The Telephone Takes Command
Claude S. Fischer · 2018
By mid-1878 the telephone business was in ferment. The resolution left Alexander Graham Bell in early 1880 with about 60,000 subscribers in exchanges scattered about the country and a monopoly on the telephone business. Although not favored, like Alexander Graham Bell, by a Hollywood biography, Theodore N. Vail is a figure of mythic stature in the telephone industry and in American corporate history. In addition, Bell&s;s affiliates took every advantage of their monopoly to levy what the market could bear. Not until after the era of monopoly did message-rate service become common, although still not universal, in Bell&s;s largest exchanges. Strategic disagreements about pricing policy arose inside Bell, in part from different visions of the telephone&s;s potential. Bell found some businessmen hesitant to replace the telegraph with the telephone because they valued a written record. In its earlier history, he reported, "the public interest received scant attention" from Bell companies.