In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven million dollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But this is no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to every hundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. To give Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will mean thirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match. And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in many countries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, it must come.
Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill among nations, when each country does for all the others what it can do best, the United States may be generally recognized as the source of skill and authority on telephony. It may be called in to rebuild or operate the telephone systems of other countries, in the same way that it is now supplying oil and steel rails and farm machinery. Just as the wise buyer of to-day asks France for champagne, Germany for toys, England for cottons, and the Orient for rugs, so he will learn to look upon the United States as the natural home and headquarters of the telephone.
CHAPTER IX. THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE
In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Vail, a rugged, ruddy, white-haired man, was superintending the building of a big barn in northern Vermont. His house stood near-by, on a balcony of rolling land that overlooked the town of Lyndon and far beyond, across evergreen forests to the massive bulk of Burke Mountain. His farm, very nearly ten square miles in area, lay back of the house in a great oval of field and woodland, with several dozen cottages in the clearings. His Welsh ponies and Swiss cattle were grazing on the May grass, and the men were busy with the ploughs and harrows and seeders. It was almost thirty years since he had been called in to create the business structure of telephony, and to shape the general plan of its development. Since then he had done many other things. The one city of Buenos Ayres had paid him more, merely for giving it a system of trolleys and electric lights, than the United States had paid him for putting the telephone on a business basis. He was now rich and retired, free to enjoy his play-work of the farm and to forget the troubles of the city and the telephone.
But, as he stood among his barn-builders, there arrived from Boston and New York a delegation of telephone directors. Most of them belonged to the "Old Guard" of telephony. They had fought under Vail in the pioneer days; and now they had come to ask him to return to the telephone business, after twenty years of absence. Vail laughed at the suggestion.
"Nonsense," he said, "I'm too old. I'm sixty-two years of age." The directors persisted. They spoke of the approaching storm-cloud of panic and the need of another strong hand at the wheel until the crisis was over, but Vail still refused. They spoke of old times and old memories, but he shook his head. "All my life," he said, "I have wanted to be a farmer."
Then they drew a picture of the telephone situation. They showed him that the "grand telephonic system" which he had planned was unfinished. He was its architect, and it was undone. The telephone business was energetic and prosperous. Under the brilliant leadership of Frederick P. Fish, it had grown by leaps and bounds. But it was still far from being the SYSTEM that Vail had dreamed of in his younger days; and so, when the directors put before him his unfinished plan, he surrendered. The instinct for completeness, which is one of the dominating characteristics of his mind, compelled him to consent. It was the call of the telephone.
Since that May morning, 1907, great things have been done by the men of the telephone and telegraph world. The Bell System was brought through the panic without a scratch. When the doubt and confusion were at their worst, Vail wrote an open letter to his stock-holders, in his practical, farmer-like way. He said:
"Our net earnings for the last ten months were $13,715,000, as against $11,579,000 for the same period in 1906. We have now in the banks over $18,000,000; and we will not need to borrow any money for two years."