The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

As regards the trunk lines and long-distance business in the United States, there are often complaints of high charges and other inconveniences, but the telephone service is developed there much more extensively than in Great Britain. The Americans suffer more than we do from cyclones and storms and interruptions to their telephone system. Everything is on a magnificent scale, even the weather. My readers may remember the story of the Scot who was explaining to an American what severe winters they experienced in his native country. “Why, it is nothing at all to the cold we have in the States,” said the American. “I recollect one winter when a sheep jumping from a hillock to a field; became suddenly frozen on the way, and stuck in the air like a mass of ice.” “But,” said the solemn Scot, whose first consideration is always love of the naked fact, “the law of gravity would not allow that.” “I know that,” was the ready answer, “but the law of gravity was frozen too.” No wonder, with such possibilities, the American long-distance telephone service occasionally breaks down. Technical terms are difficult to understand in this country, but America often helps us out of difficulties by her picturesque language. For instance, a “snooper in” is a person who listens to other people's conversations on the telephone. And “the trouble man” is an excellent name for the individual who investigates faults on a wire. It is the long-distance calls which appeal most strongly to our sense of the marvellous. Owing to our insular position the extension of the range of telephonic speech has always been a difficult engineering problem, as the insertion of a length of submarine or underground cable in a telephone circuit has a “choking” effect, and materially limits the distance over which speech is possible. In order to minimise this difficulty, which affects Great Britain so adversely, a cable treated with loading coils was laid in 1909 between Abbot's Cliff, Dover, and Cape Grisnez on the French coast. It is the resistance capacity and induction of a circuit which decides whether a long-distance conversation will be satisfactory or not, and the insertion of “loading coils” in a cable artificially increases the induction, thus increasing the volume and improving the quality of speech received at the end of a circuit in such a cable.