¶ Copper Sequence (2)
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lost. In World War I a great many people said it really must have been very immoral because there were a lot of fortunes made here. What happened was-- all over-- that the copper had not rotted, and it didn’t go back in the mines: it stayed right where it was generating power and conducting power from Niagara Falls, from here to there. And so suddenly it was the first war where we came out wealthier than when we went in. The wealth was in the production capability. But this was not put on the books this way at all. There was not a great accounting change at this time. And the land was still it. The physical assets and not the know-how. This power thing was all know-how…
“Now this is what we really mean by the words ‘know-how.’ And we went through this copper business. The first telephone: one wire, one message was all we could get over one cross section; that’s all we knew about it. It came as a tremendous surprise when-- about 15 years later-- you could get two messages over the same cross section. And then suddenly we found you could get 10 or 12 (I’ve forgotten which it was); and then it went up to 28 with the same cross section. 230:-- same cross section. 2000:-- same cross section… the frequency modulation over that wire. In 1930 the chief engineer of the Bell System said”
