KinSource - Tale of the Week - Buying Minnesota Butter In Connecticut

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The Renville Star Farmer, July 14, 1911, p. 1

BUYING MINNESOTA BUTTER IN CONNECTICUT.

The Wonders Of The Long-Distance Telephone and How It Scored a New Record.

From the [dairy] farms of Minnesota to the New England market is a long, long way. It used to be considered a prohibitive distance so far as the transaction of a business deal in quick time is concerned. Nowadays all that is changed, at least, in the opinion of a Connecticut dealer who recently called up Minneapolis to buy butter.

Minnesota butter is a commodity that in itself is likely to prove incentive for the smashing of records. Its fame extends even as far away as New England, and though in the old days quick, up-to-date transactions at such distances were out of the question, the New Haven firm which resorted to the use of the long-distance telephone to order a carload of butter from Minneapolis has called attention to a very important fact with regard [to] telephone service between distant cities.

The record for long-distance merchandising is believed to have been established by this instance. The message was received at Minneapolis at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. By nine that evening the car had been loaded and shipped. This assured the receipt of the butter in New Haven at least a day and a half sooner than if the deal had been arranged by mail.

This is only one of the later day wonders of the telephone. Somehow, without any noise or fuss, this little instrument, which only recently observed its thirty fifth birthday, has won its way into universal acceptance as a necessity. When it was invented it was considered a toy and laughed at. That was as recently as 1876.

To-day the whole business and social world demands the best in the way of telephone service. The telephone is in every commercial house, in thousands of residences, and has even more recently found its way into the farms. This is the most useful work it has done, for [lightening] the labors and banishing isolation on the farms is an achievement worthy of standing by itself.

To spread telephone service over the farms, where once such a thing was unknown, has been a work of education. Attractive literature has found its way into every corner of rural America, telling the farmers the benefits and value of the telephone. "How to Build Rural Telephone Lines" is the title of a booklet which the Western Electric Company has been distributing over every section of the country. For it is a fact that the farmers themselves can do most of the work of construction, and this booklet has been made the text-book from which many successful rural telephone companies of today have grown.

Work of an educational nature has made possible the network of telephone wires in the farming sections where formerly such a thing was not even thought of. It was education of the sort fostered by the example of the man who bought Minnesota butter in Connecticut and who demonstrated what the long-distance telephone can do.