easily have happened. One by one there arrived
to help him a number of able men, with all the various abilities that
the changing situation required. There was such a focussing of factors
that the whole matter appeared to have been previously rehearsed. No
sooner had Bell appeared on the stage than his supporting players, each
in his turn, received his cue and took part in the action of the drama.
There was not one of these men who could have done the work of any
other. Each was distinctive and indispensable. Bell invented the
telephone; Watson constructed it; Sanders financed it; Hubbard
introduced it; and Vail put it on a business basis.

The new General Manager had, of course, no experience in the telephone
business. Neither had any one else. But he, like Bell, came to his task
with a most surprising fitness. He was a member of the historic Vail
family of Morristown, New Jersey, which had operated the Speedwell Iron
Works for four or five generations. His grand-uncle Stephen had built
the engines for the Savannah, the first American steamship to cross the
Atlantic Ocean; and his cousin Alfred was the friend and co-worker of
Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had lived for several years
at the Vail homestead in Morristown; and it was here that he erected
his first telegraph line, a three-mile circle around the Iron Works, in
1838. He and Alfred Vail experimented side by side in the making of the
telegraph, and Vail eventually received a fortune for his share of the
Morse patent.

Thus it happened that young Theodore Vail learned the dramatic story
of Morse at his mother's knee. As a boy, he played around the first
telegraph line, and learned to put messages on the wire. His favorite
toy was a little telegraph that he constructed for himself. At
twenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of possessing a bonanza farm;
then he swung back into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself in
the Government Mail Service at Washington. By 1876, he was at the head
of this Department, which he completely reorganized. He introduced the
bag system in postal cars, and made war on waste and clumsiness. By
virtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who had
a comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs. He was much more
apt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a national
telephone system.

While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-cleaning he met Hubbard,
who had just been