It was the most practical and complete switchboard of its day, and held the field against all comers until it was superseded by the modern type of board, vastly more elaborate and expensive.
By 1884, gathered around Gilliland in Boston and the Western Electric in Chicago, there came to be a group of mechanics and high-school graduates, very young men, mostly, who had no reputations to lose; and who, partly for a living and mainly for a lark, plunged into the difficulties of this new business that had at that time little history and less prestige.

These young adventurers, most of whom are still alive, became the makers of industrial history.

They were unquestionably the founders of the present science of telephone engineering.
The problem that they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than any of them imagined.

It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities.

It was on the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task--to weave such a web of wires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in touch with every other.