Thus many great inventive minds have produced the physical telephone.We can point to several men--Bell, Blake, Carty, Scribner, Barrett, Pupin --and say of each one, "Without his work the present telephone system could not exist." But business genius, as well as mechanical genius, explains this achievement.
For the first four or five years of its existence, the new invention had hard sailing.Bell and Thomas Watson, in order to fortify their finances, were forced to travel around the country, giving a kind of vaudeville entertainment.Bell made a speech explaining the new invention, while a cornet player, located in another part of the town, played solos, the music reaching the audience through several telephone instruments placed against the walls.Watson, also located at a distance, varied the program by singing songs via telephone.These lecture tours not only gave Bell the money which he sorely needed but advertised the innovation.There followed a few scattering attempts to introduce the telephone into every-day use and telephone exchanges were established in New York, Boston, Bridgeport, and New Haven.But these pioneers had the hostility of the most powerful corporation of the day--the Western Union Telegraph Company--and they lacked aggressive leaders.
In 1878, Mr.Gardiner Hubbard, Bell's earliest backer, and now his father-in-law, became acquainted with a young man who was then serving in Washington as General Superintendent of the Railway Mail Service.This young man was Theodore N.Vail.His energy and enterprise so impressed Hubbard that he immediately asked Vail to become General Manager of the company which he was then forming to exploit the telephone.Viewed from the retrospection of forty years this offer certainly looks like one of the greatest prizes in American business.What it signified at that time, however, is apparent from the fact that the office paid a salary of $3500 a year and that for the first ten years Vail did not succeed in collecting a dollar of this princely remuneration.Yet it was a happy fortune, not only for the Bell Company but for the nation, that placed Vail at the head of this struggling enterprise.There was a certain appropriateness in his selection, even then.His granduncle, Stephen Vail, had built the engines for the first steamship to cross the Atlantic.A cousin had worked with Morse while he was inventing the telegraph.Vail, who was born in Carroll County, Ohio, in 1845, after spending two years as a medical student, suddenly shifted his plans and became a telegraph operator.Then he entered the Railway Mail service;in this service he completely revolutionized the system and introduced reforms that exist at the present time.A natural bent had apparently directed Vail's mind towards methods of communication, a fact that may perhaps explain the youthful enthusiasm with which he took up the new venture and the vision with which he foresaw and planned its future.For the chief fact about Vail is that he was a business man with an imagination.The crazy little machine which he now undertook to exploit did not interest him as a means of collecting tolls, floating stock, and paying dividends.He saw in it a new method of spreading American civilization and of contributing to the happiness and comfort of millions of people.Indeed Vail had hardly seen the telephone when a picture portraying the development which we are familiar with today unfolded before his eyes.That the telephone has had a greater development in America than elsewhere and that the United States has avoided all those mistakes of organization that have so greatly hampered its growth in other lands, is owing to the fact that Vail, when he first took charge, mapped out the comprehensive policies which have guided his corporation since.
