a preparatory
period.

Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of the
telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in
Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted
iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by
profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as
a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection
of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek
language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used
the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this
preference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He was
above all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the
central figure in the telephone world.

But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time to
have at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre.

He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it clean
and clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever
had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by
borrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to the
strength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in
1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Under
his regime great things were done in the development of the art. The
business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in
his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--that
was the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminent
genius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation of
many minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic.

By 1896, when the Common Battery system created a new era, the telephone
engineer had pretty well mastered his simpler troubles. He was able to
handle his wires, no matter how many. By this time, too, the public
was ready for the telephone. A new generation had grown up, without the
prejudices of its fathers. People had grown away from the telegraphic
habit of thought, which was that wire communications were expensive
luxuries for the few. The telephone was, in fact, a new social nerve,
so new and so novel that very nearly twenty years went by before it
had fully gr