Each of their customers wished to be able to talk to every one else.

And so, having undertaken to give telephone service, they presently found themselves battling with the most intricate and baffling engineering problem of modern times--the construction around the tele-phone of such a mechanism as would bring it into universal service.
The first of these men was Thomas A.Watson, the young mechanic who had been hired as Bell's helper.

He began a work that to-day requires an army of twenty-six thousand people.

He was for a couple of years the total engineering and manufacturing department of the telephone business, and by 1880 had taken out sixty patents for his own suggestions.

It was Watson who took the telephone as Bell had made it, really a toy, with its diaphragm so delicate that a warm breath would put it out of order, and toughened it into a more rugged machine.