Early in the history of telephones, the state of New York very nearly required all telephone and telegraph wiring to be underground. If the rest of the nation had followed, we might have had a much more attractive landscape today.
A bill to compel telegraph and telephone companies in cities to place their wires underground has passed to its third reading in the New York State Senate. It provides that after March, 1885, no wires or poles shall be permitted above ground, and as it is very likely to become a law, the officers of the companies interested will probably be obliged to set themselves at work in earnest to devise some unexceptionable means of laying and using subterranean lines. The Western Union Telegraph Company has taken the lead, and in a few months the two thousand wires which now enter its main building on Broadway will probably all be concealed beneath the surface. One of the principal difficulties in the way of burying electric-wires seems to be the imperfect character of the means of insulation. now in use. At present gutta-percha is the material most available, but this is not very durable, and is, besides, melted by a comparatively slight heat, so that it runs down, and leaves the wires exposed. In the streets of a city so compact and so modern as New York there are many sources of heat, which may injure cables placed near them, and the pipes of the steam-heating companies have occasioned the destruction of many insulated wires buried near by. One of the greatest needs of electrical practice is a better insulating substance than any yet employed, and the discoverer of such a material will reap an ample reward. The telephone lines, owing to the much greater sensitiveness of the instruments used upon them, are generally assumed to need more careful insulation than even those of the telegraph, but a singular story has been reported in one or two of the technical journals, to the effect that a certain “line-man” in a western city, while intoxicated, carried some wires without insulation, simply securing them to the posts by iron staples, and that these wires were found just as serviceable, even in rainy weather, as those running over glass insulators; so that the company who employed this unconscious inventor afterwards built many miles of uninsulated line, and used it with perfect success.
—American Architect and Building News, March 10, 1883.