International Communications

"In international communication the U. S. ought to be supreme." So said Electric Tycoon Owen D. Young last week. At the same time came news of a British merger, to control more than half of all the miles of cables in the world. But also last week, a great U. S. communication merger took place and the U. S. public was invited to inspect a new power in U. S. business. His name is Sosthenes Behn.

Companies. As everyone knows, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (including Newcomb Carlton's Western Union) is the greatest domestic communication system in the U. S. At its head is that young super-executive, President Walter Sherman Gifford. As everyone also knows, the second greatest domestic system is the Mackay-owned Postal Telegraph, which has no telephones.

Both these systems send telegrams in the U. S. Both send cables overseas, this being an especially large part of the Mackay business. But, as not everyone knows, the only U. S. communication company owning extensive telephone and telegraph wires in foreign countries as well as extensive cables between many countries is the International Telephone & Telegraph Co.,* the creation of Sosthenes Behn and J. P. Morgan & Co.

Last week the I. T. & T. merged/- with the Mackay companies, thereby throwing together assets of $300,000,000.

Two Men. Sosthenes Behn is ancestrally Dutch-French. By birth, he is Danish, having been born at St. Thomas, Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands, U. S. territory). His first name is the Greek for "life-strength." By his own efforts, he is a naturalized American. A touch of World War heroism becomes his dark, tall, military bearing--he was a lieutenant colonel, won the D. S. M., was a member of the Legion of Honor. He started by electrifying Porto Rico's wilderness, then Cuba's, Mexico's, Chile's. These were telephone operations, at first, but soon branched into telegraph, cable and wireless communications. The Caribbean master-communicator got the house of Morgan behind him and has lately be come the foremost U. S. promoter, inter nationally, of a foremost U. S. art (the fast message)*.

Photographs of Sosthenes Behn are not easily had. But anyone may regard at leisure the groomed, handsome visage of Clarence Hungerford Mackay in any of the thousands of offices of the Postal Telegraph Co. His father, the late John W. Mackay, rough-palmed Irish '49er, found gold in California river beds and bequeathed its power in bank directorates, cable companies, cash. Son Clarence, polished by European tutors and universities, is less the director of 58 corporations than the member of 27 clubs. To his guest, Edward of Wales, he could display with dignity the world's finest collection of armor, which lines his great halls on Long Island. The masses know him be cause he is grandfather, without his consent, to the baby daughter of Songwriter Irving Berlin. Intelligent New York knows him as, next to Otto Kahn, its most famed music-patron. (See p. 46).

Systems. Linked by Messrs. Behn and Mackay were telegraph and telephone systems throughout the U. S., Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Porto Rico, Central America, both coasts of South America, Spain. Cable systems are spread from Germany and France through the U. S. to Honolulu, Midway Islands, Guam, Manila, to Shanghai; also cable systems from U. S. ports to every important South American port. Radio systems will stretch from Sayville, N. Y., to London, if an alarmed British Post Office does not object. Otherwise it will be Sayville-to-Paris. Radio systems will also wind along the Georgia coast with additions here and there along the southern seaboard. Finally, a new radio-telephone service from the U. S. Pacific Coast to Honolulu will open in May, and to Manila in October. The I. T. & T., which is essentially a holding company, controls the telephone system of Spain. It also has a contract to modernize the painful Paris telephones, which French politics prevented it from buying. It is bidding for fresh footholds in Brazil and the Argentine.

Newspaper accounts of the giant word-sending merger said that Mr. Mackay, 54, having sold control of his $100,000,000 companies to the $200,000,000 I. T. & T., would retire from active business. He will, however, retain considerable titular regalia, responsibilities, remunerations.

Associated with Sosthenes Behn in his rise to fame was his brother Hernand Behn. But Sosthenes was greatest, and greater than he their work. He says: "It is not I but the company that is important."

Significance. Thus united under Sosthenes Behn, D. S. M., the U. S. now has a combination of word-sending enterprises sufficiently strong to compete for the world supremacy now held by Britain. The British merger, last week, of the Eastern Telegraph Company and the Marconi Company of London, added Marconi ether-prestige to a total of 141,256 miles of cables. There are only 260,000 miles of cable in the world. The I. T. & T. combine will start out with 62,899 miles of cable. With great land connections, with immense assets, with powerful banking support, and above all with Sosthenes Behn, it may soon advance to first place, under and over the seas.

*The Western Electric Co. supplies both A. T. & T. and I. T. & T. with equipment.

/-Not technically a merger. Actually, all that happened was that the I. T. & T. bought stock control of the Mackay companies which, for a time at least, will maintain their identity.