t the keynote of expansion was first sounded by Theodore Vail in the earliest days, when as yet

t the different cities for the purpose of personal communicat

s. Most telephone men regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did not see any business future for the telephone except in short-distance service. But Vail was in earnest. His previous experience as the head

dred miles to-morrow." And he persisted, in spite of a considerable deal of ridicule, in main

t from the start. This success cheered Vail on to a master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence, and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Company refused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone. He organized a company of well-known Rhode Island

was to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on ten thousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening red copper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars,

ephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudice that telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhood affair. "It was the salvation of the business," said Edward J. Hill. It marked a turning-po

. It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltke did for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was the creation of a central company that should link all local companies together, and itself own and operate the means by which these companie

n words, the marching orders of this Company: "To connect one or more points in each and every city, town, or place an the State of New York, with one or more points in each and every other city, town, or place in said State, and in each and every other of the Unite

lan for a "grand telephonic system" was under way and fairly well understood. Then he went out, into a series of picturesque enterprises, until he had built up a four-s

g and had a little money in the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic that it carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and too much general inertia to ov

by profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek language, and very fond of using it. On all possi

e business at that time to have at its head a

e held fast whatever had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by borrowing fifty millions

evelopment of the art. The business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday-that was the keynote

ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive luxuries f

ayment, all customers paid the same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as they pleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for small towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240, which lifted the

e was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the "candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and criticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same

hone business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896, there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal. It was adapted to

an. Fish was a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament. He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He borrowed money in stupendous amounts-$150,000,000 at one

ly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of cooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever known. And as

llion messages a day in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMES as many. Such was the plun

d in Boston to be heard in Omaha. Slowly and with much effort the public were taught to substitute the telephone for travel. A special long-distance salon was fitted up in New York City to entice people into the habit of talking to other cities. Cabs were sent for customers; and when one arrived, he was escorted over Oriental rugs to a gilded

men groped through dense forests where their poles looked like toothpicks beside the towering pines and cedars. They girdled the mountains and basted the prairies with wire, until the lonely places were brought together and made sociable. They drove off the Indians, who wanted the bright wire for

ble to attract the support of such men as John Crerar, H. H. Porter, and Robert T. Lincoln. Since 1882 it has paid dividends, and in one glorious year its stock soared to four hundred dollars a s

business struck with the force of a tidal wave. The number of users leaped from 56,000 in 1900 up to 810,000 in 1908. In a single year of sweating an

hones in New York than there are in the four countries, France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined. As a user of telephones New York has risen to be unapproachable. Mass together all the telepho

orty horses, and four hundred men to do the work of distribution. There was one shabby little exchange thirty years ago; but now there are fifty-two exchanges, as the nerve-centres of a vast fifty-million-dollar system. Incredi

. Merely to do the writing of these records wears away five hundred and sixty thousand lead pencils. And merely to give these girls a cup of tea or coffee at noon, compels the B

he telephone. Half an hour later there are twice as many. Between seven and eight twenty-five thousand people have called up twenty-five thousand other people, so that there are as many people talking by wire as there were in the whole city of New York in the Revolutionary period. Even this is onl

phone has been required to give in any city. And it is as much a world's wonder, to men and women of imagination, as

ief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to the public. And

of independent companies. The time of the original patents had expired, and the Bell Companies found themselves freed from the expense of litigation only to be snarled up in a tangle of duplication. In

at cost. But there were other companies, probably a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the myth that they were fabulously r

young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a third telephone sys

tempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of

t. One which had printed fifty million dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. S

fth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike, whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raised their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them in on

spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automa

tations of an isolated company, and asked to be included as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell Company; and in 1908 these were

. Vail, who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid do

verning companies, united by a central company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that c

engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing else to w

as large as Baltimore. It would contain half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth

ockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and have a tw

York State could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put o

early one-quarter of its citizens would work in factories, while the others would be busy in six thousand exchanges, making it

would fill Vassar College a hundred times and more, or double the population of Nevada. Put these men and girls in line, march them ten abreast, and six hours woul

only four men who own as many as ten thousand shares of the stock of the central company. This Bell System stands as the life-work of unprivileged men, who are for the most part still alive and busy. With very few and trivial exceptions, every part of it was made in the United