But it was no more than might have been expected.

Here was a patent--"the most valuable single patent ever issued"-- and yet the invention itself was so simple that it could be duplicated easily by any smart boy or any ordinary mechanic.

The making of a telephone was like the trick of Columbus standing an egg on end.

Nothing was easier to those who knew how.

And so it happened that, as the crude little model of Bell's original telephone lay in the Patent Office open and unprotected except by a few phrases that clever lawyers might evade, there sprang up inevitably around it the most costly and persistent Patent War that any country has ever known, continuing for eleven years and comprising SIX HUNDRED LAWSUITS.
The first attack upon the young telephone business was made by the Western Union Telegraph Company.