It was he who set the agents free from the ball-and-chain of royalties, allowing them to pay instead a percentage of gross receipts.

And it was he who "broke the jam," as a lumberman would say, by suggesting the MESSAGE RATE system.
By this plan, which U.N.Bethell developed to its highest point in New York, a user of the telephone pays a fixed minimum price for a certain number of messages per year, and extra for all messages over this number.

The large user pays more, and the little user pays less.

It opened up the way to such an expansion of telephone business as Bell, in his rosiest dreams, had never imagined.

In three years, after 1896, there were twice as many users; in six years there were four times as many; in ten years there were eight to one.