And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone apparatus of the world--the Western Electric. The mother factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio. To put its totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and 40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877. The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without celebrating its birthdays. At first it had no telephones to make. None had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things. But in 1878, when the Western Union made its short-lived attempt to compete with the Bell Company, the Western Electric agreed to make its telephones. Three years later, when the brief spasm of competition was ended, the Western Electric was taken in hand by the Bell people and has since then remained the great workshop of the telephone. The main plant in Chicago is not especially remarkable from a manufacturing point of view. Here are the inevitable lumber-yards and foundries and machine-shops. Here is the mad waltz of the spindles that whirl silk and cotton threads around the copper wires, very similar to what may be seen in any braid factory. Here electric lamps are made, five thousand of them in a day, in the same manner as elsewhere, except that here they are so small and dainty as to seem designed for fairy palaces. The things that are done with wire in the Western Electric factories are too many for any mere outsider to remember. Some wire is wrapped with paper tape at a speed of nine thousand miles a day. Some is fashioned into fantastic shapes that look like absurd sea-monsters, but which in reality are only the nerve systems of switchboards. And some is twisted into cables by means of a dozen whirling drums--a dizzying sight, as each pair of drums revolve in opposite directions. Because of the fact that a cable's inevitable enemy is moisture, each cable is wound on an immense spool and rolled into an oven until it is as dry as a cinder. Then it is put into a strait-jacket of lead pipe, sealed at both ends, and trundled into a waiting freight car.