The History of the Telephone, Herbert N. Casson [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

zeal.” The young man replied, in one of those dignified letters more usual in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century.

“My faith in the success of the enterprise is such that I am willing to trust to it,” he wrote, “and I have confidence that we shall establish the harmony and cooperation that is essential to the success of an enterprise of this kind.” One week later the young man, Theodore N. Vail, took his seat as General Manager in a tiny office in Reade Street, New York, and the building of the business began.

 

This arrival of Vail at the critical moment emphasized the fact that Bell was one of the most fortunate of inventors. He was not robbed of his invention, as might easily have happened.

One by one there arrived to help him a number of able men, with all the various abilities that the changing situation required. There was such a focussing of factors that the whole matter appeared to have been previously rehearsed. No sooner had Bell appeared on the stage than his supporting players, each in his turn, received his cue and took part in the action of the drama.

There was not one of these men who could have done the work of any other. Each was distinctive and indispensable. Bell invented the telephone; Watson constructed it; Sanders financed it; Hubbard introduced it; and Vail put it on a business basis.

 

The new General Manager had, of course, no experience in the telephone business. Neither had any one else. But he, like Bell, came to his task with a most surprising fitness. He was a member of the historic Vail family of Morristown, New Jersey, which had operated the

Speedwell Iron Works for four or five generations.

His grand-uncle Stephen had built the engines for the Savannah, the first American steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean; and his cousin Alfred was the friend and co-worker of Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had lived for several years at the Vail homestead in Morristown; and it was here that he erected his first telegraph line, a three-mile circle around the Iron Works, in 1838. He and Alfred Vail experimented side by side in the making of the telegraph, and Vail eventually received a fortune for his share of the Morse patent.

 

Thus it happened that young Theodore Vail learned the dramatic story of Morse at his mother’s knee. As a boy, he played around the first telegraph line, and learned to put messages on the wire. His favorite toy was a little telegraph that he constructed for himself. At twenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of possessing a bonanza farm; then he swung back into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself in the Government Mail Service at Washington.

By 1876, he was at the head of this Department, which he completely reorganized. He

introduced the bag system in postal cars, and made war on waste and clumsiness. By virtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who had a comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs. He was much more apt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a national telephone system.

 

While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-cleaning he met Hubbard, who had just been appointed by President Hayes as the head of a commission on mail transportation. He and Hubbard were constantly thrown together, on trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably had a pair of telephones in his valise, the two men soon became co-enthusiasts. Vail found himself painting brain-pictures of the future of the telephone, and by the time that he was asked to become its General Manager, he had become so confident that, as he said afterwards, he “was willing to leave a Government job with a small salary for a telephone job with no salary.”

 

So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty years before to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N. Vail left the post office service to establish the telephone business.

He had been in authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was the developer of a system that covered every inhabited portion of the country. Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immensely valuable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone.

Line by line, he mapped out a method, a policy, a system. He introduced a larger view of the telephone business, and swept off the table all schemes for selling out. He persuaded half a dozen of his post office friends to buy stock, so that in less than two months the first “Bell Telephone Company” was organized, with $450,000

capital and a service of twelve thousand telephones.

 

Vail’s first step, naturally, was to stiffen up the backbone of this little company, and to prevent the Western Union from frightening it into a surrender. He immediately sent a copy of Bell’s patent to every agent, with orders to hold the fort against all opposition. “We have the only original telephone patents,” he wrote; “we have organized and introduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from us by any corporation.” To one agent, who was showing the white feather, he wrote:

 

“You have too great an idea of the Western Union.

If it was all massed in your one city you might well fear it; but it is represented there by one man only, and he has probably as much as he can attend to outside of the telephone. For you to acknowledge that you cannot compete with his influence when you make it your special business, is hardly the thing. There may be a dozen concerns that will all go to the Western Union, but they will not take with them all their friends.

I would advise that you go ahead and keep your present advantage. We must organize companies with sufficient vitality to carry on a fight, as it is simply useless to get a company started that will succumb to the first bit of opposition it may encounter.”

 

Next, having encouraged his thoroughly alarmed agents, Vail proceeded to build up a definite business policy. He stiffened up the contracts and made them good for five years only.

He confined each agent to one place, and reserved all rights to connect one city with another.

He established a department to collect and protect any new inventions that concerned the telephone.

He agreed to take part of the royalties in stock, when any local company preferred to pay its debts in this way. And he took steps toward standardizing all telephonic apparatus by controlling the factories that made it.

 

These various measures were part of Vail’s plan to create a national telephone system. His central idea, from the first, was not the mere leasing of telephones, but rather the creation of a Federal company that would be a permanent partner in the entire telephone business. Even in that day of small things, and amidst the confusion and rough-and-tumble of pioneering, he worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day; and this goes far to explain the fact that there are in the United States twice as many telephones as there are in all other countries combined.

 

Vail arrived very much as Blucher did at the battle of Waterloo—a trifle late, but in time to prevent the telephone forces from being routed by the Old Guard of the Western Union. He was scarcely seated in his managerial chair, when the Western Union threw the entire Bell army into confusion by launching the Edison transmitter.

Edison, who was at that time fairly

started in his career of wizardry, had made an instrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond all argument superior to the telephones then in use and the lessees of Bell telephones clamored with one voice for “a transmitter as good as Edison’s.” This, of course, could not be had in a moment, and the five months that followed were the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone.

 

How to compete with the Western Union, which had this superior transmitter, a host of agents, a network of wires, forty millions of capital, and a first claim upon all newspapers, hotels, railroads, and rights of way—that was the immediate problem that confronted the new General Manager. Every inch of progress had to be fought for. Several of his captains deserted, and he was compelled to take control of their unprofitable exchanges. There was scarcely a mail that did not bring him some bulletin of discouragement or defeat.

 

In the effort to conciliate a hostile public, the telephone rates had everywhere been made too low. Hubbard had set a price of twenty dollars a year, for the use of two telephones on a private line; and when exchanges were started, the rate was seldom more than three dollars a month.

There were deadheads in abundance, mostly officials and politicians. In St. Louis, one of the few cities that charged a sufficient price, nine-tenths of the merchants refused to become subscribers. In Boston, the first pay-station ran three months before it earned a dollar. Even as late as 1880, when the first National Telephone Convention was held at Niagara Falls, one of the delegates expressed the general situation very correctly when he said: “We were all in a state of enthusiastic uncertainty. We were full of hope, yet when we analyzed those hopes they were very airy indeed. There was probably not one company that could say it was making a cent, nor even that it EXPECTED to make a cent.”

 

Especially in the largest cities, where the Western Union had most power, the lives of the telephone pioneers were packed with hardships and adventures. In Philadelphia, for instance, a resolute young man named Thomas E. Cornish was attacked as though he had suddenly become a public enemy, when he set out to establish the first telephone service. No official would grant him a permit to string wires. His workmen were arrested. The printing-telegraph men warned him that he must either quit or be driven out.

When he asked capitalists for money, they replied that he might as well expect to lease jew’sharps as telephones. Finally, he was compelled to resort to strategy where argument had failed.

He had received an order from Colonel Thomas Scott, who wanted a wire between his house and his office. Colonel Scott was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and therefore a man of the highest prestige in the city. So as soon as Cornish had put this line in place, he kept his men at work stringing other lines. When the police interfered, he showed them Colonel Scott’s signature and was let alone. In this way he put fifteen wires up before the trick was discovered; and soon afterwards, with eight subscribers, he founded the first Philadelphia exchange.

 

As may be imagined, such battling as this did not put much money into the treasury of the parent company; and the letters written by Sanders at this time prove that it was in a hard plight.

 

The following was one of the queries put to Hubbard by the overburdened Sanders: “How on earth do you expect me to meet a draft of two hundred and seventy-five dollars without a dollar in the treasury, and with a debt of thirty thousand dollars staring us in the face?”

“Vail’s salary is small enough,” he continued in a second letter, “but as to where it is coming from I am not so clear. Bradley is awfully blue and discouraged. Williams is tormenting me for money and my personal credit will not stand everything. I have advanced the Company two thousand dollars to-day, and Williams must have three thousand dollars more this month. His pay-day has come and his capital will not