of human switchboard, who linked them all together and kept them busy. place, and judge him by results. Engineers could become bookkeepers, success of the telephone. And always at their head was Barton, as a sort that fits him for the leadership of twenty-six thousand people. head of the table. Thayer is a Vermonter who has climbed the ladder men, brilliant and adventurous, who dared to stake their futures on the and at once became one of its apostles. By 1882 his plant had become into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created; brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was bishop emeritus of the Western Electric to-day; and the big industry sense. His policy was to pick out a man, put him in a responsible and bookkeepers could become engineers. Such a plan worked well in the In appearance, Enos M. Barton closely resembles ex-President Eliot, earlier days, when the art of telephony was in the making, and when of Harvard. He is slow in speech, simple in manner, and with a rare Yankee--lean, shrewd, tireless, and with a cold-blooded sense of justice and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less sagacity in business affairs. He was not an organizer, in the modern not in the United States. Here in one year it had become famous, and invention and manufacturing. Here was gathered a notable group of young is now being run by a group of young hustlers, with H. B. Thayer at the So, as we have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a the official workshop of the Bell Companies. It was the headquarters of energetic country, it might have remained feeble and undeveloped; but there was no source of authority on telephonic problems. Barton is the an elfin birth--an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured of experience from its lower rungs to the top. He is a typical