the typical
American story of self-help. He was a telegraph messenger boy in New
York during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland. In
1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars a month to ninety
dollars; whereupon he walked out and founded the Western Electric in a
shabby little machine-shop. Later he moved to Chicago, took in Elisha
Gray as his partner, and built up a trade in the making of telegraphic
materials.

When the telephone was invented, Barton was one of the sceptics. "I well
remember my disgust," he said, "when some one told me it was possible to
send conversation along a wire." Several months later he saw a telephone
and at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had become
the official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of
invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of young
men, brilliant and adventurous, who dared to stake their futures on the
success of the telephone. And always at their head was Barton, as a sort
of human switchboard, who linked them all together and kept them busy.

In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles ex-President Eliot,
of Harvard. He is slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a rare
sagacity in business affairs. He was not an organizer, in the modern
sense. His policy was to pick out a man, put him in a responsible
place, and judge him by results. Engineers could become bookkeepers,
and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in the
earlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and when
there was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is the
bishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industry
is now being run by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer at the
head of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter who has climbed the ladder
of experience from its lower rungs to the top. He is a typical
Yankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-blooded sense of justice
that fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people.

So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a
brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was
an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured
into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created;
and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less
energetic country, it might have remained feeble and