s well as mechanical
genius, explains this achievement. For the first four or five years
of its existence, the new invention had hard sailing. Bell and Thomas
Watson, in order to fortify their finances, were forced to travel around
the country, giving a kind of vaudeville entertainment. Bell made a
speech explaining the new invention, while a cornet player, located in
another part of the town, played solos, the music reaching the audience
through several telephone instruments placed against the walls. Watson,
also located at a distance, varied the program by singing songs via
telephone. These lecture tours not only gave Bell the money which
he sorely needed but advertised the innovation. There followed a few
scattering attempts to introduce the telephone into every-day use and
telephone exchanges were established in New York, Boston, Bridgeport,
and New Haven. But these pioneers had the hostility of the most powerful
corporation of the day--the Western Union Telegraph Company--and they
lacked aggressive leaders.

In 1878, Mr. Gardiner Hubbard, Bell's earliest backer, and now his
father-in-law, became acquainted with a young man who was then serving
in Washington as General Superintendent of the Railway Mail Service.
This young man was Theodore N. Vail. His energy and enterprise so
impressed Hubbard that he immediately asked Vail to become General
Manager of the company which he was then forming to exploit the
telephone. Viewed from the retrospection of forty years this offer
certainly looks like one of the greatest prizes in American business.
What it signified at that time, however, is apparent from the fact that
the office paid a salary of $3500 a year and that for the first ten
years Vail did not succeed in collecting a dollar of this princely
remuneration. Yet it was a happy fortune, not only for the Bell Company
but for the nation, that placed Vail at the head of this struggling
enterprise. There was a certain appropriateness in his selection, even
then. His granduncle, Stephen Vail, had built the engines for the first
steamship to cross the Atlantic. A cousin had worked with Morse while he
was inventing the telegraph. Vail, who was born in Carroll County, Ohio,
in 1845, after spending two years as a medical student, suddenly shifted
his plans and became a telegraph operator. Then he entered the Railway
Mail service; in this service he completely revolutionized the system
and introduced reforms that exist at the pr