It was beset by a throng of promoters and stock-jobbers, who fell upon it and upon the public like a swarm of seventeen-year locusts.

In three years, one hundred and twenty-five competing companies were started, in open defiance of the Bell patents.

The main object of these companies was not, like that of the Western Union, to do a legitimate telephone business, but to sell stock to the public.

The face value of their stock was $225,000,000, although few of them ever sent a message.

One company of unusual impertinence, without money or patents, had capitalized its audacity at $15,000,000.
How to HOLD the business that had been established--that was now the problem.