From Hookswitch to Grave
AT&T has a complicated corporate history due to decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, which was partly caused by monopolization and vertical integration. The company's history is closely tied to the development of the telephone system, and its early stories are often obscured by its later achievements. The history of AT&T is also connected to other inventors and companies, such as Elisha Gray and Western Electric, which played important roles in the development of telephone technology.
- ▪AT&T was one of the largest enterprises in American history, rivaling the federal government in size and budget.
- ▪Elisha Gray was a prominent inventor who claimed to have invented the telephone and founded Western Electric, which later became a core part of the Bell System.
- ▪Western Electric was acquired by AT&T in 1881 and became the manufacturing and supply arm of the company, producing equipment for the Bell telephone network.
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from hookswitch to grave 2026-06-14 Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally. While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Computers Are Bad.
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