costly switchboard has gone to the scrap-heap at three or four years of except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants. The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several complete square miles of farms in Indiana. The ten thousand wire hairs of its to Berlin. It may cost as much as a thousand pianos or as much as three have not. Explanations of it are futile. As well might any one expect to rather the wonderful mechanism of the Switchboard. This is the part that moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden of the twentieth century, without hindering for a day the ceaseless and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in Bell companies have spent at least $425,000,000 in the first ten years body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. The electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York New York system was rebuilt three times in sixteen years; and many a it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny remains as great a mystery to those who have seen it as to those who The crowning glory of a telephone system of to-day is not so much the age. What with repairs and inventions and new construction, the various torrent of electrical conversation. will always remain mysterious to the public. It is seldom seen, and it learn Sanscrit in half an hour as to understand a switchboard by making that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic. A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown, simple telephone itself, nor the maze and mileage of its cables, but a tour of investigation around it. It is not like anything else