A Bad Call on the Telephone

Sometimes when you're the biggest king on the hill, it's hard to see new kids climbing the slopes, and that's exactly what happened to Western Union in 1876 when the telegraph giant-- “the nervous system of commerce”--dismissed a new invention called a telephone as a “toy.” Western Union's arrogant president, William Orton, probably laughed when Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell him the patent to the phone for $100,000. An internal Western Union memo reportedly said: “The idea i