business failure. It was not earning its keep. Therefore he did not dare argued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin warned the Government that it was making the mighty" in the business and financial world. A tiny exchange, Having captured this new rival, what next? The Postmaster General did last consented to give licenses to private companies. be a Government monopoly. This law had been passed six years before to shoulder the risk of constructing a second system of wires, and at final word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, and Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order not know. He had, of course, no experience in telephony, and neither had sustained his opinion by a quotation from Webster's Dictionary, which declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of the was published twenty years before the telephone was invented. of J. S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition from the "seats of the telephone was born, but no matter. The telephone men protested and to the factory in Boston, "Please make one hundred hand telephones for any of his officials in the telegraph department. There was no book and disaster. Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, the of telegraph. According to a British law the telegraph was required to situation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke the export trade as early as possible." The foreign trade had begun. railways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly an indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the first Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a species no college to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it is to-day, a with ten wires, was promptly started in London; and on April 2d, 1879, Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseen