They test every telephone by actual talk, set up every switchboard, and try out every cable.

A single transmitter, by the time it is completed, has had to pass three hundred examinations; and a single coin-box is obliged to count ten thousand nickels before it graduates into the outer world.

Seven hundred inspectors are on guard in the two main plants at Chicago and New York.

This is a ruinously large number, from a profit-making point of view; but the inexorable fact is that in a telephone system nothing is insignificant.

It is built on such altruistic lines that an injury to any one part is the concern of all.
As usual, when we probe into the history of a business that has grown great and overspread the earth, we find a Man; and the Western Electric is no exception to this rule.