1888: Seventy-seven feet of Faraday cable have been added to the telephone circuit this week to take the place of the wires which run from the switch-board in the exchange to the large standard on Harmony block. This makes a total of 481 feet of the cable in use.
Essentially, this means they are replacing bare wires with insulated wires and a multi-wire system. That’s the nutshell version; it took a lot of research and technological advances to get there. A lot of that work was spurred on by the effort to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, which finally succeeded in 1866, and made use of Michael Faraday’s research into electromagnetism and induction.
http://ethw.org/Transatlantic_Cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday
wired
I love all the old news about wiring things up. Once we started, we never stopped.