Edison, who was at that time fairly started in his career of wizardry, had made an instrument of marvellous alertness. It was beyond all argument superior to the telephones then in use and the lessees of Bell telephones clamored with one voice for "a transmitter as good as Edison's." This, of course, could not be had in a moment, and the five months that followed were the darkest days in the childhood of the telephone.
How to compete with the Western Union, which had this superior transmitter, a host of agents, a network of wires, forty millions of capital, and a first claim upon all newspapers, hotels, railroads, and rights of way--that was the immediate problem that confronted the new General Manager. Every inch of progress had to be fought for. Several of his captains deserted, and he was compelled to take control of their unprofitable exchanges. There was scarcely a mail that did not bring him some bulletin of discouragement or defeat.
In the effort to conciliate a hostile public, the telephone rates had everywhere been made too low. Hubbard had set a price of twenty dollars a year, for the use of two telephones on a private line; and when exchanges were started, the rate was seldom more than three dollars a month.
There were deadheads in abundance, mostly officials and politicians. In St. Louis, one of the few cities that charged a sufficient price, nine-tenths of the merchants refused to become subscribers. In Boston, the first pay-station ran three months before it earned a dollar. Even as late as 1880, when the first National Telephone Convention was held at Niagara Falls, one of the delegates expressed the general situation very correctly when he said: "We were all in a state of enthusiastic uncertainty. We were full of hope, yet when we analyzed those hopes they were very airy indeed. There was probably not one company that could say it was making a cent, nor even that it EXPECTED to make a cent."Especially in the largest cities, where the Western Union had most power, the lives of the telephone pioneers were packed with hardships and adventures. In Philadelphia, for instance, a resolute young man named Thomas E. Cornish was attacked as though he had suddenly become a public enemy, when he set out to establish the first telephone service. No official would grant him a permit to string wires. His workmen were arrested. The printing-telegraph men warned him that he must either quit or be driven out.
When he asked capitalists for money, they replied that he might as well expect to lease jew's-harps as telephones. Finally, he was compelled to resort to strategy where argument had failed.
He had received an order from Colonel Thomas Scott, who wanted a wire between his house and his office. Colonel Scott was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and therefore a man of the highest prestige in the city. So as soon as Cornish had put this line in place, he kept his men at work stringing other lines. When the police interfered, he showed them Colonel Scott's signature and was let alone. In this way he put fifteen wires up before the trick was discovered;and soon afterwards, with eight subscribers, he founded the first Philadelphia exchange.
As may be imagined, such battling as this did not put much money into the treasury of the parent company; and the letters written by Sanders at this time prove that it was in a hard plight.
The following was one of the queries put to Hubbard by the overburdened Sanders:
