After the telephone had been born in Boston, baptized in the Patent
Office, and given a royal reception at the Philadelphia Centennial, it
might be supposed that its life thenceforth would be one of peace and
pleasantness. But as this is history, and not fancy, there must be
set down the very surprising fact that the young newcomer received no
welcome and no notice from the great business world. "It is a scientific
toy," said the men of trade and commerce. "It is an interesting
instrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; but
it can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to put
a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory."
Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of
ridicule. He was an "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says
he can talk through a wire." The London Times alluded pompously to the
telephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasons
why speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittent
nature of the electric current. Almost all electricians--the men who
were supposed to know--pronounced the telephone an impossible thing; and
those who did not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that Bell had
stumbled upon some freakish use of electricity, which could never be of
any practical value.
Even though he came late in the succession of inventors, Bell had to run
the gantlet of scoffing and adversity. By the reception that the public
gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose first
sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first
reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow,
and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a
nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad
freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a
fool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind."
The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and
extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer
and the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was too freakish, too
bizarre, to be used outside of the laboratory and the museum. No one,
literally, could understand how it worked; and the only man who offered
a clear solution of the mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained
that there was "a hole through the middle of the wire."
People who talked for the first time into a telephone box had a sort of
stage fright. They felt foolish. To do so seemed an absurd performance,
especially when they had to shout at the top of their voices. Plainly,
whatever of convenience there might be in this new contrivance was
far outweighed by the loss of personal dignity; and very few men
had sufficient imagination to picture the telephone as a part of the
machinery of their daily work. The banker said it might do well enough
for grocers, but that it would never be of any value to banking; and the
grocer said it might do well enough for bankers, but that it would never
be of any value to grocers.
As Bell had worked out his invention in Salem, one editor displayed the
headline, "Salem Witchcraft." The New York Herald said: "The effect is
weird and almost supernatural." The Providence Press said: "It is hard
to resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league
with it." And The Boston Times said, in an editorial of bantering
ridicule: "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East
Boston; but the most serious aspect of this invention is the awful and
irresponsible power it will give to the average mother-in-law, who will
be able to send her voice around the habitable globe."
There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in American cities in 1876,
looking with sharp eyes in all directions for business chances; but not
one of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his patent. Not one came
running for a State contract. And neither did any legislature, or city
council, come forward to the task of giving the people a cheap and
efficient telephone service. As for Bell himself, he was not a man of
affairs. In all practical business matters, he was as incompetent as a
Byron or a Shelley. He had done his part, and it now remained for men
of different abilities to take up his telephone and adapt it to the uses
and conditions of the business world.
The first man to undertake this work was Gardiner G. Hubbard, who
became soon afterwards the father-in-law of Bell. He, too, was a man
of enthusiasm rather than of efficiency. He was not a man of wealth
or business experience, but he was admirably suited to introduce the
telephone to a hostile public. His father had been a judge of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court; and he himself was a lawyer whose practice
had been mainly in matters of legislation. He was, in 1876, a man of
venerable appearance, with white hair, worn long, and a patriarchal
beard. He was a familiar figure in Washington, and well known among the
public men of his day. A versatile and entertaining companion, by turns
prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbard
became a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of the
telephone business.
No other citizen had done more for the city of Cambridge than Hubbard.
It was he who secured gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure water, and a
street-railway to Boston. He had gone through the South in 1860 in
the patriotic hope that he might avert the impending Civil War. He
had induced the legislature to establish the first public school for
deaf-mutes, the school that drew Bell to Boston in 1871. And he had been
for years a most restless agitator for improvements in telegraphy and
the post office. So, as a promoter of schemes for the public good,
Hubbard was by no means a novice. His first step toward capturing
the attention of an indifferent nation was to beat the big drum of
publicity. He saw that this new idea of telephoning must be made
familiar to the public mind. He talked telephone by day and by night.
Whenever he travelled, he carried a pair of the magical instruments
in his valise, and gave demonstrations on trains and in hotels.
He buttonholed every influential man who crossed his path. He was a
veritable "Ancient Mariner" of the telephone. No possible listener was
allowed to escape.
Further to promote this campaign of publicity, Hubbard encouraged Bell
and Watson to perform a series of sensational feats with the telephone.
A telegraph wire between New York and Boston was borrowed for half an
hour, and in the presence of Sir William Thomson, Bell sent a tune
over the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile line. "Can you hear?" he asked the
operator at the New York end. "Elegantly," responded the operator. "What
tune?" asked Bell. "Yankee Doodle," came the answer. Shortly afterwards,
while Bell was visiting at his father's house in Canada, he bought
up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence
between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village
eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean
quotations over the wire.
There was still a large percentage of people who denied that spoken
words could be transmitted by a wire. When Watson talked to Bell
at public demonstrations, there were newspaper editors who referred
sceptically to "the supposititious Watson." So, to silence these
doubters, Bell and Watson planned a most severe test of the telephone.
They borrowed the telegraph line between Boston and the Cambridge
Observatory, and attached a telephone to each end. Then they maintained,
for three hours or longer, the FIRST SUSTAINED conversation by
telephone, each one taking careful notes of what he said and of what
he heard. These notes were published in parallel columns in The Boston
Advertiser, October 19, 1876, and proved beyond question that the
telephone was now a practical success.
After this, one event crowded quickly on the heels of another. A series
of ten lectures was arranged for Bell, at a hundred dollars a lecture,
which was the first money payment he had received for his invention. His
opening night was in Salem, before an audience of five hundred people,
and with Mrs. Sand-ers, the motherly old lady who had sheltered Bell in
the days of his experiment, sitting proudly in one of the front seats.
A pole was set up at the front of the hall, supporting the end of a
telegraph wire that ran from Salem to Boston. And Watson, who became the
first public talker by telephone, sent messages from Boston to various
members of the audience. An account of this lecture was sent by
telephone to The Boston Globe, which announced the next morning--
"This special despatch of the Globe has been transmitted by telephone
in the presence of twenty people, who have thus been witnesses to a feat
never before attempted--the sending of news over the space of sixteen
miles by the human voice."
This Globe despatch awoke the newspaper editors with an unexpected jolt.
For the first time they began to notice that there was a new word in the
language, and a new idea in the scientific world. No newspaper had made
any mention whatever of the telephone for seventy-five days after Bell
received his patent. Not one of the swarm of reporters who thronged the
Philadelphia Centennial had regarded the telephone as a matter of any
public interest. But when a column of news was sent by telephone to
The Boston Globe, the whole newspaper world was agog with excitement.
A thousand pens wrote the name of Bell. Requests to repeat his lecture
came to Bell from Cyrus W. Field, the veteran of the Atlantic Cable,
from the poet Longfellow, and from many others.
As he was by profession an elocutionist, Bell was able to make the most
of these opportunities. His lectures became popular entertainments. They
were given in the largest halls. At one lecture two Japanese gentlemen
were induced to talk to one another in their own language, via the
telephone. At a second lecture a band played "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
in Boston, and was heard by an audience of two thousand people in
Providence. At a third, Signor Ferranti, who was in Providence, sang a
selection from "The Marriage of Figaro" to an audience in Boston. At a
fourth, an exhortation from Moody and a song from Sankey came over the
vibrating wire. And at a fifth, in New Haven, Bell stood sixteen Yale
professors in line, hand in hand, and talked through their bodies--a
feat which was then, and is to-day, almost too wonderful to believe.
Very slowly these lectures, and the tireless activity of Hubbard, pushed
back the ridicule and the incredulity; and in the merry month of May,
1877, a man named Emery drifted into Hubbard's office from the near-by
city of Charlestown, and leased two telephones for twenty actual
dollars--the first money ever paid for a telephone. This was the first
feeble sign that such a novelty as the telephone business could be
established; and no money ever looked handsomer than this twenty dollars
did to Bell, Sanders, Hubbard, and Watson. It was the tiny first-fruit
of fortune.
Greatly encouraged, they prepared a little circular which was the first
advertisement of the telephone business. It is an oddly simple little
document to-day, but to the 1877 brain it was startling. It modestly
claimed that a telephone was superior to a telegraph for three reasons:
"(1) No skilled operator is required, but direct communication may be
had by speech without the intervention of a third person.
"(2) The communication is much more rapid, the average number of words
transmitted in a minute by the Morse sounder being from fifteen to
twenty, by telephone from one to two hundred.
"(3) No expense is required, either for its operation or repair. It
needs no battery and has no complicated machinery. It is unsurpassed for
economy and simplicity."
The only telephone line in the world at this time was between the
Williams' workshop in Boston and the home of Mr. Williams in Somerville.
But in May, 1877, a young man named E. T. Holmes, who was running a
burglar-alarm business in Boston, proposed that a few telephones be
linked to his wires. He was a friend and customer of Williams, and
suggested this plan half in jest and half in earnest. Hubbard was quick
to seize this opportunity, and at once lent Holmes a dozen telephones.
Without asking permission, Holmes went into six banks and nailed up
a telephone in each. Five bankers made no protest, but the sixth
indignantly ordered "that playtoy" to be taken out. The other five
telephones could be connected by a switch in Holmes's office, and thus
was born the first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here it ran for
several weeks as a telephone system by day and a burglar-alarm by night.
No money was paid by the bankers. The service was given to them as
an exhibition and an advertisement. The little shelf with its five
telephones was no more like the marvellous exchanges of to-day than
a canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was unquestionably the first place
where several telephone wires came together and could be united.
Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones out of the banks, and
started a real telephone business among the express companies of
Boston. But by this time several exchanges had been opened for ordinary
business, in New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia. Also,
a man from Michigan had arrived, with the hardihood to ask for a State
agency--George W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that Hubbard
joyfully gave him everything he asked--a perpetual right to the whole
State of Michigan. Balch was not required to pay a cent in advance,
except his railway fare, and before he was many years older he had sold
his lease for a handsome fortune of a quarter of a million dollars,
honestly earned by his initiative and enterprise.
By August, when Bell's patent was sixteen months old, there were 778
telephones in use. This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard.
He decided that the time had come to organize the business, so
he created a simple agreement which he called the "Bell Telephone
Association." This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard and Sanders a
three-tenths interest apiece in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THERE
WAS NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had. The four men had at this time
an absolute monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody else was
quite willing that they should have it.
The only man who had money and dared to stake it on the future of the
telephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for business
reasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily by
sentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders's
little son, and was soon to marry Hubbard's daughter.
Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that so much money would be
needed. He was not rich. His entire business, which was that of cutting
out soles for shoe manufacturers, was not at any time worth more than
thirty-five thousand dollars. Yet, from 1874 to 1878, he had advanced
nine-tenths of the money that was spent on the telephone. He had paid
Bell's room-rent, and Watson's wages, and Williams's expenses, and
the cost of the exhibit at the Centennial. The first five thousand
telephones, and more, were made with his money. And so many long,
expensive months dragged by before any relief came to Sanders, that
he was compelled, much against his will and his business judgment, to
stretch his credit within an inch of the breaking-point to help Bell and
the telephone. Desperately he signed note after note until he faced a
total of one hundred and ten thousand dollars. If the new "scientific
toy" succeeded, which he often doubted, he would be the richest citizen
in Haverhill; and if it failed, which he sorely feared, he would be a
bankrupt.
A disheartening series of rebuffs slowly forced the truth in upon
Sanders's mind that the business world refused to accept the telephone
as an article of commerce. It was a toy, a plaything, a scientific
wonder, but not a necessity to be bought and used for ordinary purposes
by ordinary people. Capitalists treated it exactly as they treated the
Atlantic Cable project when Cyrus Field visited Boston in 1862. They
admired and marvelled; but not a man subscribed a dollar. Also, Sanders
very soon learned that it was a most unpropitious time for the setting
afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion.
What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and the
bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in the
news of the day to encourage investors.
It was impossible for Sanders, or Bell, or Hubbard, to prepare any
definite plan. No matter what the plan might have been, they had no
money to put it through. They believed that they had something new and
marvellous, which some one, somewhere, would be willing to buy. Until
this good genie should arrive, they could do no more than flounder
ahead, and take whatever business was the nearest and the cheapest. So
while Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-pictures of a universal
telephone service to applauding audiences, Sanders and Hubbard were
leasing telephones two by two, to business men who previously had been
using the private lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company.
This great corporation was at the time their natural and inevitable
enemy. It had swallowed most of its competitors, and was reaching out to
monopolize all methods of communication by wire. The rosiest hope that
shone in front of Sanders and Hubbard was that the Western Union might
conclude to buy the Bell patents, just as it had already bought many
others. In one moment of discouragement they had offered the telephone
to President Orton, of the Western Union, for $100,000; and Orton had
refused it. "What use," he asked pleasantly, "could this company make of
an electrical toy?"
But besides the operation of its own wires, the Western Union was
supplying customers with various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dial
telegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty words a minute. These
accurate instruments, it believed, could never be displaced by such a
scientific oddity as the telephone. And it continued to believe this
until one of its subsidiary companies--the Gold and Stock--reported that
several of its machines had been superseded by telephones.
At once the Western Union awoke from its indifference. Even this tiny
nibbling at its business must be stopped. It took action quickly and
organized the "American Speaking-Telephone Company," with $300,000
capital, and with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and Dolbear,
on its staff. With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige, it
swept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon Bell's
patent with as little concern as an elephant can have when he tramples
upon an ant's nest. To the complete bewilderment of Bell, it coolly
announced that it had "the only original telephone," and that it was
ready to supply "superior telephones with all the latest improvements
made by the original inventors--Dolbear, Gray, and Edison."
The result was strange and unexpected. The Bell group, instead of being
driven from the field, were at once lifted to a higher level in the
business world. The effect was as if the Standard Oil Company were to
commence the manufacture of aeroplanes. In a flash, the telephone ceased
to be a "scientific toy," and became an article of commerce. It began
for the first time to be taken seriously. And the Western Union, in
the endeavor to protect its private lines, became involuntarily a
bell-wether to lead capitalists in the direction of the telephone.
Sanders's relatives, who were many and rich, came to his rescue. Most of
them were well-known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls,
Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men, together with Colonel William
H. Forbes, who came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the first
capitalists who, for purely business reasons, invested money in the
Bell patents. Two months after the Western Union had given its weighty
endorsement to the telephone, these men organized a company to do
business in New England only, and put fifty thousand dollars in its
treasury.
In a short time the delighted Hubbard found himself leasing telephones
at the rate of a thousand a month. He was no longer a promoter, but a
general manager. Men were standing in line to ask for agencies. Crude
little telephone exchanges were being started in a dozen or more cities.
There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise; and the next step,
clearly, was to create a business organization. None of the partners
were competent to undertake such a work. Hubbard had little aptitude as
an organizer; Bell had none; and Sanders was held fast by his leather
interests. Here, at last, after four years of the most heroic effort,
were the raw materials out of which a telephone business could be
constructed. But who was to be the builder, and where was he to be
found?
One morning the indefatigable Hubbard solved the problem. "Watson," he
said, "there's a young man in Washington who can handle this situation,
and I want you to run down and see what you think of him." Watson went,
reported favorably, and in a day or so the young man received a letter
from Hubbard, offering him the position of General Manager, at a salary
of thirty-five hundred dollars a year. "We rely," Hubbard said, "upon
your executive ability, your fidelity, and unremitting 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's-harps 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 carry him another inch.
If Bradley throws up his hand, I will unfold to you my last desperate
plan."
And if the company had little money, it had less credit. Once when Vail
had ordered a small bill of goods from a merchant named Tillotson, of
15 Dey Street, New York, the merchant replied that the goods were ready,
and so was the bill, which was seven dollars. By a strange coincidence,
the magnificent building of the New York Telephone Company stands to-day
on the site of Tillotson's store.
Month after month, the little Bell Company lived from hand to mouth. No
salaries were paid in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid at all.
In Watson's note-book there are such entries during this period as
"Lent Bell fifty cents," "Lent Hubbard twenty cents," "Bought one bottle
beer--too bad can't have beer every day." More than once Hubbard would
have gone hungry had not Devonshire, the only clerk, shared with him
the contents of a dinner-pail. Each one of the little group was beset by
taunts and temptations. Watson was offered ten thousand dollars for
his one-tenth interest, and hesitated three days before refusing it.
Railroad companies offered Vail a salary that was higher and sure, if he
would superintend their mail business. And as for Sanders, his folly was
the talk of Haverhill. One Haverhill capitalist, E. J. M. Hale, stopped
him on the street and asked, "Have n't you got a good leather business,
Mr. Sanders?" "Yes," replied Sanders. "Well," said Hale, "you had better
attend to it and quit playing on wind instruments." Sanders's banker,
too, became uneasy on one occasion and requested him to call at the
bank. "Mr. Sanders," he said, "I will be obliged if you will take that
telephone stock out of the bank, and give me in its place your note for
thirty thousand dollars. I am expecting the examiner here in a few days,
and I don't want to get caught with that stuff in the bank."
Then, in the very midnight of this depression, poor Bell returned from
England, whither he and his bride had gone on their honeymoon, and
announced that he had no money; that he had failed to establish a
telephone business in England; and that he must have a thousand dollars
at once to pay his urgent debts. He was thoroughly discouraged and sick.
As he lay in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he wrote a cry for help
to the embattled little company that was making its desperate fight to
protect his patents. "Thousands of telephones are now in operation in
all parts of the country," he said, "yet I have not yet received one
cent from my invention. On the contrary, I am largely out of pocket
by my researches, as the mere value of the profession that I have
sacrificed during my three years' work, amounts to twelve thousand
dollars."
Fortunately, there came, in almost the same mail with Bell's letter,
another letter from a young Bostonian named Francis Blake, with the good
news that he had invented a transmitter as satisfactory as Edison's, and
that he would prefer to sell it for stock instead of cash. If ever a man
came as an angel of light, that man was Francis Blake. The possession of
his transmitter instantly put the Bell Company on an even footing with
the Western Union, in the matter of apparatus. It encouraged the few
capitalists who had invested money, and it stirred others to come
forward. The general business situation had by this time become
more settled, and in four months the company had twenty-two thousand
telephones in use, and had reorganized into the National Bell Telephone
Company, with $850, 000 capital and with Colonel Forbes as its first
President. Forbes now picked up the load that had been carried so long
by Sanders. As the son of an East India merchant and the son-in-law of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a Bostonian of the Brahmin caste. He was
a big, four-square man who was both popular and efficient; and his
leadership at this crisis was of immense value.
This reorganization put the telephone business into the hands of
competent business men at every point. It brought the heroic and
experimental period to an end. From this time onwards the telephone
had strong friends in the financial world. It was being attacked by
the Western Union and by rival inventors who were jealous of Bell's
achievement. It was being half-starved by cheap rates and crippled by
clumsy apparatus. It was being abused and grumbled at by an impatient
public. But the art of making and marketing it had at last been built
up into a commercial enterprise. It was now a business, fighting for its
life.