le of duplication. In a few years there
were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies. And by 1901
they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing
to have a capital of a hundred millions.

Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the
telephone business into new territory. They were in fact small mutual
associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get
telephone service at cost. But there were other companies, probably
a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their
hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the
myth that they were fabulously rich. Instead of legitimately extending
telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters
proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon
whatever cities would give them permission to do so.

In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste of
duplication began in most American cities. The telephone business was
still so young, it was so little appreciated even by the telephone
officials and engineers, that the public regarded a second or a
third telephone system in one city as quite a possible and desirable
innovation. "We have two ears," said one promoter; "why not therefore
have two telephones?"

This duplication went merrily on for years before it was generally
discovered that the telephone is not an ear, but a nerve system; and
that such an experiment as a duplicate nerve system has never been
attempted by Nature, even in her most frivolous moods. Most people
fancied that a telephone system was practically the same as a gas or
electric light system, which can often be duplicated with the result of
cheaper rates and better service. They did not for years discover that
two telephone companies in one city means either half service or double
cost, just as two fire departments or two post offices would.

Some of these duplicate companies built up a complete plant, and gave
good local service, while others proved to be mere stock bubbles. Most
of them were over-capitalized, depending upon public sympathy to atone
for deficiencies in equipment. One which had printed fifty million
dollars of stock for sale was sold at auction in 1909 for four hundred
thousand dollars. All told, there were twenty-three of these bubbles
that burst in 1905, twenty-one in 1906, and twelve in 1907. So high
has been the death-rate among these is