



Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






    [Illustration: _On Main Street, U. S. A., the telephone company is a
    home town institution, run by local people. Linking together home
    town communities all over America, the telephone makes a
    neighborhood of the nation._]




                        The Telephone in America


    [Illustration: Typical city street scene]

                         Bell Telephone System

    [Illustration: _This radio-relay station on Buckhorn Mountain in
    Colorado is one of 107 in the Bell System’s transcontinental
    microwave system. Flashed from station to station, telephone calls
    and television programs first spanned the continent by air in
    1951._]




                        The Telephone in America


The telephone was born in America and has reached its highest
development in this country. Since 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell
first talked successfully over his p