In a few years there were six thousand of these little Robinson Crusoe companies.

And by 1901 they had put in use more than a million telephones and were professing to have a capital of a hundred millions.
Most of these companies were necessary and did much to expand the telephone business into new territory.

They were in fact small mutual associations of a dozen or a hundred farmers, whose aim was to get telephone service at cost.

But there were other companies, probably a thousand or more, which were organized by promoters who built their hopes on the fact that the Bell Companies were unpopular, and on the myth that they were fabulously rich.

Instead of legitimately extending telephone lines into communities that had none, these promoters proceeded to inflict the messy snarl of an overlapping system upon whatever cities would give them permission to do so.
In this way, masked as competition, the nuisance and waste of duplication began in most American cities.