No other company uses so much wire and hard rubber, or so many tons of brass rods, as the Western Electric. Of platinum, too, which is more expensive than gold, it uses one thousand pounds a year in the making of telephone transmitters. This is imported from the Ural Mountains. The silk thread comes from Italy and Japan; the iron for magnets, from Norway; the paper tape, from Manila; the mahogany, from South America; and the rubber, from Brazil and the valley of the Congo. At least seven countries must cooperate to make a telephone message possible. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the Western Electric factories is the multitude of its inspectors. No other sort of manufacturing, not even a Government navy-yard, has so many. Nothing is too small to escape these sleuths of inspection. They test every tiny disc of mica, and throw away nine out of ten. 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. Its Man, still fairly hale and busy after forty years of leadership, is Enos M. Barton. His career is the typical American story of self-help. He was a telegraph messenger boy in New York during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland. In 1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars a month to ninety dollars; whereupon he walked out and founded the Western Electric in a shabby little machine-shop. Later he moved to Chicago, took in Elisha Gray as his partner, and built up a trade in the making of telegraphic materials. When the telephone was invented, Barton was one of the sceptics. "I well remember my disgust," he said, "when some one told me it was possible to send conversation along a wire." Several months later he saw a telephone and at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had become the official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of young men, brilliant and adventurous, who dared to stake their futures on the success of the telephone. And always at their head was Barton, as a sort of human switchboard, who linked them all together and kept them busy.