AT&T CORPORATION

formerly (18991994) American Telephone and Telegraph Company American corporation that provides long-distance telephone and other telecommunications services. It is a descendant of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which built much of the United States' long-distance and local telephone networks, becoming the world's largest corporation and a standard for the telecommunications industry. This firm voluntarily split into three smaller companies in 1996, one of which retained the AT&T name. The company's origins date back to 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the first wire transmission of intelligible speech. Bell secured a patent for the device, and in 1877 he and two investors, Gardiner C. Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company, which they sold the next year to a group of financiers. The Bell Company was already embroiled in a race with the the leading telegraph company, Western Union Company, for the development of telephone serviceWestern Union by this time having acquired its own telephone devices and its own patents. Bell interests were represented by Theodore N. Vail, who was general manager from 1878 to 1887 and led the patent fight against Western Union. In 1879 Western Union, which was itself involved in a war of control between the Vanderbilts and Jay Gould, agreed to give up all its telephone patents, claims, and facilities in return for Bell's promise to stay out of the telegraph business. The Bell Telephone Company underwent a series of reorganizations and renamings between 1878 and 1900. In 1881 Bell bought Western Electric; this leading maker of telegraphic equipment thenceforth became the dominant manufacturer of telephone equipment as well. Another important unit, the Mechanical Department, formed in 1883, became the Bell Telephone Laboratories, incorporated as a separate company in 1925. In 1885 Bell established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, or AT&T, as its subsidiary responsible for building long-distance telephone lines. In 1899 AT&T was made the parent company of the Bell System. After the Bell Company's patent on the telephone expired in 1894, it encountered growing competition from independent phone companies and telephone manufacturers. Vail was brought back into the company as president in 1907, and from then until his retirement in 1919 he molded AT&T into virtually the organization that lasted until 1984. Vail set about trying to achieve a monopoly for AT&T over the American telecommunications industry. He consolidated the Bell associated companies into state and regional organizations, acquired many previously independent companies, and achieved control over Western Union in 1910. In a commitment first enunciated in 1913 but affirmed by the Graham-Willis Act of 1921, AT&T, as a natural monopoly, agreed to provide long-distance service to all independent telephone companies. By 1939 AT&T controlled 83 percent of all U.S. telephones and 98 percent of all long-distance telephone lines and manufactured 90 percent of all U.S. phone equipment. In 1949 the Justice Department brought suit against AT&T under the Sherman Antitrust Act, seeking, among other things, to divorce Western Electric from the Bell System; the suit ended in 1956 in a consent decree that kept Western Electric in the system but restricted monopolistic practices. AT&T kept growing; by the 1970s it had almost one million employees and was the largest company in the world, with total assets exceeding those of General Motors, the Exxon Corporation, and the Mobil Corporation combined. In 1974 the United States instituted a second antitrust suit for the dismemberment of the Bell System. After years of litigation, AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement in 1982 whereby AT&T would divest itself of 22 regional operating companies that would become separate entities and operate local telephone networks. The 22 regional operating companies were divested by Jan. 1, 1984, and were reorganized and converted into seven regional phone companies: Nynex, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech (or American Information Technologies, Inc.), BellSouth, Southwestern Bell Corporation, US West, and Pacific Telesis Group. AT&T relinquished the use of the name Bell to these companies, which became informally known as Baby Bells. Though it had left the local-network business, AT&T remained the nation's largest provider of long-distance telephone service. The company also retained its Western Electric subsidiary, which manufactured telephones and other equipment; and Bell Telephone Laboratories, its research and development arm. In addition, the company was freed to compete in such previously forbidden fields as data processing and computer communications. Among its efforts in this direction was the purchase in 1991 of NCR Corporation (q.v.), a major manufacturer of computers, electronic cash registers, and other data-processing systems. In 1994 AT&T purchased McCaw Cellular Communications Inc., the nation's largest provider of cellular telephone service. That same year the company also formally adopted its traditional byname, AT&T, and became the AT&T Corporation. In order to compete more effectively in an American telecommunications industry that had just been deregulated by the federal government, AT&T divided its operations into three separate companies in 1996. The largest of these, the AT&T Corporation, continued to provide long-distance telecommunications services. A second company, Lucent Technologies Inc., made and marketed telephones, network switching equipment, computer chips, and other hardware and also picked up most of the Bell Laboratories. The third company was the NCR Corporation. AT&T's self-imposed dismantling was the largest corporate breakup in history. AT&T gave the United States the largest, most advanced, and most efficient telecommunications network of any nation in the world. The company was responsible for most of the major technical advances made in telephone service, switching systems, and signal transmission during the 20th century. AT&T pioneered the building of transoceanic radiotelephone links and telephone cable systems, built early-warning radar systems for the U.S. Department of Defense, and created the Telstar satellite communications system. Bell Labs, one of the world's foremost research centres, invented the transistor in 1948.