Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/444

440 influence or hustling ability, who shared in the optimistic views of Graham Bell and Mr. Hubbard. While this latter plan would provide the quickest method of meeting the universal demand that Graham Bell was confident would develop, it might not prove the best plan for the public in the long run. For it meant a large number of different companies, governed by as many different policies, and operating under an endless number of systems. While under one company only one policy would prevail, system, equipment and methods would be standardized, and interconnecting lines built as rapidly as the necessary funds could be procured. Thus it was to determine which was the better plan, that Bell licenses were at first issued only for limited periods of five or ten years, with the understanding that at the expiration of the agreed term, the Bell company could take over the local exchange system at cost price, if it so desired.

Again it was quickly perceived that the true value of the telephone was intimately interwoven in the breadth and scope of the exchange system, and that its sphere of usefulness would be seriously curtailed unless combined with all the rights and privileges that a corporation secures from borough and township, county and state, rights that include the building of pole lines on highways and streets, the stringing of aerial circuits and the placing of cables underground. In other words, that the local value of telephone service was in direct ratio to the physical expansion of the exchange system, and in its capacity for meeting the ever-varying requirements of local users. Without the telephone the exchange system would have no value; without the exchange system the telephone would have comparatively little value.

By reason of the very nature of the invention, the right to use the telephone had to be safeguarded as few other patents have been, not only for the protection of the owner, but also that the licensee company might not suffer. A mowing-machine is a self-contained piece of mechanism that can be operated in any field, regardless of the number of or the absence of other mowers. The fewer mowing machines in a county the greater the probable profit of the owner of a machine intended for general use, and the greater its usefulness in a farming community. On the contrary, the fewer telephones in a county the more limited the value of the service to the public. While the greater the number of telephones and the more comprehensive the scope of exchange and toll system, the richer the benefits conferred upon the public, provided all telephones in the county are intercommunicating.