Company
ReorganizedAT&T
United States · Since 1880
The Bell System was broken up in 1984. The company that uses the name today is the former SBC, which bought the long-distance business in 2005 and took its name.
American Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1880 to hold the Bell patents. American Telephone and Telegraph, founded in 1885 as its long-distance subsidiary, became the parent in 1899. For most of the twentieth century AT&T was the Bell System: local companies, a long-distance network, Western Electric as the manufacturer, and Bell Laboratories as the research arm.
It was a regulated monopoly. In exchange for a universal service obligation, it was allowed to be the telephone company. The operator, the installer, and the switchman were its workforce, and for decades they were the telephone.
A nationwide craft
Operators, mostly women, sat the boards. Installers, mostly men, climbed poles and entered houses. Western Electric built the sets they installed, to a standard, so a phone in Ohio matched a line in Oregon. Bell Labs, formally organized in 1925, employed scientists whose job was the network's next twenty years. The transistor, the laser, and Unix came out of that arrangement. A monopoly can fund work a competitive firm will not, which is the defense AT&T offered and the reason its critics never found sufficient.
Two breakups
In 1984, after a long antitrust case, the local Bell companies were split from AT&T. The long-distance company kept the name, Western Electric, and the labs. In 2005 SBC Communications, one of the regional pieces, bought that AT&T and took its name. The company called AT&T today is that successor. It is a large wireless and broadband employer. It is not the Bell System. The operator's job, which the system had already been automating for decades, did not come back.
The work it organized
- Switchboard operator
- Installer
- Switchman
- Research scientist