Its Man, still fairly hale and busy after forty years of leadership, is Enos M.Barton.His career is the typical American story of self-help.

He was a telegraph messenger boy in New York during the Civil War, then a telegraph operator in Cleveland.

In 1869 his salary was cut down from one hundred dollars a month to ninety dollars; whereupon he walked out and founded the Western Electric in a shabby little machine-shop.

Later he moved to Chicago, took in Elisha Gray as his partner, and built up a trade in the making of telegraphic materials.
When the telephone was invented, Barton was one of the sceptics.

"I well remember my disgust," he said, "when some one told me it was possible to send conversation along a wire." Several months later he saw a telephone and at once became one of its apostles.