elephone system without a switchboard. If there had been at first
two separate companies, one owning the telephone and the other the
switchboard, neither could have done the business.

Several years before the telephone got a switchboard of its own, it made
use of the boards that had been designed for the telegraph. These were
as simple as wheelbarrows, and became absurdly inadequate as soon as
the telephone business began to grow. Then there came adaptations by the
dozen. Every telephone manager became by compulsion an inventor. There
was no source of information and each exchange did the best it could.
Hundreds of patents were taken out. And by 1884 there had come to be a
fairly definite idea of what a telephone switchboard ought to be.

The one man who did most to create the switchboard, who has been its
devotee for more than thirty years, is a certain modest and little known
inventor, still alive and busy, named Charles E. Scribner. Of the nine
thousand switchboard patents, Scribner holds six hundred or more. Ever
since 1878, when he devised the first "jackknife switch," Scribner has
been the wizard of the switchboard. It was he who saw most clearly its
requirements. Hundreds of others have helped, but Scribner was the one
man who persevered, who never asked for an easier job, and who in the
end became the master of his craft.

It may go far to explain the peculiar genius of Scribner to say that he
was born in 1858, in the year of the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and
that his mother was at the time profoundly interested in the work and
anxious for its success. His father was a judge in Toledo; but young
Scribner showed no aptitude for the tangles of the law. He preferred the
tangles of wire and system in miniature, which he and several other boys
had built and learned to operate. These boys had a benefactor in an old
bachelor named Thomas Bond. He had no special interest in telegraphy.
He was a dealer in hides. But he was attracted by the cleverness of the
boys and gave them money to buy more wires and more batteries. One day
he noticed an invention of young Scribner's--a telegraph repeater.

"This may make your fortune," he said, "but no mechanic in Toledo
can make a proper model of it for you. You must go to Chicago, where
telegraphic apparatus is made." The boy gladly took his advice and went
to the Western Electric factory in Chicago. Here he accidentally met
Enos M. Barton, the head of the factory. Barton no