the application would be granted, he received for answer: "We had made up
our minds to allow the appropriation, when the Professor came in and
upset everything. Why! he undertook to tell us that he could send ten
words from Washington to Baltimore in two minutes. Good heavens! Twenty
minutes is quick enough, but two minutes is nonsense. The Professor is
too radical and visionary, and I doubt if the committee recommend the sum
to be risked in such a manner." Mr. Sibley's sound arguments and
persuasiveness prevailed, though he took care not to say what he
believed, that the Professor was right as to the two minutes. Their joint
efforts secured the subsidy of $40,000.

This example stimulated other inventors, and in a few years several
patents were in use, and various lines had been constructed by different
companies. The business was so divided as to be always unprofitable. Mr.
Sibley conceived the plan of uniting all the patents and companies in one
organization. After three years of almost unceasing toil, he succeeded in
buying up the stock of the different corporations, some of it at a price
as low as two cents on the dollar, and in consolidating the lines which
then extended over portions of thirteen States. The Western Union
Telegraph Company was then organized, with Mr. Sibley as the first
president. Under his management for sixteen years, the number of
telegraph offices was increased from 132 to over 4,000, and the value of
the property from $220,000 to $48,000,000.

In the project of uniting the Atlantic and Pacific by a line to
California, he stood nearly alone. At a meeting of the prominent
telegraph men of New York, a committee was appointed to report upon his
proposed plan, whose verdict was that it would be next to impossible to
build the line; that, if built, the Indians would destroy it; and that it
would not pay, even if built, and not destroyed. His reply was