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t advantage. We must organize companies with sufficient vitality to carry on a fight, as it is simply useless to get a company started that will succumb to the first bit of opposition it may encounter." Next, having encouraged his thoroughly alarmed agents, Vail proceeded to build up a definite business policy. He stiffened up the contracts and made them good for five years only. He confined each agent to one place, and reserved all rights to connect one city with another. He established a department to collect and protect any new inventions that concerned the telephone. He agreed to take part of the royalties in stock, when any local company preferred to pay its debts in this way. And he took steps toward standardizing all telephonic apparatus by controlling the factories that made it. These various measures were part of Vail's plan to create a national telephone system. His central idea, from the first, was not the mere leasing of telephones, but rather the creation of a Federal company that would be a permanent partner in the entire telephone business. Even in that day of small things, and amidst the confusion and rough-and-tumble of pioneering, he worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day; and this goes far to explain the fact that there are in the United States twice as many telephones as there are in all other countries combined. Vail arrived very much as Blucher did at the battle of Waterloo--a trifle late, but in time to prevent the telephone forces from being routed by the Old Guard of the Western Union. He was scarcely seated in his managerial chair, when the Western Union threw the entire Bell army into confusion by launching the Edison transmitter. Edison, who was at that time fairly started in his career of wizardry, had made an instrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond all argument superior to the telephones then in use and the lessees of Bell telephones clamored with one voice for "a transmitter as good as Edison's." This, of course, could not be had in a moment, and the five months that followed were the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone. How to compete with the Western Union, which had this superior transmitter, a host of agents, a network of wires, forty millions of capital, and a first claim upon all newspapers, hotels, railroads, and rights of way--that was the immediate problem that confronted the new General Manager. Every inch of progress had to be fought for.
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