Some fifteen years ago, when Frederick P. Fish, the famous patent attorney, was the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, I asked him in the course of a conversation whether he would like to sell me back my invention. “Yes,” said he, “but only if you will buy the whole telephone company with it. Our whole plant has been adjusted to the invention, and when one goes the other also must go. The invention has enabled us to detect many defects in our transmission system, and if it had done nothing else than that it would have been worth at least ten times what we paid you. It is the greatest faultfinder that we ever struck, and it is the only form of faultfinder for which we have any use.” A progressive industrial organization courts the criticism of an accurate and friendly faultfinder. It leads to research and development, and that supplies the vital energy to every industry. Twenty-five years ago the American Telephone and Telegraph Company had a small laboratory in Boston, where it did all its scientific research and development. But, presently, faultfinders like my inventions moved into the peaceful and drowsy precincts of that tiny laboratory, and stirred up the engineers and the board of directors. I am very happy whenever I think that, possibly, my inventions have contributed some to this healthful stirring up. What was the result? To-day the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the affiliated Western Electric Company employ about three thousand persons at an expenditure of some nine million dollars annually in their research and development work. The scientific research work at our universities looks very modest in comparison with operations of this kind. Young men of the highest academic training and splendid talents are busy day and night exploring the hidden treasures on the boundary-lines between the various sciences and the science and art of telephony, and their discoveries, I am sure, are the best investment of this great industrial organization. For instance, their development of the many details in my invention have been wonderful, and give testimony of the highest kind to the excellence of their scientific research. It is not so much the occasional inventor who nurses a great art like telephony and makes it grow beyond all our expectations, as it is the intelligence of a well-organized and liberally supported research laboratory. When I think of that I am perfectly convinced that very few of the great advances in the telephone art would have happened under government ownership. That explains why telephony is practically dead in most European countries. What little life it has in Europe is due to the American research in the above-mentioned laboratories.