appointed by President Hayes as the head of a
commission on mail transportation. He and Hubbard were constantly thrown
together, on trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably had a pair
of telephones in his valise, the two men soon became co-enthusiasts.
Vail found himself painting brain-pictures of the future of the
telephone, and by the time that he was asked to become its General
Manager, he had become so confident that, as he said afterwards, he "was
willing to leave a Government job with a small salary for a telephone
job with no salary."

So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty years
before to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N. Vail left the
post office service to establish the telephone business. He had been
in authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was the
developer of a system that covered every inhabited portion of the
country. Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immensely
valuable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone. Line
by line, he mapped out a method, a policy, a system. He introduced
a larger view of the telephone business, and swept off the table all
schemes for selling out. He persuaded half a dozen of his post office
friends to buy stock, so that in less than two months the first "Bell
Telephone Company" was organized, with $450,000 capital and a service of
twelve thousand telephones.

Vail's first step, naturally, was to stiffen up the backbone of this
little company, and to prevent the Western Union from frightening it
into a surrender. He immediately sent a copy of Bell's patent to every
agent, with orders to hold the fort against all opposition. "We have
the only original telephone patents," he wrote; "we have organized and
introduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from us
by any corporation." To one agent, who was showing the white feather, he
wrote:

"You have too great an idea of the Western Union. If it was all massed
in your one city you might well fear it; but it is represented there by
one man only, and he has probably as much as he can attend to outside of
the telephone. For you to acknowledge that you cannot compete with his
influence when you make it your special business, is hardly the thing.
There may be a dozen concerns that will all go to the Western Union, but
they will not take with them all their friends. I would advise that you
go ahead and keep your presen