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1 History

In 1856, George Shawk, purchased an electrical engineering business in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1869, he became partners with Enos N. Barton and, later the same year, sold his share to inventor Elisha Gray. In 1872 Barton and Gray moved the business to Clinton Street, Chicago, Illinois and incorporated it as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. They manufactured a variety of electrical products including typewriters, alarms and lighting and had a close relationship with the telegraph company Western Union to whom they supplied relays and other equipment.

In 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell ( March 3, 1847 August 2, 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and founder of the Bell telephone company. In addition to his work in telecommunications technology, he also was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil's patentA patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date). The term "patent" originates from the term patere which means to lay open (to public inspectio application for the telephoneThe telephone or phone is a telecommunications device that transmits speech by means of electric signals. Generally attributed to the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the first was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1876. However, an Italian inventor Anton. The ensuing legal battle over patentA patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date). The term "patent" originates from the term patere which means to lay open (to public inspectio rights, between Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company , ended in 1879 with the former company withdrawing from the telephone market and the latter acquiring Western Electric in 1881.

From this time, well into the 1970s, all telephones and telephone networks in the United States with the exception of a few areas, were owned directly or indirectly by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) popularly known as Ma Bell. AT&T was composed of regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs), such as Pacific Telephone and New York Telephone . Other divisions of AT&T and parts of the Bell System included Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs), AT&T Long Lines and Western Electric, the manufacturing arm.

All telephones, all components of the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and all devices connected to the network were made by Western Electric and no other devices were allowed to be connected to the network.

Western Electric telephones were leased by subscribers and never sold, and so had to be repaired at no charge if they failed. This led Western Electric to pursue extreme reliability and durability in design. In particular, the work of Walter A. Shewhart, who developed new techniques for statistical quality control in the 1920s, helped lead to the legendary quality of manufacture of Western Electric telephones.

AT&T's only serious competitor in providing phone service was General Telephone and Electronics (GTE), which operated its own manufacturing arm, Automatic Electric.

In 1905 AT&T began construction of the Hawthorne Works on the outskirts of Chicago and which, by 1914 had absorbed all manufacturing work from Clinton Street and Western Electric's other plant in New York.

In addition to being a supplier for AT&T, Western Electric also played a major role in the development and production of professional sound recording and reproducing equipment, notably the Vitaphone system which brought sound to the movies, the Westrex optical sound that succeeded it, and the Westrex cutter and system for recording stereophonic sound in a single-groove gramophone record that was compatible with monophonic equipment.