As soon as the telegraphs had been transferred to the Government, the Post Office Department set to work to rearrange the wires wherever competition had caused duplication or triplication; to extend the wires into the centre of each town or place "imperfectly" served; to build lines to all places with money order issuing Post Offices that had no telegraphic service; to enlarge the local telegraph system of Metropolitan London from 95 telegraph offices in 1869, to 334 offices at the close of 1870; to give cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester, from 14 to 32 telegraph offices each;[48] to provide additional wires to meet the anticipated growth of traffic; and to release some 5,000 or 6,000 miles of wire for the exclusive use of the railway companies in the conduct of transportation. For these several purposes the Post Office Department, in the course of the three years ending with September, 1873, erected 8,000 miles of posts, and 46,000 miles of wire; strengthened 8,500 miles of line; laid 192 miles of underground pipes and 23 miles of pneumatic pipes; and laid 248 miles of submarine cable. By September, 1873, the Post Office Department had spent upon the rearrangement and extension of the telegraphs, the sum of $11,041,000.[49] Something over $2,500,000[50] of that sum represented the cost of repairing the depreciation suffered by the plant in the years 1868 and 1869, a depreciation for which full allowance had been made in fixing the purchase price. The balance, $8,500,000, represented new capital outlay. In 1868 Mr. Scudamore had stated before the Select Committee of the House of Commons that it would cost $1,000,000 to rearrange the telegraphs and give perfect telegraphic service to 2,950 places.[51] In 1869, the Postmaster General, the Marquis of Hartington, had told the House of Commons that $1,500,000 would cover the cost of rearranging the telegraphs and giving perfect accommodation to 3,776 places.[52] In April, 1867, on the other hand, Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, an eminent economist, had estimated at $12,500,000 the cost of "the improvement of the present telegraphs, and their extension to many villages which do not at present possess a telegraph station."[53] Mr. Scudamore's estimate of the cost of extending the telegraphs to 841 places that had no telegraphic accommodation, was based on the assumption that each such extension would require, on the average, the erection of three-quarters of a mile of telegraph line. But when the Post Office Department came to build to "new" places, it found that "the opening of upward of 1,000 additional telegraph offices necessitated the erection of not less than 3,000 miles of telegraph line."[54]