It enabled a thin wire to carry as far as a thick one, and thus saved as much as forty dollars a wire per mile.
As a reward for his cleverness, a shower of gold fell upon Pupin, and made him in an instant as rich as one of the grand-dukes of his native land.
It is now a most highly skilled occupation, supporting fully fifteen thousand families, to put the telephone wires in place and protect them against innumerable dangers.

This is the profession of the wire chiefs and their men, a corps of human spiders, endlessly spinning threads under streets and above green fields, on the beds of rivers and the slopes of mountains, massing them in cities and fluffing them out among farms and villages.

To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book of adventures.

Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble with it.

But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES--ten apiece to every family in the United States; and these lines are not punctuated with clothespins, but with the most delicate of electrical instruments.
The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises.