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Continued: He was the first president (1907-1919) of American Telephone & Telegraph.
Biography: "IN ONE MAN'S LIFE", by Albert Bigelow Paine (1921)
Dictionary of American Biography (1936), Vol. 19, p.138:
".... In 1876 Theodore Vail became general superintendent of the (U.S.Postal system) railway mail service. Meantime, Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and Gardiner G. Hubbard had begun to organize the business. Hubbard recognized the need for a young man of vision, ability, and force to carry on the development of the telephone industry. Knowing Vail through his active interest in the postal service, Hubbard singled him out and persuaded him to undertake the work under the title of general manager of the Bell Telephone Company.
Between May, 1878 and September, 1887 Vail organized the expanding telephone system ..... he incorporated in 1885 a special subsidiary company, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, of which he was the first president...... He resigned (in 1887) from the A.T.& T. company and from all other responsibilities, and retired in 1889 to a farm he had bought at Lyndonville, Vermont.....
(From 1894 to 1907) he turned his interest and energy into utility projects in Argentina....
With the expiration of the Bell telephone patents in 1893 and 1894, hundreds of independent telephone companies sprang up and entered into local competition with the Bell organizations. It was not yet generally realized that the telephone was a natural monopoly. The directors of the Bell Co. now urged Vail to take hold of the industry again, and on May 1, 1907, his election as president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company was announced. "
(On June 18, 1919 he became chairman of the Board of Directors)
Who's Who in America (1907-20):
Between 1910-15, T .N. Vail was honored with LL.D. degrees from Dartmouth, Middlebury, Princeton and Harvard Universities., and D.Science from Univ. of Vermont. He was on the boards of many other companies, and a member of numerous societies and clubs in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Vail moved from Lyndonville, Vermont to New York City in 1918, and had a longtime winter residence at Jekyl Island, GA.
National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 28, p. 50-53:
" ..... Vail was endowed by nature with an extraordinary personality, vivid, colorful, distinctive and stimulating. He always radiated confidence, enthusiasm and good cheer. A man of large stature and great physical strength, he was a veritable dynamo of energy and vitality. No plan was too great for his quick mind to undertake and no detail too small to receive his personal attention. .....He was noted for his candor and sterling honesty, his sound business sense, his punctuality, his hospitality and generosity. .....Unaffected, democratic, sensitive and easily moved, he would see anyone who sought access to him. .....He loved music, art and books, was a collector of beautiful and costly volumes, accumulated a splendid library where he spent much of his time reading, and gave liberally to the support of public museums and libraries."
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