Slater Lewis screw-top insulator made at Haverhill, MA

EDITORIAL NOTES FROM NEW

ENGLAND.

My first call in Providence was on Mr. Duxbury, of the Rhode Island Telephone Company. I found him full of work, full of news, and full of plans, as usual. His latest move has been the organization of the Providence Time and Messenger Company — a corporation which takes the license for the Time Telegraph for Providence, and also undertakes the messenger business, " thusly:" Across the street from the Butler Exchange, in which the Telephone Company is located, an office has been opened by the new company. In its time department it has over five hundred clocks running. It is connected by wire with each board in the telephone exchange. If a telephone subscriber wants a messenger, he rings up and says so. The operator at once connects him with the wire running to the office across the street, and rings it up. The party in the office talks with the subscriber, ascertains his wants, and sends a messenger accordingly. Thus a good and prompt messenger service is supplied without call-boxes or additional wire; the telephone becomes additionally valuable to every subscriber; those who do not have it see a new reason for taking it, and a very good business is established for the new company without the investment of much capital. Do you ask how the Telephone Company is compensated for the service rendered? Don't worry about that. Providence people and companies are not given to rendering services in a business way without keeping an eye to the returns, and there is no exception in this case. The office of the new company is a public telephone station, for which the Telephone Company pays no rent. Moreover, the Time and Messenger Company, through its boys, does a great deal of outlying collecting for the Telephone Company, and, in one way and another, gives quite as much in the way of service as it receives.

In Mr. Duxbury's office I met Mr. Lytle, who was down from Boston on business. He tells me that work on the new insulators at Haverhill is progressing favorably; that the tools for making the new English (Lewis) "screw top" insulators are about ready, and that they expect to turn out a big lot soon. By the way, a funny thing. Insulators in England are made of earthenware, glazed. They "come high" over there — not far from sixteen cents each. They are made in a lathe, fired, then glazed, then fired again, and are such handsome pieces of pottery that one wonders they are not put up in velvet-lined cases like Sevres cups. Why are they made of earthenware? Because in England, you know, we always use iron pins — not the wooden things you stick up in this country, don't you see? Now, if we put on glass, the sun shines through it and don't heat it, but it does heat the iron, you know, expands it, and cracks the glass. But if we use earthenware; don't you see, the sun can't do it, you know. Poor things, it never occurred to them to use opaque glass, simply because they never had used opaque glass; but I am of the opinion that when Mr. Lytle gets over there with a few thousand screw-top insulators, made in one motion with a perfect inside thread, and of a beautiful white glass that the sun can't shine through, any more than it can through a piece of iron, and offers them at less than one-half what it costs the manufacturers over there to turn out their hand-made Keramic specimens, the folks will wake up to the idea that "those blasted Yankees" still have an idea or two that they have not as yet had any conception of. By the way, Mr Duxbury tells me that he has tried some of the new insulators of the "pony" size, and likes them very much indeed.

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