All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

156 All About Inventions Vail accepted the post with enthusiasm, and although money was so scarce that he often had to rest content with but a fraction of his salary, he buckled into his new and difficult task with un- bounded zeal. He gathered together the tangled skeins of the idea and set about organisation upon an extensive scale. At the time he came upon the scene there were not more than a thousand telephones in use in Boston, and he speedily observed that the young invention was suffering from strangulation. It was healthy, and wanted to stretch out in all direc- tions. Forthwith he decided to give it all the elbow- room it required. Numerous other companies had commenced operations, and their competition was hitting the pioneer company extremely hard. In 1881 Alexander Bell came to England with the idea of persuading its introduction here. But it was a terribly hard uphill task, accentuated by the fact that rival interests were pushing the Edison tele- phone with all the zest they could command. The latter established an exchange, which was the sug- gestion of a Hungarian, in Queen Victoria Street, in which Mr. George Bernard Shaw served as a switchboard operator. Finally, as is well known, an organisation, the National Telephone Company, re- ceived a franchise from the British Government to embark upon the commercial exploitation of the idea. Subsequently, Bell returned to the United States and abandoned telephone inventions com- pletely, concentrating his energies mainly upon the problem of dynamic flight, although he attacked such side issues as the talking machine, the scientific breeding of sheep, a new metric system, and food