It granted licenses to five cities that demanded municipal ownership.

These cities set out bravely, with loud beating of drums, plunged from one mishap to another, and finally quit.

Even Glasgow, the premier city of municipal ownership, met its Waterloo in the telephone.

It spent one million, eight hundred thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran it for a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain has been a "comedy of errors." There are now, in the two islands, not six hundred thousand telephones in use.

London, with its six hundred and forty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gaining at the rate of ten thousand a year.