The Bell System logo and trademark as it appeared in 1972. Transatlantic services started in 1927 using two-way radio, but the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable did not arrive until Sept. This connection used a system of lines with loading coils and the Audion vacuum tube repeater first tested between New York and Philadelphia in 1913. National long-distance service reached San Francisco with the First transcontinental telephone call in 1915. With this transfer of assets, AT&T became the parent of the Bell System. On December 30, 1899, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company bought the assets of American Bell this was because Massachusetts corporate laws (which limited market capitalization to ten million dollars, preventing the direct growth of American Bell itself) were more restrictive than those of New York, where AT&T was headquartered. Starting from New York, the network reached Chicago in 1892.īell's patent on the telephone expired in 1893, but the company's much larger customer base made its service much more valuable than alternatives and substantial growth continued. This project was formally incorporated into a separate company named American Telephone and Telegraph Company on March 3, 1885. The project was the first of its kind to create a nationwide long-distance network with a commercially viable cost-structure. In 1880, the management of American Bell created what would become AT&T Long Lines. Only three years earlier, Western Union had turned down Gardiner Hubbard's offer to sell it all rights to the telephone for $100,000 ($2.68 million in 2009 dollars ). By 1881, it had bought a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company from Western Union. Renamed the National Bell Telephone Company in March 1879, it became the American Bell Telephone Company in March 1880.
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The formation of the Bell Telephone Company superseded an agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his financiers, principal among them Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Thomas Sanders. This company maintained an effective monopoly on local telephone service in the United States until anti-trust regulators agreed to allow AT&T to retain Western Electric and enter general trades computer manufacture and sales in return for its offer to split the Bell System by divesting itself of ownership of the Bell operating Companies (such as Illinois Bell Telephone Company) in 1982.ĪT&T Corporation was eventually purchased by one of the Regional Bell Operating Companies, formed at assume ownership of the divested Bell System Operating Companies ("Baby Bells") the former Southwestern Bell Company, in 2005, and the combined company became known as AT&T Inc.ĪT&T's lines and metallic circuit connections. Bell and Hubbard also established American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885, which acquired the Bell Telephone Company and became the primary telephone company in the United States. The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell, who obtained the first US patent for the telephone, and his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
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The history of AT&T dates back to the invention of the telephone.