own into place, and before the social body developed the
instinct of using it.

Not that the difficulties of the telephone engineers were over, for they
were not. They have seemed to grow more numerous and complex every year.
But by 1896 enough had been done to warrant a forward movement. For the
next ten-year period the keynote of telephone history was EXPANSION.
Under the prevailing flat-rate plan of payment, all customers paid
the same yearly price and then used their telephones as often as they
pleased. This was a simple method, and the most satisfactory for small
towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be
suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240,
which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens as
though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling
the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the
wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service
and others too much. It was a very unsatisfactory situation.

How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small
users--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did
most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone
business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief
of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the
statesmen of the telephone. For more than thirty years he has been the
"candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and
criticising. Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly
cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a
zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service. It was he
who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing
them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts. And it was he who
"broke the jam," as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE
RATE system.

By this plan, which U. N. Bethell developed to its highest point in New
York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain
number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this
number. The large user pays more, and the little user pays less. It
opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell,
in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined. In three years, after 1896,
there were twice as many users; in six years there wer