AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph Company)
Company | Defunct
1885 CE to 1982 CE
AT&T Corp., originally American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies.
During its long history, AT&T is at times the world's largest telephone company, the world's largest cable television operator, and a regulated monopoly.
At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, it employs one million people and its revenue is roughly $300 billion annually in 2006 dollars.In 2005, AT&T is purchased by Baby Bell SBC Communications for more than $16 billion ($19 billion in present-day terms).
SBC then rebrands itself as AT&T Inc. Today, AT&T Corporation continues to exist as the long distance subsidiary of AT&T Inc., and its name occasionally shows up in AT&T press releases.
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Telephones are owned by more than one hundred and fifty thousand people in the United States by 1886.
Bell company engineers have made numerous other improvements to the telephone, which has emerged as one of the most successful products ever.
American Bell had acquired a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company from Western Union by 1881.
Only three years earlier, Western Union had turned down Gardiner Hubbard's offer to sell it all rights to the telephone for one hundred thousand U.S. dollars (approximately two point forty-one million in current dollars).
In only a few years, Western Union's president would acknowledge that it had been a serious business error, one that nearly led to his company later almost being swallowed up by the newly emerging telecommunications giant into which Bell Telephone will shortly evolve.
Western Union will be saved from demise only by the U.S. Government's anti-monopoly interventions.
A year earlier, in 1880, the management of American Bell had created what will become AT&T Long Lines.
The project is the first of its kind to create a nationwide long-distance network with a commercially viable cost-structure.
The project had been formally incorporated in New York State as a separate company named American Telephone and Telegraph Company on March 3, 1885.