inhabitants, and only one of more than fifteen
thousand, without a telephone exchange. The industry thrived under
competition, and the absence of it now had a decided effect in checking
growth; for when the Bell patent expired in 1893, the total of telephone
sets in operation in the United States was only 291,253. To quote from
an official Bell statement:

"The brief but vigorous Western Union competition was a kind of blessing
in disguise. The very fact that two distinct interests were actively
engaged in the work of organizing and establishing competing telephone
exchanges all over the country, greatly facilitated the spread of the
idea and the growth of the business, and familiarized the people with
the use of the telephone as a business agency; while the keenness of the
competition, extending to the agents and employees of both companies,
brought about a swift but quite unforeseen and unlooked-for expansion
in the individual exchanges of the larger cities, and a corresponding
advance in their importance, value, and usefulness."

The truth of this was immediately shown in 1894, after the Bell patents
had expired, by the tremendous outburst of new competitive activity, in
"independent" country systems and toll lines through sparsely settled
districts--work for which the Edison apparatus and methods were
peculiarly adapted, yet against which the influence of the Edison patent
was invoked. The data secured by the United States Census Office in 1902
showed that the whole industry had made gigantic leaps in eight years,
and had 2,371,044 telephone stations in service, of which 1,053,866
were wholly or nominally independent of the Bell. By 1907 an even
more notable increase was shown, and the Census figures for that year
included no fewer than 6,118,578 stations, of which 1,986,575 were
"independent." These six million instruments every single set employing
the principle of the carbon transmitter--were grouped into 15,527 public
exchanges, in the very manner predicted by Bell thirty years before,
and they gave service in the shape of over eleven billions of talks. The
outstanding capitalized value of the plant was $814,616,004, the income
for the year was nearly $185,000,000, and the people employed were
140,000. If Edison had done nothing else, his share in the creation
of such an industry would have entitled him to a high place among
inventors.

This chapter is of necessity brief in its reference to many extremely