The Price of Progress THE Canal loan achieve HE Panama Canal stands as one ments of the age. Into its construction went not only the highest engineering skill, but the best business brains of the nation, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars. Suppose conditions not to be foreseen made it necessary to place the present canal with a new and larger waterway of the sea-level type, to be built in the next ten years. Also suppose that this new canal would be the means of a great saving in time and money to the canal-using public, because of the rapid progress in canal engineering. This sounds improbable; yet it illustrates exactly what has happened in the development of the telephone, and what certainly will happen again. Increasing demands upon the TELEP TELEPHONE telephone system, calling for more extended and better service, forced removal of every. part of the plant not equal to these demands. Switchboards, cables, wires and the telephone instrument itself were changed time and again, as fast as the advancing art of the telephone could improve them. It was practical to do all this because it greatly increased the capacity of the plant, reduced service rates and added subscribers by the hundred thousand. In ten years, the telephone plant of the Bell System has been rebuilt and renewed, piece by piece, at an expense exceeding the cost of the Canal. Thus the Bell System is kept at the highest point of efficiency, always apace with the telephone requirements of the public. And the usefulness of the telephone has been extended to all the people. AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY One Policy JUN 26 1916 One System Universal Service NOTICE.-Contributions to the Overland Monthly should be typewritten, accompanied by full return postage and with the author's name and address plainly written in upper corner of first The publisher of the Overland Monthly will not be responsible for the preservation of unso- Hcited contributions and photographs. Issued Monthly. $1.20 per year in advance. Ten cents per copy Copyrighted, 1914, by the Overland Monthly Company. Northwestern offices at 74 Hilbour Building, Butte, Mont., under management of Mrs. Helen Fitzgerald Sanders. Entered at the San Francisco, Cal., Postoffice as second-class mail matter. Published by the OVERLAND MONTHLY COMPANY, San Francisco, California. |