By virtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who had a comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs.

He was much more apt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a national telephone system.
While in the midst of this bureaucratic house-cleaning he met Hubbard, who had just been appointed by President Hayes as the head of a commission on mail transportation.

He and Hubbard were constantly thrown together, on trains and in hotels; and as Hubbard invariably had a pair of telephones in his valise, the two men soon became co-enthusiasts.
Vail found himself painting brain-pictures of the future of the telephone, and by the time that he was asked to become its General Manager, he had become so confident that, as he said afterwards, he "was willing to leave a Government job with a small salary for a telephone job with no salary." So, just as Amos Kendall had left the post office service thirty years before to establish the telegraph business, Theodore N.Vail left the post office service to establish the telephone business.

He had been in authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was the developer of a system that covered every inhabited portion of the country.

Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immensely valuable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone.