This is not hyperbole. Picture yourself starting for business in the morning if there were no wire and see what the verdict would be by quitting time. Considering the vital part that wire plays in the growing and transportation of food for man and beast, it is likely you would go breakfastless after sleeping on a bed without springs or the luxury of a woven wire mattress. But that would be only the beginning of sorrow. The trolley would stand dead. Perhaps you are a commuter and journey to town by steam road. The ferry would hug its slip, and where is the railroader who in these days of congestion and short headway would dare to send a train out without the protection of the little lengths of bonding wire between the rails, that articulate the block signal system? You could telephone the office? How and over what unless wire were used? Wireless? Without the coils and armatures that keep the instruments going or the aerials that seize the word wave in its flight, there would be no wireless. [Illustration: WITHOUT WIRE--NO WIRELESS] Suppose you managed to get there. Without wire rope no insurance company would let an elevator get higher than the second story, and you couldn't signal the elevator anyway, for the annunciator operates only by an ingenious system of wires, and the control is even more complex. You can climb the stairs, but the door key is flat wire and the shank on which the knob turns is square wire and half the lock is wire. More trouble. The buttons on your suit are flat wire; so are your garters. As for the stenographer, if she got there at all--for she is as completely wired as a telegraph system, from her hat to her shoes--the index files and office books and letter hooks and much of the other equipment of the office would fall to pieces without wire, and the machine which is her pride and the symbol of her dominion is about all wire of one kind or another, except the frame. Distinctly, it would not be your busy day. You might spend it looking out of the window at the ships going down the river, but unhappily, the majestic liner is compact of wire, from her glistening trucks to the deepest shadows of the engine room; or airplanes soaring and swaying above the teeming town and far-stretched waterways. But an airplane lives by wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor even hold together if its frame were not strung with wire and its wings and ailerons and fuselage bound and braced and its machinery vitalized by divers forms of wire and wire strand and woven wire cord.