The Bell group, instead of being driven from the field, were at once lifted to a higher level in the business world.
Most of them were well- known business men--the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, Fay, Silsbee, and Carlton.
There was a spirit of confidence and enterprise; and the next step, clearly, was to create a business organization.
Vail, took his seat as General Manager in a tiny office in Reade Street, New York, and the building of the business began.
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.
So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty years before to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N.
"We have the only original telephone patents," he wrote; "we have organized and introduced the business, and we do not propose to have it taken from us by any corporation." To one agent, who was showing the white feather, he wrote:
For you to acknowledge that you cannot compete with his influence when you make it your special business, is hardly the thing.
'But surely this is not the way to do the business,' Arthur Clennam could not help saying.
'When the business is regularly before that Department, whatever it is,' pursued this bright young Barnacle, 'then you can watch it from time to time through that Department.
How my lords then made a Minute, number five thousand one hundred and three, whereby they resigned the business to the Circumlocution Office.