Theodore Vail

July 16, 1845 (age 74)

Malvern, Ohio, United States

At seventeen, Vail went to work in a drugstore where there was a telegraph office; he learned to use the instrument, and by the time he was nineteen he was at work in New York as an operator for the Western Union Telegraph Company. This career was interrupted by the decision of his father to go west. The family moved in 1866 to Waterloo, Iowa, and Theodore went with them. Here he learned what it was to be a pioneer, breaking the loam and harvesting rich crops. Baseball was the recreation of the region, and in Iowa, Vail conceived his lifelong enthusiasm for the game. In 1868, he went back into the telegraph service and was soon night operator at Pine Bluffs, in the Indian country among the Black Hills on the Union Pacific Railway. From this telegraph service he went into the mail service. Vail was soon devising improvements in the operation and routings of the railway mail service. This initiative brought him advancement and in 1873 transfer to the office of the railway mail service at Washington; in 1874, he became assistant general superintendent. Under Postmaster-General Marshall Jewell, on September 16, 1875, he inaugurated the Fast Mail between New York and Chicago, over the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad; the first train, carrying only mail, started from New York at a speed of more than forty-one miles an hour, faster than any passenger train had ever traveled. With the beginning of 1876, Theodore Vail became general superintendent of the railway mail service. Meantime Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and Gardiner Greene Hubbard had begun to organize the business. Hubbard recognized the need for a young man of vision, ability, and force to carry on the development of the telephone industry. Knowing Vail through his active interest in the postal service, Hubbard singled him out and persuaded him to undertake the work under the title of general manager of the Bell Telephone Company. He resigned from the telephone company and from all other responsibilities, and retired in 1889 to a farm he had bought at Lyndonville, Vermont. There, some years before, his interest in scientific agriculture and in practical education had led him to give the funds necessary to rehabilitate and reopen (in 1884) an industrial school, Lyndon Institute. Soon, however, a visitor from South America interested him in the industrial development of the Argentine Republic; and after several years, during which he spent much time in Europe without losing touch with the telephone company, he turned his interest and energy into utility projects in Argentina. This was his chief occupation from 1894 to 1907. He financed and developed a great water-power plant at Cordoba and electrified and made profitable a street railway system in Buenos Aires. After the death of his wife in February 1905, and of his only child, Davis, in December 1906, he sold out his South American interests and returned to Vermont. After his second marriage he again turned his attention to agriculture and education for country life. The Bell Companies had grown from 180, 680 telephones to 2, 773, 547 telephones. In 1900, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company had taken over from the American Bell Telephone Company its function as the chief corporation of the telephone system, retaining its former long-distance functions in a special long-line department. With the expiration of the Bell telephone patents in 1893 and 1894, hundreds of independent telephone companies sprang up and entered into local competition with the Bell organizations. It was not yet generally realized that the telephone was a natural monopoly and that the existence of a multiplicity of telephone companies would prevent nation-wide telephone efficiency. The directors of the Bell company now urged Vail to take hold of the industry again, and on May 1, 1907, his election as president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company was announced. His first step was to move the headquarters of the company from Boston to New York. With the purpose of fostering and increasing public understanding and confidence he made the annual reports a medium for the frank discussion of telephone problems. He hastened the unification of the telephone industry by personally making the acquaintance of all the chief officers of the Bell companies throughout the country and by a policy of cooperation with the independent telephone companies. Under this policy, companies that preferred to remain independent could secure long-distance service by contract from the adjacent Bell company; these were called Bell-connected. Vail went further, toward a unification of all electric communications, affiliating the Western Union Telegraph Company with the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1909, with himself as president of both companies, and inaugurating improvements of service such as the night letter and telephone reception of telegrams. The federal government claimed, however, that this association was in violation of the anti-trust laws, and in 1913, the two companies were separated without formal legal action in court. Meanwhile, by selecting the right men and properly supporting them in their work, Vail pushed forward the progress of telephony: scientific research resulted in new inventions and technical improvement, as well as in efficient construction; popular education increased the field of the telephone; able commercial management brought profits; and world telephony was rendered certain. The first long stride in this direction was the telephone conquest of the desert and the mountains. On January 25, 1915, during the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, the first transcontinental telephone line was opened with conversations between President Woodrow Wilson at Washington, Alexander Graham Bell at New York, Thomas A. Watson at San Francisco, and Theodore N. Vail at Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. The same year telephone engineers under John J. Carty developed radio telephony so that on October 21, communications sent out from Arlington, Virginia, were simultaneously received in Paris and at Honolulu. In 1917 a collection of Vail's papers and addresses was privately printed under the title, Views on Public Questions. After the United States went into the World War, telephone battalions were organized, in accordance with plans suggested by Carty and approved by Vail, and they built an American telephone system in France. On July 31, 1918, the government took over control of all the wire communication systems, and Vail was requested to continue with his own organization the conduct of the telephone business for the government, reporting to the Postmaster General. The wires were returned to the owning companies on July 31, 1919. Just previously, June 18, Vail had resigned the presidency of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and become chairman of the Board of Directors. Vail had always lived unsparingly; in April 1920, he went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, where he died on April 16. He was buried in the old cemetery at Parsippany, New Jersey.

Theodore Newton Vail Edit Profile

also known as Theodore Newton Mail

executive

Background

Theodore Newton Vail was born near Minerva, Carroll County, Ohio on July 16, 1845. He was the son of Davis Vail, a Quaker farmer and iron worker, and Phebe (Quinby), his wife. There were ten children, of whom seven survived childhood, and of these Theodore was the third.

In 1847, Davis Vail took his family back to his former home in New Jersey, and went to work again in the Speedwell Iron Works near Morristown, well known through its association with his cousin, Alfred Vail, and the electric telegraph.

Education

Theodore went to the public schools and to the Morristown Academy until he had finished the high school grade. By this time he had become interested in reading, especially along the lines of geography and human achievement; but his real education was mainly a casual one in the school of versatile experience.

Career

At seventeen, Vail went to work in a drugstore where there was a telegraph office; he learned to use the instrument, and by the time he was nineteen he was at work in New York as an operator for the Western Union Telegraph Company. This career was interrupted by the decision of his father to go west. The family moved in 1866 to Waterloo, Iowa, and Theodore went with them. Here he learned what it was to be a pioneer, breaking the loam and harvesting rich crops.

Baseball was the recreation of the region, and in Iowa, Vail conceived his lifelong enthusiasm for the game. In 1868, he went back into the telegraph service and was soon night operator at Pine Bluffs, in the Indian country among the Black Hills on the Union Pacific Railway. From this telegraph service he went into the mail service. Vail was soon devising improvements in the operation and routings of the railway mail service.

This initiative brought him advancement and in 1873 transfer to the office of the railway mail service at Washington; in 1874, he became assistant general superintendent. Under Postmaster-General Marshall Jewell, on September 16, 1875, he inaugurated the Fast Mail between New York and Chicago, over the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad; the first train, carrying only mail, started from New York at a speed of more than forty-one miles an hour, faster than any passenger train had ever traveled.

With the beginning of 1876, Theodore Vail became general superintendent of the railway mail service. Meantime Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and Gardiner Greene Hubbard had begun to organize the business. Hubbard recognized the need for a young man of vision, ability, and force to carry on the development of the telephone industry.

Knowing Vail through his active interest in the postal service, Hubbard singled him out and persuaded him to undertake the work under the title of general manager of the Bell Telephone Company. He resigned from the telephone company and from all other responsibilities, and retired in 1889 to a farm he had bought at Lyndonville, Vermont.

There, some years before, his interest in scientific agriculture and in practical education had led him to give the funds necessary to rehabilitate and reopen (in 1884) an industrial school, Lyndon Institute. Soon, however, a visitor from South America interested him in the industrial development of the Argentine Republic; and after several years, during which he spent much time in Europe without losing touch with the telephone company, he turned his interest and energy into utility projects in Argentina. This was his chief occupation from 1894 to 1907.

He financed and developed a great water-power plant at Cordoba and electrified and made profitable a street railway system in Buenos Aires. After the death of his wife in February 1905, and of his only child, Davis, in December 1906, he sold out his South American interests and returned to Vermont. After his second marriage he again turned his attention to agriculture and education for country life.

The Bell Companies had grown from 180, 680 telephones to 2, 773, 547 telephones. In 1900, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company had taken over from the American Bell Telephone Company its function as the chief corporation of the telephone system, retaining its former long-distance functions in a special long-line department.

With the expiration of the Bell telephone patents in 1893 and 1894, hundreds of independent telephone companies sprang up and entered into local competition with the Bell organizations. It was not yet generally realized that the telephone was a natural monopoly and that the existence of a multiplicity of telephone companies would prevent nation-wide telephone efficiency. The directors of the Bell company now urged Vail to take hold of the industry again, and on May 1, 1907, his election as president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company was announced. His first step was to move the headquarters of the company from Boston to New York.

With the purpose of fostering and increasing public understanding and confidence he made the annual reports a medium for the frank discussion of telephone problems. He hastened the unification of the telephone industry by personally making the acquaintance of all the chief officers of the Bell companies throughout the country and by a policy of cooperation with the independent telephone companies. Under this policy, companies that preferred to remain independent could secure long-distance service by contract from the adjacent Bell company; these were called Bell-connected.

Vail went further, toward a unification of all electric communications, affiliating the Western Union Telegraph Company with the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1909, with himself as president of both companies, and inaugurating improvements of service such as the night letter and telephone reception of telegrams. The federal government claimed, however, that this association was in violation of the anti-trust laws, and in 1913, the two companies were separated without formal legal action in court.

Meanwhile, by selecting the right men and properly supporting them in their work, Vail pushed forward the progress of telephony: scientific research resulted in new inventions and technical improvement, as well as in efficient construction; popular education increased the field of the telephone; able commercial management brought profits; and world telephony was rendered certain. The first long stride in this direction was the telephone conquest of the desert and the mountains.

On January 25, 1915, during the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, the first transcontinental telephone line was opened with conversations between President Woodrow Wilson at Washington, Alexander Graham Bell at New York, Thomas A. Watson at San Francisco, and Theodore N. Vail at Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. The same year telephone engineers under John J. Carty developed radio telephony so that on October 21, communications sent out from Arlington, Virginia, were simultaneously received in Paris and at Honolulu.

In 1917 a collection of Vail's papers and addresses was privately printed under the title, Views on Public Questions. After the United States went into the World War, telephone battalions were organized, in accordance with plans suggested by Carty and approved by Vail, and they built an American telephone system in France.

On July 31, 1918, the government took over control of all the wire communication systems, and Vail was requested to continue with his own organization the conduct of the telephone business for the government, reporting to the Postmaster General. The wires were returned to the owning companies on July 31, 1919. Just previously, June 18, Vail had resigned the presidency of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and become chairman of the Board of Directors.

Vail had always lived unsparingly; in April 1920, he went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, where he died on April 16. He was buried in the old cemetery at Parsippany, New Jersey.

Achievements

The chief organizer of the telephone business, in little more than forty years, Vail had "made neighbors of a hundred million people. " Vail saw telephone service as a public utility and moved to consolidate telephone networks under the Bell system. Between May 1878 and September 1887, Vail organized the expanding telephone system; he merged the rapidly multiplying local exchanges into more efficient companies; he put into effect a practical system of financing the telephone industry; he provided for anticipatory technical development and for improved and more economical manufacture of telephone apparatus, with the Western Electric Company as the manufacturing unit, so as to improve the quality and extend the distance of telephone transmission. His culminating contribution in this period was to unify the industry by connecting all the operating companies and exchanges by a long-distance telephone system. For this purpose, with Edward J. Hall, Jr. , as the active man, he incorporated in 1885 a special subsidiary company, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, of which he was the first president. In 1913, he oversaw the Kingsbury Commitment that led to a more open system for connection. Vail founded the Vermont School of Agriculture in 1910 in Lyndon, Vermont. This was subsequently merged into a preparatory school, Lyndon Institute. He acquired the scientific book collection of George Edward Dering in 1911 and presented it to the library of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Vail Collection covers topics including "electricity, magnetism, lighter-than-air travel, animal magnetism" and others. Vail co-founded Junior Achievement in 1919.

Views

Quotations: "One Policy, One System, Universal Service. "

Membership

a member of the Union League Club of New York, a member of the Algonquin Club of Boston and the Jekyll Island Club

Personality

By 1887, Vail's vitality was depleted, for no plan had been too great for his quick mind to undertake, and no detail too small to receive his personal attention.

Connections

On August 3, 1869, at Newark, New Jersey, Vail married Emma Louise Righter, a cousin on his mother's side. They settled in Omaha, whence he went on his mail trips across the continent.

On July 18, 1870, a son was born to them. In 1905, his wife died. Marrying on July 27, 1907, Mabel R. Sanderson of Boston, and making his niece, Katherine Vail, his adopted daughter.

Father:: Davis Vail
Mother:: Phoebe Quinby Vail
Brother:: William Alonzo Vail
Brother:: Isaac Quinby Vail
Sister:: Emma Eugenia Vail
Sister:: Emma Eugenia Vail Halsey
Sister:: Mary Eliza Vail
Wife:: Mabel R. Sanderson
Wife:: Emma Louisa Righter Vail
Son:: Davis Righter Vail
Cousin:: Alfred Lewis Vail

References

the financial history of the american telephone and telegraph company

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Theodore Newton Vail Edit Profile

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