UTILITIES: Voices Across the Land

• Share

Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:

It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,

Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,

In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,

A copper wire.

—Carl Sandburg, Under a Telephone Pole

Screwdriver and splicing knife hanging from his belt, the telephone man keeps history's happiest invention humming from coast to coast. He watches over 265 million miles of wire, waging war against storm, disaster and pesky animals that chew up or nest in his equipment. He hoists his lines over mountains with helicopters, shoots them across canyons with bow and arrow, strings them through dark conduits far beneath great cities. To every home and office, he gains ready entrance, exuding courtesy and helpfulness.

He must deal with subscribers who blow apart their telephone lines by firing shotguns out the window (148 such cases in Chicago last New Year's Eve), with farmers who harvest the lines with their crops (corn-picking time is a nightmare for repairmen), with homeowners who are jealous of their picture-window view ("They come at me like a bear," says one foreman, "if they don't like where I put a pole"). He must also be ready for the occasional lonely housewife who meets him in a negligee. Rule of thumb: get out, and come back when hubby is home.

He must learn to expect anything. An old lady in Washington, D.C. asked the repairman to run the new telephone wire through her parakeet's cage so that he "would have something interesting to perch on" (refused). A Chicago woman insisted on having her wall telephone four inches from the floor so that she would be forced to exercise while bending to answer it (granted). One telephone man was called to a Chicago hotel to repair a badly frayed cord, discovered the cause of the trouble as he was leaving: sitting in the bathtub was a pet lion.

Phthisic on the Farm. The telephone has done more than diplomats, clergymen or scientists to knit the world together. Taken for granted by kings and butchers alike, it is an indispensable companion that serves without favor or prejudice. It has reached into every civilized corner of the world—and often brought civilization with it. From its wires spring the words of history in the making, the chatter of daily life. English Novelist Arnold Bennett called it "the proudest and the most poetical achievement of the American people."

In the U.S., the telephone man has installed 66,600,000 phones, more than half of the 117,800,000 in the world. Each day in the U.S., 245 million telephone conversations hum over the wires, more than 500 calls a year for every person. At any second of the business day, more than 2,000,000 people are talking on U.S. phones. What do they talk about?

¶ In Sharon Springs, N.Y. Attorney Joseph P. Leary, stalled in a snowstorm 50 miles from court, argued his client's case to the judge by telephone—and won.

¶ In Nevada, Mo. Louise Phillips, 17, and J. P. Ashley, 20, a coast guardsman stationed in Hawaii, were married in a transpacific telephone ceremony heard over a church loudspeaker by 125 wedding guests.