Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/236

230 would have developed a rural system of telephone service contemporaneously with its early growth in towns and villages.

Again, the infringing telephone companies, and they were numerous, while their promoters were strong in political and financial influence in the '80's, circulated the most absurd statements concerning the millions that had been made in the consolidating of Bell operating companies, and the manipulation of telephone stocks. One statement read: "It is within limits to say that the entire property, rights and franchises of the Bell company and its licensees could be duplicated for one twenty-fifth of the stock capital invested." Yet it is interesting to note that during the three years, 1881-1883, in New York state alone, one hundred and twenty-five infringing telephone companies were organized and capitalized at an aggregate of two hundred and twenty-five millions of dollars, a capitalization authorized by one state only, and three times greater than the combined capital stock of all the Bell companies in all the states of the union, including that of the parent company.

Very fortunately for the investing public, few of these infringing companies ever got fairly under way, even when the highest officials in state and nation appeared to do all in their power to aid in filching rewards honestly won and meritoriously bestowed. Moreover, it has been stated that many of these infringing claims were offered to the parent Bell company for small sums or large sums, depending upon how gloomy or how roseate the outlook was. A comical phase of these infringing competitive schemes was the certainty with which statements would appear in printed circulars, that the telephone was first exhibited to the public at the Centennial Exposition in 1876, and the first telephone line was constructed in Boston in 1877. The fact that they thus admitted that Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was the first telephone did not appeal even to their sense of humor.

Even the announcement on January 24, 1883, of Judge Gray's decision on final hearing in the Dolbear case, and of Judge Lowell's decision the following August, did not appear to discourage investment in the securities of infringing companies, while both decisions served to stimulate the building of small exchanges by speculative promoters and the rapid consolidation of these non-paying properties into overcapitalized organizations.

Judge Gray's opinion in part was:

The opinion in Spencer's case clearly points out that "Bell discovered a new art—that of transmitting speech by electricity—and has the right to hold the broadest claim for it which can be permitted in any case.". . . The evidence in this case clearly shows that Bell discovered that articulate sounds could be transmitted by undulatory vibrations of electricity, and invented the art or process of transmitting such sounds by means of such vibrations. If that art or process is (as the witnesses called by the defendant say it is) the only way