A tiny exchange, with ten wires, was promptly started in London; and on April 2d, 1879, Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order to the factory in Boston, "Please make one hundred hand telephones for export trade as early as possible." The foreign trade had begun.
Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseen disaster.

Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, the Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a species of telegraph.

According to a British law the telegraph was required to be a Government monopoly.

This law had been passed six years before the telephone was born, but no matter.

The telephone men protested and argued.