story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success.
Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his old-time friends in the
Washington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the
Telephone." It was said that the actual cost of the Bell plant was only
one-twenty-fifth of its capital, and that every four cents of investment
had thus become a dollar. Even Jay Gould, carried beyond his usual
caution by these stories, ran up to New Haven and bought its telephone
company, only to find out later that its earnings were less than its
expenses.

Much to the bewilderment of the Bell Company, it soon learned that the
troubles of wealth are as numerous as those of poverty. It was beset by
a throng of promoters and stock-jobbers, who fell upon it and upon
the public like a swarm of seventeen-year locusts. In three years,
one hundred and twenty-five competing companies were started, in open
defiance of the Bell patents. The main object of these companies was
not, like that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate telephone
business, but to sell stock to the public. The face value of their stock
was $225,000,000, although few of them ever sent a message. One company
of unusual impertinence, without money or patents, had capitalized its
audacity at $15,000,000.

How to HOLD the business that had been established--that was now the
problem. None of the Bell partners had been mere stock-jobbers. At one
time they had even taken a pledge not to sell any of their stock to
outsiders. They had financed their company in a most honest and simple
way; and they were desperately opposed to the financial banditti whose
purpose was to transform the telephone business into a cheat and a
gamble. At first, having held their own against the Western Union, they
expected to make short work of the stock-jobbers. But it was a vain
hope. These bogus companies, they found, did not fight in the open, as
the Western Union had done.

All manner of injurious rumors were presently set afloat concerning
the Bell patent. Other inventors--some of them honest men, and some
shameless pretenders--were brought forward with strangely concocted
tales of prior invention. The Granger movement was at that time a strong
political factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and
"monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company. A few
Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up as the figureheads of
the crusade. And a loud hue-and-cry wa