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| ==CHAPTER V - THE EXPANSION OF THE BUSINESS==
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|
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| The telephone business did not really begin
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| to grow big and overspread the earth until
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| 1896, but the keynote of expansion was first
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| sounded by Theodore Vail in the earliest days,
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| when as yet the telephone was a babe in arms.
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| In 1879 Vail said, in a letter written to one of his
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| captains:
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|
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| "Tell our agents that we have a proposition
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| on foot to connect the different cities for the purpose
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| of personal communication, and in other
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| ways to organize a GRAND TELEPHONIC SYSTEM."
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|
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| This was brave talk at that time, when there
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| were not in the whole world as many telephones
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| as there are to-day in Cincinnati. It was brave
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| talk in those days of iron wire, peg switchboards,
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| and noisy diaphragms. Most telephone men
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| regarded it as nothing more than talk. They did
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| not see any business future for the telephone ex-
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| cept in short-distance service. But Vail was in
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| earnest. His previous experience as the head of
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| the railway mail service had lifted him up to a
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| higher point of view. He knew the need of a
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| national system of communication that would be
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| quicker and more direct than either the telegraph
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| or the post office.
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|
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| "I saw that if the telephone could talk one
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| mile to-day," he said, "it would be talking a
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| hundred miles to-morrow." And he persisted, in
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| spite of a considerable deal of ridicule, in
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| maintaining that the telephone was destined to
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| connect cities and nations as well as individuals.
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|
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| Four months after he had prophesied the
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| "grand telephonic system," he encouraged
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| Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build
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| a telephone line between Boston and Lowell.
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| This was the first inter-city line. It was well
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| placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in
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| Boston, and it made a small profit from the
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| start. This success cheered Vail on to a master-
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| effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston
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| to Providence, and was so stubbornly bent upon
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| doing this that when the Bell Company refused
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| to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it
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| alone. He organized a company of well-
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| known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the
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| "Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was
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| a failure at first, and went by the name of "Vail's
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| Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy
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| thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment
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| established two new factors in the telephone
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| business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long
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| Distance line.
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|
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| At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's
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| point of view, bought his new line, and launched
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| out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy enterprise
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| of stringing a double wire from Boston to
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| New York. This was to be not only the longest
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| of all telephone lines, strung on ten thousand
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| poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening
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| red copper, not iron. Its cost was to be
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| seventy thousand dollars, which was an enormous
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| sum in those hardscrabble days. There
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| was much opposition to such extravagance, and
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| much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as
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| a gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.
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|
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| But when the last coil of wire was stretched
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| into place, and the first "Hello" leaped from
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| Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious
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| success. It carried messages from the
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| first day; and more, it raised the whole telephone
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| business to a higher level. It swept away the
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| prejudice that telephone service could become
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| nothing more than a neighborhood affair. "It
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| was the salvation of the business," said Edward
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| J. Hill. It marked a turning-point in the history
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| of the telephone, when the day of small
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| things was ended and the day of great things was
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| begun. No one man, no hundred men, had
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| created it. It was the final result of ten years of
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| invention and improvement.
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|
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| While this epoch-making line was being
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| strung, Vail was pushing his "grand telephonic
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| system" policy by organizing The American
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| Telephone and Telegraph Company. This, too,
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| was a master-stroke. It was the introduction of
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| the staff-and-line method of organization into
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| business. It was doing for the forty or fifty
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| Bell Companies what Von Moltke did for the
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| German army prior to the Franco-Prussian
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| War. It was the creation of a central company
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| that should link all local companies together,
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| and itself own and operate the means by which
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| these companies are united. This central company
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| was to grapple with all national problems,
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| to own all telephones and long-distance lines, to
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| protect all patents, and to be the headquarters of
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| invention, information, capital, and legal protection
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| for the entire federation of Bell Companies.
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|
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| Seldom has a company been started with so
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| small a capital and so vast a purpose. It had
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| no more than $100,000 of capital stock, in 1885;
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| but its declared object was nothing less than to
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| establish a system of wire communication for
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| the human race. Here are, in its own words,
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| the marching orders of this Company: "To
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| connect one or more points in each and every
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| city, town, or place an the State of New York,
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| with one or more points in each and every other
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| city, town, or place in said State, and in each
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| and every other of the United States, and in
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| Canada, and Mexico; and each and every of said
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| cities, towns, and places is to be connected with
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| each and every other city, town, or place in said
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| States and countries, and also by cable and other
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| appropriate means with the rest of the known
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| world."
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|
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| So ran Vail's dream, and for nine years he
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| worked mightily to make it come true. He remained
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| until the various parts of the business had
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| grown together, and until his plan for a "grand
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| telephonic system" was under way and fairly
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| well understood. Then he went out, into a
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| series of picturesque enterprises, until he had
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| built up a four-square fortune; and recently, in
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| 1907, he came back to be the head of the telephone
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| business, and to complete the work of organization
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| that he started thirty years before.
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|
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| When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone
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| business, it had passed from infancy to
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| childhood. It was well shaped but not fully
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| grown. Its pioneering days were over. It was
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| self-supporting and had a little money in the
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| bank. But it could not then have carried the
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| load of traffic that it carries to-day. It had still
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| too many problems to solve and too much general
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| inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved,
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| drilled, educated, popularized. And the man
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| who was finally chosen to replace Vail was in
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| many respects the appropriate leader for such a
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| preparatory period.
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|
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| Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the
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| name of the new head of the telephone people.
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| He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and
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| bred in Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander,
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| whose ancestors had smelted iron ore in
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| Lynn when Charles the First was King. He
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| was a lawyer by profession and a university professor
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| by temperament. His specialty, as a man
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| of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby
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| was the collection of rare books and old English
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| engravings. He was a master of the Greek language,
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| and very fond of using it. On all possible
| |
| occasions he used the language of Pericles in
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| his conversation; and even carried this preference
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| so far as to write his business memoranda in
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| Greek. He was above all else a scholar, then a
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| lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the central
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| figure in the telephone world.
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|
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| But it was of tremendous value to the telephone
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| business at that time to have at its head a
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| man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.
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|
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| He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its
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| credit. He kept it clean and clear above all
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| suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever
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| had been gained. And he prepared the way
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| for the period of expansion by borrowing fifty
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| millions for improvements, and by adding greatly
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| to the strength and influence of the American
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| Telephone and Telegraph Company.
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|
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| Hudson remained at the head of the telephone
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| table until his death, in 1900, and thus lived to
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| see the dawn of the era of big business. Under
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| his regime great things were done in the development
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| of the art. The business was pushed ahead
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| at every point by its captains. Every man in
| |
| his place, trying to give a little better service
| |
| than yesterday--that was the keynote of the
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| Hudson period. There was no one preeminent
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| genius. Each important step forward was the
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| result of the cooperation of many minds, and the
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| prodding necessities of a growing traffic.
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|
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| By 1896, when the Common Battery system
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| created a new era, the telephone engineer had
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| pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He
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| was able to handle his wires, no matter how many.
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| By this time, too, the public was ready for the
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| telephone. A new generation had grown up,
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| without the prejudices of its fathers. People
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| had grown away from the telegraphic habit of
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| thought, which was that wire communications
| |
| were expensive luxuries for the few. The telephone
| |
| was, in fact, a new social nerve, so new and
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| so novel that very nearly twenty years went by
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| before it had fully grown into place, and before
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| the social body developed the instinct of using it.
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|
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| Not that the difficulties of the telephone
| |
| engineers were over, for they were not. They
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| have seemed to grow more numerous and complex
| |
| every year. But by 1896 enough had been
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| done to warrant a forward movement. For the
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| next ten-year period the keynote of telephone
| |
| history was EXPANSION. Under the prevailing
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| flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid the
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| same yearly price and then used their telephones
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| as often as they pleased. This was a simple
| |
| method, and the most satisfactory for small towns
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| 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,
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| which lifted the telephone as high above the mass
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| of the citizens as though it were a piano or a
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| diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling
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| the business. It was shutting out the small
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| users. It was clogging the wires with deadhead
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| calls. It was giving some people too little
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| service and others too much. It was a very
| |
| unsatisfactory situation.
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|
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| How to extend the service and at the same time
| |
| cheapen it to small users--that was the Gordian
| |
| knot; and the man who unquestionably did most
| |
| to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall
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| founded the telephone business in Buffalo in
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| 1878, and seven years afterwards became the
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| chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then,
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| and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone.
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| For more than thirty years he has been
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| the "candid friend" of the business, incessantly
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| suggesting, probing, and criticising. Keen and
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| dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting
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| to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has
| |
| at the same time been a zealot for the improvement
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| and extension of telephone service. It was
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| he who set the agents free from the ball-and-
| |
| chain of royalties, allowing them to pay instead a
| |
| percentage of gross receipts. And it was he
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| who "broke the jam," as a lumberman would
| |
| say, by suggesting the MESSAGE RATE system.
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|
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| By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed
| |
| to its highest point in New York, a user of the
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| telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a
| |
| certain number of messages per year, and extra
| |
| for all messages over this number. The large
| |
| user pays more, and the little user pays less. It
| |
| opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone
| |
| 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 all kinds and
| |
| conditions of men. A great corporation, nerved
| |
| at every point with telephone wires, may now pay
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| fifty thousand dollars to the Bell Company, while
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| at the same time a young Irish immigrant boy,
| |
| just arrived in New York City, may offer five
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| coppers and find at his disposal a fifty million
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| dollar telephone system.
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|
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| When the message rate was fairly well established,
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| Hudson died--fell suddenly to the
| |
| ground as he was about to step into a railway
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| carriage. In his place came Frederick P. Fish,
| |
| also a lawyer and a Bostonian. 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
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| money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at
| |
| one time--and flung it into a campaign of red-
| |
| hot development. More business he demanded,
| |
| and more, and more, until his captains, like a
| |
| thirty-horse team of galloping horses, became
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| very nearly uncontrollable.
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|
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| It was a fast and furious period. The whole
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| country was ablaze with a passion of prosperity.
| |
| After generations of conflict, the men with large
| |
| ideas had at last put to rout the men of small
| |
| ideas. The waste and folly 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 the telephone is essentially the instrument of
| |
| co-working and interdependent people, it found
| |
| itself suddenly welcomed as the most popular and
| |
| indispensable of all the agencies that put men in
| |
| touch with each other.
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|
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| To describe this growth in a single sentence,
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| we might say that the Bell telephone secured its
| |
| first million of capital in 1879; its first million of
| |
| earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in
| |
| 1884; its first million of surplus in 1885. It had
| |
| paid out its first million for legal expenses by
| |
| 1886; began first to send a million 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 plunging progress
| |
| of the Bell Companies in this period of expansion,
| |
| that by 1905 they had swept past all
| |
| European countries combined, not only in the
| |
| quality of the service but in the actual number of
| |
| telephones in use. This, too, without a cent of
| |
| public money, or the protection of a tariff, or the
| |
| prestige of a governmental bureau.
| |
|
| |
| By 1892 Boston and New York were talking
| |
| to Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, and Washington.
| |
| One-half of the people of the United
| |
| States were within talking distance of each other.
| |
| The THOUSAND-MILE TALK had ceased to be a fairy
| |
| tale. Several years later the western end of the
| |
| line was pushed over the plains to Nebraska,
| |
| enabling the spoken word 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 booth,
| |
| draped with silken curtains. This was the
| |
| famous "Room Nine." By such and many other
| |
| allurements a larger idea of telephone service was
| |
| given to the public mind; until in 1909 at least
| |
| eighteen thousand New York-Chicago conversa-
| |
| tions were held, and the revenue from strictly
| |
| long-distance messages was twenty-two thousand
| |
| dollars a day.
| |
|
| |
| By 1906 even the Rocky Mountain Bell Company
| |
| had grown to be a ten-million-dollar enterprise.
| |
| It began at Salt Lake City with a
| |
| hundred telephones, in 1880. Then it reached
| |
| out to master an area of four hundred and
| |
| thirteen thousand square miles--a great Lone
| |
| Land of undeveloped resources. Its linemen
| |
| 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 ear-rings and bracelets; and the
| |
| bears, which mistook the humming of the wires
| |
| for the buzzing of bees, and persisted in gnawing
| |
| the poles down. With the most heroic
| |
| optimism, this Rocky Mountain Company persevered
| |
| until, in 1906, it had created a seventy-
| |
| thousand-mile nerve-system for the far West.
| |
|
| |
| Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou-
| |
| sand telephones in use, in her two hundred
| |
| square miles of area. The business had been
| |
| built up by General Anson Stager, who was
| |
| himself wealthy, and able 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 share. The old-
| |
| timers--the men who clambered over roof-tops
| |
| in 1878 and tacked iron wires wherever they could
| |
| without being chased off--are still for the most
| |
| part in control of the Chicago company.
| |
|
| |
| But as might have been expected, it was New
| |
| York City that was the record-breaker when the
| |
| era of telephone expansion arrived. Here the
| |
| flood of big 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 and breathless activity,
| |
| 65,000 new telephones were put on desks or hung
| |
| on walls--an average of one new user for every
| |
| two minutes of the business day.
| |
|
| |
| Literally tons, and hundreds of tons, of
| |
| telephones were hauled in drays from the factory
| |
| and put in place in New York's homes and
| |
| offices. More and more were demanded, until
| |
| to-day there are more telephones 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 telephones
| |
| of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester,
| |
| Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffleld, Bristol,
| |
| and Belfast, and there will even then be barely as
| |
| many as are carrying the conversations of this
| |
| one American city.
| |
|
| |
| In 1879 the New York telephone directory was
| |
| a small card, showing two hundred and fifty-two
| |
| names; but now it has grown to be an eight-hundred-page
| |
| quarterly, with a circulation of half a
| |
| million, and requiring twenty drays, forty 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. Incredible as it may seem
| |
| to foreigners, it is literally true that in a single
| |
| building in New York, the Hudson Terminal,
| |
| there are more telephones than in Odessa or
| |
| Madrid, more than in the two kingdoms of
| |
| Greece and Bulgaria combined.
| |
|
| |
| Merely to operate this system requires an army
| |
| of more than five thousand girls. Merely to keep
| |
| their records requires two hundred and thirty-five
| |
| million sheets of paper a year. 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 Bell Company to buy yearly six
| |
| thousand pounds of tea, seventeen thousand
| |
| pounds of coffee, forty-eight thousand cans of
| |
| condensed milk, and one hundred and forty
| |
| barrels of sugar.
| |
|
| |
| The myriad wires of this New York system
| |
| are tingling with talk every minute of the day
| |
| and night. They are most at rest between three
| |
| and four o'clock in the morning, although even
| |
| then there are usually ten calls a minute. Between
| |
| five and six o'clock, two thousand New
| |
| Yorkers are awake and at the 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 only
| |
| the dawn of the day's business. By half-past
| |
| eight it is doubled; by nine it is trebled; by ten it
| |
| is multiplied sixfold; and by eleven the roar has
| |
| become an incredible babel of one hundred and
| |
| eighty thousand conversations an hour, with
| |
| fifty new voices clamoring at the exchanges every
| |
| second.
| |
|
| |
| This is "the peak of the load." It is the topmost
| |
| pinnacle of talk. It is the utmost degree of
| |
| service that the telephone has been required to
| |
| give in any city. And it is as much a world's
| |
| wonder, to men and women of imagination, as
| |
| the steel mills of Homestead or the turbine
| |
| leviathans that curve across the Atlantic Ocean
| |
| in four and a half days.
| |
|
| |
| As to the men who built it up: Charles F.
| |
| Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are
| |
| still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now in
| |
| Cutler's place at the head of the New York
| |
| Company, has been the operating chief 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 just as foreigners go to Pittsburg
| |
| to see the steel business at its best; just as
| |
| they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the New
| |
| Farmer, so they make pilgrimages to Bethell's
| |
| office to learn the profession of telephony.
| |
|
| |
| This unparalleled telephone system of New
| |
| York grew up without having at any time the
| |
| rivalry of competition. But in many other cities
| |
| and especially in the Middle West, there sprang
| |
| up in 1895 a medley 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 a few years there
| |
| were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe
| |
| companies. And by 1901 they had put in use
| |
| more than a million telephones and were professing
| |
| to have a capital of a hundred millions.
| |
|
| |
| Most of these companies were necessary and
| |
| did much to expand the telephone business into
| |
| new territory. They were in fact small mutual
| |
| associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers,
| |
| whose aim was to get telephone service 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 rich. Instead of legitimately
| |
| extending telephone lines into communities
| |
| that had none, these promoters proceeded to
| |
| inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system
| |
| upon whatever cities would give them permission
| |
| to do so.
| |
|
| |
| In this way, masked as competition, the
| |
| nuisance and waste of duplication began in most
| |
| American cities. The telephone business was
| |
| still so young, it was so little appreciated even by
| |
| the telephone officials and engineers, that the
| |
| public regarded a second or a third telephone
| |
| system in one city as quite a possible and desirable
| |
| innovation. "We have two ears," said one
| |
| promoter; "why not therefore have two telephones?"
| |
|
| |
| This duplication went merrily on for years
| |
| before it was generally discovered that the telephone
| |
| is not an ear, but a nerve system; and that
| |
| such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system
| |
| has never been attempted 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 cheaper rates and
| |
| better service. They did not for years discover
| |
| that two telephone companies in one city means
| |
| either half service or double cost, just as two fire
| |
| departments or two post offices would.
| |
|
| |
| Some of these duplicate companies built up a
| |
| complete plant, and gave good local service,
| |
| while others proved to be mere stock bubbles.
| |
| Most of them were over-capitalized, depending
| |
| upon public sympathy to atone for deficiencies in
| |
| equipment. 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. So high has been the death-rate among
| |
| these isolated companies that at a recent conven-
| |
| tion of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel
| |
| was made of thirty-five pieces of wood, taken
| |
| from thirty-five switchboards of thirty-five
| |
| extinct companies.
| |
|
| |
| A study of twelve single-system cities and
| |
| twenty-seven double-system cities shows that
| |
| there are about eleven per cent more telephones
| |
| under the double-system, and that where the
| |
| second system is put in, every fifth 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 one city. Taking the United
| |
| States as a whole, there are to-day fully two
| |
| hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying
| |
| for two telephones instead of one, an
| |
| economic waste of at least ten million dollars a
| |
| year.
| |
|
| |
| A fair-minded survey of the entire independent
| |
| telephone movement would probably show that
| |
| it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants
| |
| usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably
| |
| for several years a spur to the Bell Com-
| |
| panies. 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
| |
| automatic switchboard--a brilliant invention,
| |
| which is now in its experimental period. In the
| |
| main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and
| |
| troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive
| |
| movement among the farmers.
| |
|
| |
| By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force.
| |
| It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad
| |
| ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the
| |
| rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone
| |
| promoters learned the limitations 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 followed by
| |
| three hundred and fifty thousand more. After
| |
| this landslide to the policy of consolidation, there
| |
| still remained a fairly large assortment of
| |
| independent companies; but they had lost their
| |
| dreams and their illusions.
| |
|
| |
| As might have been expected, the independent
| |
| movement produced a number of competent local
| |
| leaders, but none of national importance. The
| |
| Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered
| |
| by men who had for a quarter of a century been
| |
| surveying telephone problems from a national
| |
| point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards,
| |
| was Theodore N. 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 down the
| |
| first principles of its policy. In the second and
| |
| third acts he had no place; but when the curtain
| |
| rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the
| |
| central figure, standing white-haired among his
| |
| captains, and pushing forward the completion
| |
| of the "grand telephonic system" that he had
| |
| dreamed of when the telephone was three
| |
| years old.
| |
|
| |
| Thus it came about that the telephone business
| |
| was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson,
| |
| expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being
| |
| consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together
| |
| into a stupendous Bell System--a federation of
| |
| self-governing 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 come from long experience,
| |
| immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists,
| |
| and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System
| |
| is strong," says Vail, "because we are all tied
| |
| up together; and the success of one is therefore
| |
| the concern of all."
| |
|
| |
| The Bell System! Here we have the motif
| |
| of American telephone development. Here is
| |
| the most comprehensive idea that has entered any
| |
| telephone 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 which we can compare it. It is so wide-
| |
| spread that few are aware of its greatness. It
| |
| is strung out over fifty thousand cities and
| |
| communities.
| |
|
| |
| If it were all gathered together into one place,
| |
| this Bell System, it would make a city of
| |
| Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would
| |
| contain half of the telephone property of the
| |
| world. Its actual wealth would be fully $760,000,000,
| |
| and its revenue would be greater than
| |
| the revenue of the city of New York.
| |
|
| |
| Part of the property of the city of Telephonia
| |
| consists of ten million poles, as many as would
| |
| make a fence from New York to California, or
| |
| put a stockade 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 twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if
| |
| their city were a hundred square miles in extent,
| |
| they might set up a seven-ply wall around it with
| |
| these poles.
| |
|
| |
| Wire, too! Eleven million miles of it! This
| |
| city of Telephonia would be the capital of an
| |
| empire of wire. Not all the men in New 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 on the other side the
| |
| wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the
| |
| last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in
| |
| the air.
| |
|
| |
| What would this city do for a living? It
| |
| would make two-thirds of the telephones, cables,
| |
| and switchboards of all countries. Nearly one-
| |
| quarter of its citizens would work in factories,
| |
| while the others would be busy in six thousand
| |
| exchanges, making it possible for the people of
| |
| the United States to talk to one another at the
| |
| rate of SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION CONVERSATIONS A YEAR.
| |
|
| |
| The pay-envelope army that moves to work
| |
| every morning in Telephonia would be a host of
| |
| one hundred and ten thousand men and girls,
| |
| mostly girls,--as many girls as 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
| |
| would pass before the last company would arrive
| |
| at the reviewing stand. In single file this throng
| |
| of Telephonians would make a living wall from
| |
| New York to New Haven.
| |
|
| |
| Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander
| |
| Graham Bell was the only resident in 1875.
| |
| It has been built up without the backing of any
| |
| great bank or multi-millionaire. There have
| |
| been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers,
| |
| Rothschilds, Harrimans. There are even
| |
| now 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 States. No other industrial organism of
| |
| equal size owes foreign countries so little. Alike
| |
| in its origin, its development, and its highest
| |
| point of efficiency and expansion, the telephone is
| |
| as essentially American as the Declaration of
| |
| Independence or the monument on Bunker Hill.
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
