Some idea of the rapid growth of the telephone business in the United States may be gathered from the statistician’s figures, which show that in 1880 there were less than 100,000 telephones in use in this country, and in 1915 there were more than 9,000,000 telephones in the Bell System alone. Of the 14,000,000 telephones in the world, 10,000,000 are in this country. Sixty-five per cent of all the telephones in the world are in this country, although it has only five and five-tenths per cent of the world’s population. The Bell System alone reaches 70,000 places, 5,000 more than the number of post-offices and 10,000 more than the number of railroad stations. [Illustration: CENTRAL TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, NEW YORK CITY, 1880] The telephone wire mileage in the United States is over 22,000,000 miles. In the Bell System there are over 18,000,000 miles of wire which carry over 26,000,000 telephone talks daily--or nearly 9,000,000,000 per year. Essential Factor in American Life. Such broad use is made of the telephone service of America that the progress in telephony is an essential factor in all American progress. A visiting Englishman envying the light, airy accommodations in the tall office buildings in American cities, has sagely said that the skyscraper would be impossible without the adequate telephone service which is here provided. In the housing of the people the telephone is a pioneering agent for better conditions. In the cities telephone service is indispensable in apartment houses and hotels which raise people above the noise and dust of the street. In the suburbs the telephone and the trolley make the waste places desirable homes, and although a man may walk some distance to reach some transportation line, the telephone must enter his own dwelling place before he is content to live there. [Illustration: A TYPICAL OPERATING ROOM IN AN AMERICAN CITY, WITH THE MOST MODERN BELL SWITCHBOARD] This desirable decentralization of the population in which the telephone has been so important a factor extends beyond the suburbs to the rural districts, and the American farmer with his wife and family is blessed by facilities for communication unknown in any other part of the world. The fact that the farms and ranches in this country, and especially in the west, have been of comparatively large area, has had a tendency to make American farm life particularly lonely. It is safe to say that nothing has done more to relieve this loneliness and prevent the drift from the farms to the cities, than the widespread establishment of rural telephone service. The telephone development of the United States is not confined to the large centers of population, but is well distributed, the large number of farm telephones in this country being in strong contrast to the small number of farm telephones in European countries.