He is cast out as unfit for a telephone-using community.
And now, so that there shall be no anticlimax in this story of telephone development, we must turn the spot-light upon that immense aggregation of workshops in which have been made three-fifths of the telephone apparatus of the world--the Western Electric.

The mother factory of this globe-trotting business is the biggest thing in the spacious back-yard of Chicago, and there are eleven smaller factories--her children--scattered over the earth from New York to Tokio.

To put its totals into a sentence, it is an enterprise of 26,000-man-power, and 40,000,000-dollar-power; and the telephonic goods that it produces in half a day are worth one hundred thousand dollars--as much, by the way, as the Western Union REFUSED to pay for the Bell patents in 1877.
The Western Electric was born in Chicago, in the ashes of the big fire of 1871; and it has grown up to its present greatness quietly, without celebrating its birthdays.

At first it had no telephones to make.

None had been invented, so it made telegraphic apparatus, burglar-alarms, electric pens, and other such things.