His end of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company became the University of the Telephone.

He was himself a student by disposition, with a special taste for the writings of Faraday, the forerunner; Tyndall, the expounder; and Spencer, the philosopher.

And in 1890, he gathered around him a winnowed group of college graduates--he has sixty of them on his staff to-day--so that he might bequeath to the telephone an engineering corps of loyal and efficient men.
The next problem that faced the young men of the telephone, as soon as they had escaped from the clamor of the mysterious noises, was the necessity of taking down the wires in the city streets and putting them underground.

At first, they had strung the wires on poles and roof-tops.
They had done this, not because it was cheap, but because it was the only possible way, so far as any one knew in that kindergarten period.
A telephone wire required the daintiest of handling.

To bury it was to smother it, to make it dull or perhaps entirely useless.