ABSTRACT
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 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 largest exchanges. Strategic disagreements about pricing policy arose inside Bell, in part from different visions of the telephone'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.
