me the Western Electric became the headquarters of
telephonic apparatus. It was the Big Shop, all roads led to it. No
matter where a new idea was born, sooner or later it came knocking at
the door of the Western Electric to receive a material body. Here were
the skilled workmen who became the hands of the telephone business. And
here, too, were many of the ablest inventors and engineers, who did most
to develop the cables and switchboards of to-day.

In Boston, Watson had resigned in 1882, and in his place, a year or
two later stood a timely new arrival named E. T. Gilliland. This
really notable man was a friend in need to the telephone. He had been
a manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Indianapolis, until Vail's
policy of consolidation drew him into the central group of pioneers
and pathfinders. For five years Gilliland led the way as a developer
of better and cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficult
situation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found a
way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephone
agents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums of
capital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence,
and used them to carry the telephone business through the most critical
period of its life, when there was little time or money to risk
on experiments. He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for
in-stance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that was
not even imagined possible by any one else. It was the most practical
and complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against all
comers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly more
elaborate and expensive.

By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electric
in Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-school
graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose;
and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the
difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history
and less prestige. These young adventurers, most of whom are still
alive, became the makers of industrial history. They were unquestionably
the founders of the present science of telephone engineering.

The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than
any of them imagined. It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities. It was on
the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task-