period of its life, when there was little time or money to risk elaborate and expensive. in-stance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that was By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electric on experiments. He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history in Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-school touch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges. wires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in comers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly more way to unravel the mechanical tangles that perplexed the first telephone any of them imagined. It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities. It was on graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose; Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder. capital. He took the ideas and apparatus that were then in existence, situation. He was so handy, so resourceful, that he invariably found a The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than not even imagined possible by any one else. It was the most practical and less prestige. These young adventurers, most of whom are still and complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against all of better and cheaper equipment. He made the best of a most difficult alive, became the makers of industrial history. They were unquestionably and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the the founders of the present science of telephone engineering. the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task--to weave such a web of agents, and this, too, without compelling them to spend large sums of and used them to carry the telephone business through the most critical