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WITHOUT WIRE—NO WIRELESS

Suppose you managed to get there. Without wire rope no insurance company would let an elevator get higher than the second story, and you couldn’t signal the elevator anyway, for the annunciator operates only by an ingenious system of wires, and the control is even more complex.

You can climb the stairs, but the door key is flat wire and the shank on which the knob turns is square wire and half the lock is wire. More trouble. The buttons on your suit are flat wire; so are your garters. As for the stenographer, if she got there at all—for she is as completely wired as a telegraph system, from her hat to her shoes—the index files and office books and letter hooks and much of the other equipment of the office would fall to pieces without wire, and the machine which is her pride and the symbol of her dominion is about all wire of one kind or another, except the frame.

Distinctly, it would not be your busy day. You might spend it looking out of the window at the ships going down the river, but unhappily, the majestic liner is compact of wire, from her glistening trucks to the deepest shadows of the engine room; or airplanes soaring and swaying above the teeming town and far-stretched waterways. But an airplane lives by wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor even hold together if its frame were not strung with wire and its wings and ailerons and fuselage bound and braced and its machinery vitalized by divers forms of wire and wire strand and woven wire cord.

Far over the town and across the Jerseys you would see columns of smoke rising from busy factories—save that the mines of coal and the wells of oil are both dependent for every atom of their product on wire rope, and the lumber and metals which are the bases of industrial manufacture are in the same boat. And as for electric light—you might linger till dark but turning the switch wouldn’t help, for the big subterranean cables and the multitude of littler wires that make a pathway for the current, even the dynamos with their masses of wire, they were all dead long ago.

Gas? Made of coal and oil. There would be nothing left to do but to grope hungry through dark streets and, if you could find a wireless bridge, go back to Lonelyhurst, where you would learn that without wire there is no domestic joy in this earthly tabernacle, for from cellar to roof, from the bale and rim of the coal-scuttle and the binding of the broom, from the cooking pots, the dishpan and all other culinary utensils to the baby’s toys and mother’s corset and hairpins and needles and safety pins and pins, it is all wire one way or another. The family would never know what time you got home, for the watches and clocks are largely wire; and there would be no possible relief in going to the club, for nobody would have a car that would run—or a cork-screw, even in the dark.

It is wire that has brought the world together and holds it together, and when the wire mills stop, as even they would have to do if there were no wire, modern civilization might as well be dead, and it would be. Even war would peter out. Populations might perish from hunger and probably would, but they’d have to stop killing each other except by primitive methods, for without wire, which controls the movement of ships and airplanes and submarines, and permits by telegraph and telephone the manœuvering of prodigious armies and binds the shining bodies of great guns and makes most of the instruments of precision for aiming them, war would no longer offer much chance for machine-made glory. As a guarantee of perpetual and worldwide peace no League of Nations could begin to compare with the elimination of wire from the