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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