It was a very unsatisfactory situation.
How to extend the service and at the same time cheapen it to small users--that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did most to untie it was Edward J.Hall.

Mr.Hall founded the telephone business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief of the long-distance traffic.

He was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone.

For more than thirty years he has been the "candid friend" of the business, incessantly suggesting, probing, and criticising.

Keen and dispassionate, with a genius for mercilessly cutting to the marrow of a proposition, Hall has at the same time been a zealot for the improvement and extension of telephone service.