WORLD’S BIGGEST SALARY

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 June 1936, Page 3

WORLD’S BIGGEST SALARY

AMERICAN TELEPHONE KING

The American spotlight is on Walter Sherman Gifford, the highestsalaried worker in the world.

He is the telephone king, ruler of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the greatest monopolies the world has ever known.. Every time the American drops his nickel in the slot he is enriching, not a Government department, but Walter Sherman Gifford and the A.T.T.

The spotlight came in ’Washington when the Federal Communications Commission, sitting in a walnut-pan-..lled room, tried to penetrate the thick walls of secrecy that hide the inner workings of the A.T.T. They discovered that British capital :s invested in A.T.T.; that telephoners’ nickels financed the films “Dangerous Waters,” “Emperor James? “The Scoundrel.” and others; that A.T.T. capital went to the assistance of the Fox Film Corporation; that A.T.T. is now interested in automatic horse-race timing devices, artificial larynges, photoelectric eyes, and me--1 Irtnical pianos.

And every day. while he sat in a blue leather armchair, listening to evidence, Walter Sherman Gifford knew he was nearly £l5O richer thman the day be. for 1 .

Every day his creed of efficiency is practised by his staff of 250,000, by his 80,000,000 miles of telephone wire, his 6769 exchanges, factories, laboratories and office buildings.

This perfect machine of efficfency was made possible because he himself was once inefficient 40 years ago.

Twenty-year-old Walter Gifford, just out of Harvard University with his degree, was told that electric companies were looking for bright young men. He decided the choice lay between two —General Electric and ’Western Electric.

He decided on the first, and wrote them a letter of application. Then he made his one mistake. He sent the letter in a wrongly addressed envelope—to the Western Electrtie. Ho hurriedly wrote to the Western Electric explaining his mistake. The company, which was then rapidly expanding, told him they had a job for him anyway in the accounting department at £2 a He flung himself into the study of mathematics, and before long he found himself a perfect mathematician. American Telephones and Telegraphs, meanwhile, was expanding with leaps and bounds. Its president, Theodore Vail, heard of young Gifford, and four years after Gifford had . posted that wrong letter he was a statistician in the Boston office of the A.T.T. In 1925. when he was still only 40, he was elected president. He can go no higher. His salary of £52,000 a year is the highest in the world, but Gifford, restless, unsatisfied, is ceaseless in his search for new ideas.