sioux; that the flimsy iron railway bridgefell at Ashtabula; that the Molly Maguiresterrorized Pennsylvania; that the first wire ofthe Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and that BossTweed and Hell Gate were both put out of theway in New York. The Great Ekn, under which the Revolution-ary patriots had met, was still standing onBoston Common. Daniel Drew, the New Yorkfinancier, who was born before the AmericanConstitution was adopted, was still alive; sowere Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, Stewart, Thurlow Weed, Peter Cooper,Cyrus McCorm
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjecttelephone, bookyear19
