July 17, 2024

Wednesday Open Comments

The telephone system: the only time anyone talks about it is when they’re complaining about it, unsatisfied with its pricing or its service failures. Even at that, there isn’t too much complaining about it. Lack of griping in our species is an indication of satisfaction.

The phone system is a monument to human ingenuity and globe-spanning engineering. The company that built most of it was AT&T. Today’s linked article covers the wonders that occurred to wire up the nation and the world in the past century-and-a-half.

Alongside the electrification of the continent, it’s an unbelievable achievement that no one spends much time thinking about, except when a call drops or fails, or when the billing is bungled. Here’s a brief introduction:

[F]or most of the 20th century, AT&T was one of the largest and most important companies in the entire world. 40 years after its founding in 1877, it was the second largest company in the U.S. by assets after US Steel, and it continued to grow from there. In his 1939 history of the company, Noobar Danielan describes AT&T’s $5 billion in assets, mostly in the value of its telephone infrastructure, as “the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single company in the history of business.” In 1974, this had grown to $74 billion in assets (roughly $470 billion in 2024 dollars), more than three times the assets of the next largest company, General Motors. The company’s one million employees were more than 1% of the U.S. labor force.

AT&T’s size was a consequence of the seemingly unceasing rising demand for telephone service. As early as 1900, AT&T was handling more than five million telephone calls a day. By 1925, that had reached over 50 million calls a day, and by 1975 it was approaching 500 million.

The rest is here.

The only overlooked bit of the history is about the recent past: that today’s AT&T is not the same company as Ma Bell. It is instead the cell phone provider previously known as Cingular, but renamed after that company bought out AT&T solely for the purpose of having the storied brand name, and a few patents that could be sold for cash. Cingular at the time was known as the cell phone provider with the worst customer satisfaction of all, in nearly any industry. Changing their name to AT&T helped them escape that image long enough to improve their quality of service.