Theodore (Newton) Vail

Telephone and utilities executive, born near Minerva, Ohio, USA. He moved to New Jersey (1847) where he learned to operate the telegraph while working as a clerk in a drugstore. By age 19 he was at Western Union Telegraph Co in New York City, then moved with his family to Iowa (1866) and began working for the US Post Office Department (1869). He inaugurated the Fast Mail, the first train to carry only mail, between New York and Chicago (1875), and by 1876 was general superintendent of the railway mail service. He became general manager of the new Bell Telephone Co (1878–87) where he directed the expansion of local exchanges, anticipated technical developments, and organized financing of the system. He also made possible a long distance system by connecting all the existing companies into the American Telephone & Telegraph Co (AT&T) (1885) with himself as president. Exhausted, he retired to a Vermont farm in 1889. During 1894–1907 he helped develop utilities in Argentina, and was called back to AT&T (1907) to deal with the problems that ensued when the Bell patents expired in 1893–4. He successfully reunified the phone companies and pushed research and development, and in 1915 the first transcontinental telephone line was opened. He retired to chair the board of directors (1919). He was a cousin of Alfred Vail, telegraph pioneer and partner of Samuel Morse.

Theodore Newton Vail (July 16, 1845 – April 16, 1920) was a U.S. telephone industrialist.

Born in Minerva, Ohio, he served as the president of AT&T between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named American Telephone & He convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if it was brought under one monopoly so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country.