Vail arrived very much as Blucher did at the battle of Waterloo--a factories that made it. would be a permanent partner in the entire telephone business. Even in into confusion by launching the Edison transmitter. Edison, who was These various measures were part of Vail's plan to create a national unprofitable exchanges. There was scarcely a mail that did not bring him at that time fairly started in his career of wizardry, had made an capital, and a first claim upon all newspapers, hotels, railroads, and How to compete with the Western Union, which had this superior of course, could not be had in a moment, and the five months that routed by the Old Guard of the Western Union. He was scarcely seated in that day of small things, and amidst the confusion and rough-and-tumble General Manager. Every inch of progress had to be fought for. Several followed were the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone. of his captains deserted, and he was compelled to take control of their telephone system. His central idea, from the first, was not the mere rights of way--that was the immediate problem that confronted the new leasing of telephones, but rather the creation of a Federal company that of pioneering, he worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day; and this goes far to explain the fact that there are in the United States transmitter, a host of agents, a network of wires, forty millions of instrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond all argument superior clamored with one voice for "a transmitter as good as Edison's." This, twice as many telephones as there are in all other countries combined. trifle late, but in time to prevent the telephone forces from being his managerial chair, when the Western Union threw the entire Bell army to the telephones then in use and the lessees of Bell telephones