Building the Bell System
AT&T, a key player in American communication history, shaped infrastructure with vast assets and innovations like copper wire. Its global reach and legacy as a telecommunications pioneer endure despite industry changes.
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AT&T, once a dominant force in the American business landscape, played a crucial role in shaping the country's communication infrastructure throughout the 20th century. Initially founded in 1877 as the Bell Telephone Company, it rapidly expanded to become a key player in the industry. By 1974, AT&T's assets had grown to $74 billion, making it a significant employer with over one million workers. The company's relentless pursuit of providing universal telephone service led to the construction of vast amounts of infrastructure, including millions of telephones, thousands of exchanges, and millions of miles of wire across the nation.
AT&T's technical innovations, such as switching to copper wire and developing the audion amplifier, significantly improved long-distance communication capabilities. The company also established connections with foreign telephone networks, expanding its reach globally. Despite facing challenges from competitors and regulatory changes, AT&T maintained its position as a major player in the industry.
Throughout its history, AT&T's commitment to technological advancement and infrastructure development played a pivotal role in transforming American life by making telephone service more accessible and affordable. Despite changes in the industry landscape over time, AT&T's legacy as a telecommunications pioneer remains significant.
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- Many commenters praised AT&T's significant contributions to modern telecommunications and its reliable infrastructure.
- Several shared resources and historical archives, such as the Bell System Technical Journal and AT&T Archives on YouTube.
- Discussions included AT&T's billing methods in its early days and the company's strategic decisions around 1970.
- Commenters highlighted AT&T's engineering feats, including moving a central office building without dropping a call and building a network resilient to nuclear attacks.
- There was a distinction made between the historical AT&T (Ma Bell) and the modern AT&T, noting the impact of mergers and acquisitions.
13 commentsAnd of course bell labs created a number of incredibly important technologies. This isn't as easy as just throwing money at the wall, someone had to be in charge of talent selection and what projects to invest in, but when you review what they were able to accomplish, it can really make you wonder what other labs were/are doing.
>Between 1960 and 1973, NASA spent almost $26 billion on the Apollo Program ($311 billion in 2024 dollars), over 2% of U.S. GDP. Over that same period, AT&T spent almost $70 billion building new telephone infrastructure
What a crazy statistic to pull, and the chart in the article also adds to it.
500-467 thru 500-478 will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...
And those phones were very well made. My parents had the same Western Electric rotary dial phones in their house for close to 30 years, and they never had an issue.
My biggest question is what happened around 1970? Did their analysts predict saturation or the rise of other networks? It's not exactly clear from the article.
They basically were spending money like it was free in the name of growth for a century, and stopped about that time, which led to all sorts of problems. Was it a prediction, or the onset of 'beancounter accounting'?
It was so capital intensive that it must have been earning good money, but without computers, how was their business model?
E.g. a fixed fee per line, or did they have a way to charge its customers per call, or duration of the call as we're now used to?
Entire buildings underground on springs, underground generator farms and weeks of fuel, a hidden set of 4 buttons on your touch tone phone for specifying quality of service during dialing, etc. Fascinating stuff.
Ma Bell today is really AT&T, Verizon and parts of Lumen, Frontier and Consolidated.
AT&T also is worth less than Verizon due to bad mergers (DirecTV and non-cable Time Warner) which added a lot of debt, money that should've been used for fiber and 5G or even a bidding war against T-Mobile for Sprint if you had to buy your competitor.
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