Tunneling a city street is no simple task under any conditions. There were sewer-pipes, gas-pipes, water-pipes, electric light and power conduits, telephone, telegraph, and fire-alarm conduits, and the conduits for the underground trolley system of the electric cars, to be avoided. The gas-mains were elevated above the streets so that there would be no danger of an explosion, should they develop a leak, Of course, the man-holes or underground chambers, where connections were made with the telephone-lines, had to be torn away, exposing the lead-sheathed telephone cables. To protect these cables from the picks and shovels of careless laborers, they were wrapped thickly with burlap. A telephone lineman was down under the planking one morning, making some new cable connections. He was pouring hot, melted paraffin on the splice to drive out all moisture before covering it with lead, when some of the oil spattered over on his fire. Before he knew it, there was a lively blaze, which caught the burlap, melted the lead off the cables, and consumed the insulation of the copper wires within, Choking with smoke and the fumes of burning insulation, the lineman staggered out of the tunnel, yelling “Fire.” By the time the engines came up, the planking was burning briskly, and the firemen had their troubles getting this queer blaze under control.
First they cut away the snarls, and then they tested each pair of wires individually. A telephone circuit always consists of two wires twisted together, and so it was easy to tell which two wires belonged to each other. Nevertheless, it was important to test each wire of a pair, to make sure that it was electrically sound. In order to identify the pairs at the central station, a wire of a certain number would be grounded, and then the repairman, with a telegraph battery and relay connected to ground, would search through the wires until he found one which would make his telegraph instrument click. Then he would secure that wire in an index board, sticking it through a hole labeled with the number of the wire. We watched this numbering process for a time, but soon grew tired. It was so monotonous and so hopelessly slow. The men thought so themselves, evidently, because, after a time, the order came to connect up the wires in any way possible, and they would be straightened out at the central station.
There the cables would be cut again and the lines sorted out. After we had been there some time, and were starting off to get lunch, I noticed that a man was watching us rather curiously. “Hello,” he said; “what are you doing down here? “Just looking on,” I answered. “Well, I venture to say you never saw a sight like this before. I am sure I never did in all sell my mobile phone brisbane telephone experience. Seven thousand wires all matted like wool! Not all telephone wires, either. “The whole city? Ha, ha, ha! The whole city, did you say? There are five hundred thousand telephones here in this city, You just look at a telephone directory, that will give you some idea of the enormous extent of New York’s telephone system, Do you know, we print carloads of those directories every year, and, would you believe it, they use up seven tons of ink! Why, you have no idea of what a lot of telephone wires there are buried in these streets.
“It is lucky you have it all buried underground, for people would he stealing it,” I remarked. “Unfortunately it is n’t all buried. Only our city wires run in conduits, and we have an underground long-distance line running from Boston to Washington. All the rest of our wires are out in the open, and now and then some of the copper is stolen; but that does n’t happen very often now, not since our experience with the wire thieves on the Jersey meadows. We scented a good story, and urged the man to tell us all about it, which he did very willingly. “Well, it was the most exciting time we ever had with wire thieves. ‘Cy’ Hummer earned his money that trip anyway,” he said, laughing heartily. “There had been a gang of thieves at work on that lonesome spot for some time. THE DISTRIBUTING FRAME WHERE THE WIRES ARE CONNECTED TO A PERFECT MAZE OF SAFETY DEVICES. We knew just about where those fellows were most liable to play their little game, so we fixed up a little game of our own to match theirs.
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