came to his rescue. Most of
them were well-known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls,
Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton. These men, together with Colonel William
H. Forbes, who came in as a friend of the Bradleys, were the first
capitalists who, for purely business reasons, invested money in the
Bell patents. Two months after the Western Union had given its weighty
endorsement to the telephone, these men organized a company to do
business in New England only, and put fifty thousand dollars in its
treasury.
In a short time the delighted Hubbard found himself leasing telephones
at the rate of a thousand a month. He was no longer a promoter, but a
general manager. Men were standing in line to ask for agencies. Crude
little telephone exchanges were being started in a dozen or more cities.
There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise; and the next step,
clearly, was to create a business organization. None of the partners
were competent to undertake such a work. Hubbard had little aptitude as
an organizer; Bell had none; and Sanders was held fast by his leather
interests. Here, at last, after four years of the most heroic effort,
were the raw materials out of which a telephone business could be
constructed. But who was to be the builder, and where was he to be
found?
One morning the indefatigable Hubbard solved the problem. "Watson," he
said, "there's a young man in Washington who can handle this situation,
and I want you to run down and see what you think of him." Watson went,
reported favorably, and in a day or so the young man received a letter
from Hubbard, offering him the position of General Manager, at a salary
of thirty-five hundred dollars a year. "We rely," Hubbard said, "upon
your executive ability, your fidelity, and unremitting zeal." The
young man replied, in one of those dignified letters more usual in the
nineteenth than in the twentieth century. "My faith in the success of
the enterprise is such that I am willing to trust to it," he wrote, "and
I have confidence that we shall establish the harmony and cooperation
that is essential to the success of an enterprise of this kind." One
week later the young man, Theodore N. Vail, took his seat as General
Manager in a tiny office in Reade Street, New York, and the building of
the business began.
This arrival of Vail at the critical moment emphasized the fact that
Bell was one of the most fortunate of inventors. He was not robbed of
his invention, as might
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