as well as individuals.

Four months after he had prophesied the "grand telephonic system," he
encouraged Charles J. Glidden, of world-tour fame, to build a telephone
line between Boston and Lowell. This was the first inter-city line. It
was well placed, as the owners of the Lowell mills lived in Boston, and
it made a small profit from the start. This success cheered Vail on to
a master-effort. He resolved to build a line from Boston to Providence,
and was so stubbornly bent upon doing this that when the Bell Company
refused to act, he picked up the risk and set off with it alone.
He organized a company of well-known Rhode Islanders--nicknamed the
"Governors' Company"--and built the line. It was a failure at first,
and went by the name of "Vail's Folly." But Engineer Carty, by a happy
thought, DOUBLED THE WIRE, and thus in a moment established two new
factors in the telephone business--the Metallic Circuit and the Long
Distance line.

At once the Bell Company came over to Vail's point of view, bought
his new line, and launched out upon what seemed to be the foolhardy
enterprise of stringing a double wire from Boston to New York. This
was to be not only the longest of all telephone lines, strung on ten
thousand poles; it was to be a line de luxe, built of glistening red
copper, not iron. Its cost was to be seventy thousand dollars, which was
an enormous sum in those hardscrabble days. There was much opposition to
such extravagance, and much ridicule. "I would n't take that line as a
gift," said one of the Bell Company's officials.

But when the last coil of wire was stretched into place, and the first
"Hello" leaped from Boston to New York, the new line was a victorious
success. It carried messages from the first day; and more, it raised the
whole telephone business to a higher level. It swept away the prejudice
that telephone service could become nothing more than a neighborhood
affair. "It was the salvation of the business," said Edward J. Hill. It
marked a turning-point in the history of the telephone, when the day
of small things was ended and the day of great things was begun. No
one man, no hundred men, had created it. It was the final result of ten
years of invention and improvement.

While this epoch-making line was being strung, Vail was pushing his
"grand telephonic system" policy by organizing The American Telephone
and Telegraph Company. This, too, was a master-stroke. It was the
introduction of the staf