July 1. 1912.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



507 



Theodore N. Vail. 



THEODORE N, VAIL. THE NEW UNITED STATES RUBBER CO. 

 DIRECTOR. 



At the last annual meeting of the United States Rubber Co., 

 held in New Brunswick, May 21, Theodore N. Vail was elected 

 a director of the company. Ordinarily the expression is only 

 a piece of reprehensible slang, but in referring to Mr. Vail — • 

 considering both his characteristics and his position as president 

 of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. — it seems quite 



justifiable to refer to 

 ^ him as a "live wire." 



Certainly it describes 

 him. There are few 

 men in American life 

 today that have his 

 superabundance o f 

 energy and personal 

 force. 



He was born in 

 Ohio in July, 184S. 

 That makes him at 

 the present time 67 

 years old, but he 

 doesn't know it. One 

 of his illustrious an- 

 cestors was John 

 Vail, the Quaker 

 preacher, who settled 

 in New Jersey in 

 1710, but Mr. Vail 

 himself doesn't look 

 very much like a 

 Quaker. Though he 

 was born in Ohio, he 

 spent the greater part of his youth in New Jersey, and in due 

 time graduated from the Morristown Academy. An uncle was 

 a doctor, and they put the boy in his office, where he perused 

 medical literature with more or less assiduity for two years. 

 But guessing whether a patient had whooping cough or St. 

 Vitus dance didn't appeal to young Vail, and in outside moments 

 in a local office, he had learned telegraphy, and when about 

 that time his father moved to Iowa, he accompanied the fam- 

 ily but pushed on still further, to Missouri, and got a position 

 as telegrapher. That w^as about 1869. Shortly after a friend 

 secured him a position in the railway mail service, which in 

 those early days was as slow, unsystematic and chaotic as a gov- 

 ernment service could well be. Young Vail immediately set 

 to work, though only a clerk, to devise schemes for system- 

 atizing the service. He attracted the attention of the author- 

 ities at Washington, and they made him assistant superintend- 

 ent of the railway mail service. This was followed soon after 

 by his appointment, in 1876, to the position of general super- 

 intendent. The present efficient character of the railway mail 

 service dates back to the innovations of Mr. Vail's incumbency. 

 About that time a youngish man, Alexander Graham Bell, 

 was working out a scheme of talking over a wire. Most people 

 said it was a crazy scheme, but Mr, Vail thought there was 

 a great deal in it and he became general manager of the Amer- 

 ican Bell Telephone Co. in 1878. He had some great dreams 

 regarding wdiat the telephone might do and much disturbed the 

 directors of the company, who thought it never could be used 

 except locally, by insisting that if you could talk over wire for 

 a mile or two you could do the same thing for many miles. 

 He built a telephone from Boston to Lowell, and then one from 

 Boston to Providence. Even the telephone people said that 

 wouldn't work, but Vail said it would, and it did. Under his 

 direction the telephone rapidly became a colossal institution. 



In 1890 he thought he would retire from commercial life 

 and take up farming, which had always appealed to him. He 



bought a large farm in Vermont and started in to raise a great 

 variety of fancy stock. Incidentally he traveled a great deal, 

 and in 1893 going to South America and seeing what tre- 

 mendous opportunities there were there he couldn't resist the 

 temptation to do something. Among the things he did was 

 to build, just outside the city of Cordoba, an electrical power 

 plant that practically did the whole work of the city — lighting 

 it, carrying its people in the street cars and running all its 

 factories. Then he bought a horse-car line in Buenos Aires 

 and soon had the streets covered with a wonderful trolley sys- 

 tem. But these incidental activities were not enough to satisfy 

 Mr. Vail, and in 1907 he took the presidency of the great Amer- 

 ican Telephone and Telegraph Co., and wiiat that is and what it 

 is doing nobody needs to be told. 



PERSONAL MENTION. 



W. R. Bliss, who has had many years' experience in the 

 mechanical rubber goods line, having been connected as sales- 

 man at different times with the Manhattan Rubber Manufac- 

 turing Co., The Diamond Rubber Co. and the Gutta-Percha and 

 Rubber Manufacturing Co., has been appointed manager of the 

 mechanical goods department of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber 

 Co., Akron, Ohio. 



Charles V. Wick, who has been with the selling departiuent of 

 the New York office of the United States Rubber Co. for the 

 past IS years, was married to Miss Mary Schad, of Richmond 

 Hill, Long Island, on June 26. 



Charles I. O'Neil, who had been connected with the New York 

 office of the United States Rubber Co. for 10 years, most o£ 

 that time in the selling department, has joined the Iroquois 

 Rnbber Co., Buffalo, New York, in the capacity of salesman. 



LARGE EXPORTS OF AUTOS AND AUTO TIRES. 



According to figures just given out by the Bureau of Statistics 

 at Washington, the exports of automobiles for the year ending 

 June 30, 1912, will prove to amount to 20,000 in number, with a 

 valuation of $27,000,000. This includes not only the value of 

 the entire machines but of the parts exported and of tires, which 

 alone amount in value to nearly $3,000,000. These figures cover 

 only the exports to foreign countries and do not include the 900' 

 machines, valued at $1,500,000, sent to the distant possessions 

 of the United States. 



The growth in exports of automobiles from the United States 

 has been especially marked during the period since 1905, this- 

 growth being coincident with the expansion of the domestic in- 

 dustry and a corresponding decrease in imports of automobiles. 

 The value of domestic manufactures of this class of articles in- 

 creased from 5 million dollars in 1899 to 30 million in 1904, an 

 increase of 25 million dollars; while in the period from 1904 to 

 1909 the value of the output increased practically 220 million 

 dollars, from 30 million dollars in 1904 to 249 million in 1909. 

 Accompanying this notable growth in production, the imports of 

 automobiles decreased from 4;.4 million dollars in 1906 and 4J^ 

 million in 1907 to approximately 2^2 million dollars in 1912. 



Approximately 25 per cent, of the automobiles exported from 

 the United States are shipped to Canada; about 40 per cent, to 

 Europe, chiefly Great Britain; about 20 per cent, to British: 

 Australia, about 8 per cent, to South America. During the terr 

 months, ending with April, the latest period for which figures of 

 distribution are available in the Bureau of Statistics, 4,716 auto- 

 mobiles were exported to the United Kingdom, 4,424 to Canada-, 

 3,034 to British Oceania, 1,282 to South America, 849 to .Asia, 

 and other Oceania, and 2,502 to all other foreign countries. 

 There were also shipped, during the same period, 410 auto- 

 mobiles to Hawaii, 342 to Porto Rico and 11 to Alaska. 



