asking permission, Holmes went into six banks and nailed up
a telephone in each. Five bankers made no protest, but the sixth
indignantly ordered "that playtoy" to be taken out. The other five
telephones could be connected by a switch in Holmes's office, and thus
was born the first tiny and crude Telephone Exchange. Here it ran for
several weeks as a telephone system by day and a burglar-alarm by night.
No money was paid by the bankers. The service was given to them as
an exhibition and an advertisement. The little shelf with its five
telephones was no more like the marvellous exchanges of to-day than
a canoe is like a Cunarder, but it was unquestionably the first place
where several telephone wires came together and could be united.

Soon afterwards, Holmes took his telephones out of the banks, and
started a real telephone business among the express companies of
Boston. But by this time several exchanges had been opened for ordinary
business, in New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, and Philadelphia. Also,
a man from Michigan had arrived, with the hardihood to ask for a State
agency--George W. Balch, of Detroit. He was so welcome that Hubbard
joyfully gave him everything he asked--a perpetual right to the whole
State of Michigan. Balch was not required to pay a cent in advance,
except his railway fare, and before he was many years older he had sold
his lease for a handsome fortune of a quarter of a million dollars,
honestly earned by his initiative and enterprise.

By August, when Bell's patent was sixteen months old, there were 778
telephones in use. This looked like success to the optimistic Hubbard.
He decided that the time had come to organize the business, so
he created a simple agreement which he called the "Bell Telephone
Association." This agreement gave Bell, Hubbard and Sanders a
three-tenths interest apiece in the patents, and Watson one-tenth. THERE
WAS NO CAPITAL. There was none to be had. The four men had at this time
an absolute monopoly of the telephone business; and everybody else was
quite willing that they should have it.

The only man who had money and dared to stake it on the future of the
telephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for business
reasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily by
sentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders's
little son, and was soon to marry Hubbard's daughter.

Also, Sanders had no expectation, at first, that so much mo