Se 
This co-operation, which was exemplary for international 
community work, took place in 1875, and is embodied in the 
St. Petersburg Convention, concluded in the same year, which 
founded the Universal Telegraph Union (L’Union Télégraphique 
Universelle). Its organ is the Berne Office of the International 
Telegraph Union whose task it is to carry out the decisions 
of the Congresses, held every five years, to maintain inter- 
national co-operation and to prepare for new sessions. Thanks 
to the efforts of the Universal Telegraph Union, the inter- 
national telegraph service of all the participating countries has 
developed into the efficient, smooth working organisation which 
we possess to-day. It was able to survive the World War, 
and, as the last congress in Paris in the autumn of 1925 showed, 
to resume its successful activities after the war. The new re- 
gulations for international telegraph service formulated in 
Paris is a striking proof of this. The International Telegraph 
Union included, as a new part of its programme, the regulation 
of technical questions relating to the telegraph service, and 
formed for this purpose, a special committee (Comité Con- 
sultatif International des Communications Télégraphiques) 
which will meet for the first time this vear (1926). 
2. Telephony. 
The regulation of international telephone communication 
also comes within the sphere of operation of the Universal 
Telegraph Union. The first regulations relating to this ser- 
vice are contained in the agreement concluded at the Berlin 
Universal Telegraph Conference in 1885. They have been 
further extended at the following Congresses: Paris 18qo, 
Budapest 1896, London 1903, Lisbon 1908. They could be 
confined to a very few service regulations, since up to 1908 
international telephone communication was in a very un- 
developed state. 
Just before and during the war, a great change took place. 
The introduction of the amplifying valve as a telephone relay 
made it possible to expand telephone communication between 
different countries to an extent hitherto undreamt of. In 1015 
the United States of America completed the 5000 kilometer 
overland telephone line from New York to San Francisco and 
covered their country with a close network of long distance 
telephone lines, so that within a few years almost the whole 
of this vast territory was opened up to telephonic communi- 
cation. Europe, as a whole, could not follow this example at 
once, although its crippled industry and the fact of its being