And fall. Washington, D.C., April 9. Weather Bureau observers stationed along the principal rivers of the United States soon will be able to follow the rise and fall of nearby river merely by picking up a telephone and dialing a given number. Preliminary trials for the last few months here show that a new automatic sound river gauge effectively and economically supplies the facts weathermen need in forecasting floods and supplying other information on river conditions for many interests. More weather bureau stations will install the new gages as fast as possible. (1)A river gauge on the Potomac River in the Capitol, where formerly a U.S. Weather Bureau Scientist had to go to this gauge box to take a reading on the river's height, all he has to do now is to pick up his telephone, dial the number of Potomac River, listen for a gong, then a buzz and at last another buzz, and then he will know whether the river is rising or falling, 4/9/38

The invention of the telephone still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits to resolve the patent claims of commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, dominated telephone technology and were upheld by court decisions in the United States. Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent the telephone as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". The telephone exchange was an idea of the Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás (1844 - 1893) in 1876, while he was working for Thomas Edison on a telegraph exchange. Before the invention of the telephone switchboard, pairs of telephones were connected directly with each other, practically functioned as an intercom. Although telephones devices were in use before the invention of the telephone exchange, their success and economical operation would have been impossible with the schema and structure of the contemporary telegraph systems. A telephone exchange was operated manually by operators, or automatically by machine switching. It interconnects individual phone lines to make calls between them. The first commercial telephone exchange was opened at New Haven, Connecticut, with 21 subscribers on 28 January 1878, in a storefront of the Boardman Building in New Haven, Connecticut. George W. Coy designed and built the world's first switchboard for commercial use. The District Telephone Company of New Haven went into operation with only twenty-one subscribers, who paid $1.50 per month, a one-night price for a room in a city-center hotel. Coy was inspired by Alexander Graham Bell's lecture at the Skiff Opera House in New Haven on 27 April 1877. In Bell's lecture, during which a three-way telephone connection with Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut, was demonstrated, he first discussed the idea of a telephone exchange for the conduct of business and trade.