¹ The inauguration of the transcontinental line was described in numerous company publications. See, for example, The Story of a Great Achievement: Telephone Communication from Coast to Coast (New York, 1915)Google Scholar; “Coordinating the Nation,” Telephone Review (Jan. 1915): 24; Pound, Arthur, The Telephone Idea: Fifty Years After (New York, 1926)Google Scholar; and Mills, John et al. , “A Quarter-Century of Transcontinental Telephone Service,” Bell Telephone Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1940)Google Scholar.

² It is somewhat anachronistic to use the abbreviation “AT&T” for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in this era; I do so only for brevity. Some documents in this era did refer to “the A.T. & T. Co.,” but the familiar acronym “AT&T” only came into general use in the 1930s or after.

³ The Story of a Great Achievement, 11-16.

⁴ Nance, H. H. and Oram, R. M., “The Circuits Go Up,” Bell Telephone Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1940)Google Scholar.

⁵ Dinerstein, Joel, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst, Mass., 2003), 185–87Google Scholar.

⁶ Vail, Theodore N., Views on Public Questions: A Collection of Papers and Addresses (New York, 1917), 99, 313Google Scholar.

⁷ Nance and Oram, “The Circuits Go Up,” 35.

⁸ Herring, James M. and Gross, Gerald C., Telecommunications: Economics and Regulation (New York, 1936), 213Google Scholar; Weiman, David F., “Building ‘Universal Service’ in the Early Bell System: The Coevolution of Regional Urban Systems and Long-Distance Telephone Networks,” in History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demographic Change, eds. Guinnane, Timothy W., Sundstrom, William A., and Whatley, Warren (Stanford, Calif., 2004), 331–32Google Scholar. Also, a very small minority of telephone customers accounted for the great majority of early long-distance business. The Northwestern Bell Telephone Company reported in 1923 that 5 percent of telephone subscribers made more than 95 percent of the company's long-distance calls. Gabel, Richard, Development of Separations Principles in the Telephone Industry (East Lansing, Mich., 1967), 10Google Scholar.

⁹ Conference of Publicity and Personnel Representatives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Proceedings, 11-13 Apr. 1928, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School (hereafter HBS), 89.

¹⁰ Williams, Thomas W., “Our Exhibits at Two Fairs,” Bell Telephone Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1940)Google Scholar. The real takeoff for long-distance telephony came during World War II, when many Americans had their first occasion to use the long-distance lines. Long-distance traffic in the United States would increase by more than 330 percent between 1939 and 1945. Bell System Statistical Manual (Warren, N.J., 1963), 1204Google Scholar.

¹¹ Nance and Oram, “The Circuits Go Up,” 25; M. D. Fagen, ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System, vol. 1: The Early Years, 1875-1925 (Warren, N.J., 1975)Google Scholar. Adjusted for inflation, $20.70 in 1915 had approximately the same purchasing power as $376.47 in 2003. By 1940, the cost of a three-minute New York-to-San Francisco call had dropped to $6.50, approximately equivalent to $85.14 in 2003. McCusker, John J., Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in the United States (or Colonies) from 1665 to Any Other Year Including the Present (Economic History Services, 2004)Google Scholar, Web site: http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/.

¹² “Telephones for the Millions,” McClure's (Nov. 1914): 45-55.

¹³ AT&T's major commercial reward for its coast-to-coast lines came with the rise of network radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, not from person-to-person calls but from the use of the lines to transmit radio programming between network affiliates.

¹⁴ See, for instance, Mills et al., “A Quarter-Century of Transcontinental Telephone Service.”

¹⁵ Theodore N. Vail, “Report on the Operations of the Telephone Business,” 19 Mar. 1880, box 1080, AT&T Historical Archives (hereafter ATTA); Garnet, Robert W., The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System's Horizontal Structure, 1876-1909 (Baltimore, Md., 1985)Google Scholar. For a detailed history of one regional operating company and the complex relations between American Bell's agents, subagents, and local licensees, see Walsh, J. Leigh, Connecticut Pioneers in Telephony (New Haven, Conn., 1950)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ National Telephone Exchange Association, Report of the Proceedings of the National Telephone Exchange Association, HBS, 1880, 1887. Membership in the NTEA was voluntary, so these numbers do not necessarily include every operating company in the country. Nevertheless, a majority of the Bell-affiliated operating companies certainly belonged, and the general trend among operating companies of growth in size and reduction in numbers is noted by the members of the NTEA and borne out by other evidence.

¹⁷ Annual Report of the Directors of the American Bell Telephone Company to the Stock-holders, HBS, 1882, 3; 1883, 4Google Scholar.

¹⁸ John, Richard R., “Theodore N. Vail and the Civic Origins of Universal Service,” Business and Economic History 28 (Winter 1999): 71–81Google Scholar; John, Richard R., “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age,” in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, eds. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Cortada, James W. (New York, 2000)Google Scholar. For Vail's life, see Richard R. John, “Vail, Theodore Newton,” American National Biography Online (Feb. 2000), Web site: http://www.anb.org/articles/10/10-01671.html; Paine, Albert Bigelow, Theodore N. Vail: A Biography (New York, 1929)Google Scholar. For a broad sample of his writing and ideas, see Vail, Views on Public Questions.

¹⁹ Technically, the company Vail joined in 1878 was the Bell Telephone Company, not American Bell. The original Bell Telephone Company, founded in 1877, was reorganized as the National Bell Telephone Company in 1879 and again as the American Bell Telephone Company in 1880.

²⁰ It is not clear when this vision was first born in Vail's mind. Sometimes he said it was “co-existent with the business.” At other times, he claimed he could not say with any certainty when the idea of “one great big general system” first came to him. Certainly, it was implied by the expansive language in AT&T's founding charter, written in 1885. Annual Report of the Directors of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to the Stockholders, HBS, 1909, 18–19Google Scholar; New York State, Joint Committee of the Senate and Assembly Appointed to Investigate Telephone and Telegraph Companies, Report (Albany, N.Y., 1910)Google Scholar. The AT&T charter (quoted below) is reprinted in Rhodes, Frederick L., Beginnings of Telephony (New York, 1929), 196–97Google Scholar.

²¹ AT&T Annual Report, 1909, 18-19.

²² NTEA, Proceedings, 1885, 14-15. Emphasis in original.

²³ Ibid., 62.

²⁴ Annual Report of the Directors of the Southern New England Telephone Company to the Stockholders, 1885, quoted in Walsh, Connecticut Pioneers, 145-46.

²⁵ Walsh, Connecticut Pioneers, 110-18, 136-47.

²⁶ NTEA, Proceedings, 1885, 61. (AT&T did not offer telephone service between the United States and Japan until 1934.)

²⁷ Casson, Herbert N., The History of the Telephone (Chicago, 1910), 172Google Scholar.

²⁸ Rhodes, Beginnings of Telephony, 196-97.

²⁹ Hochfelder, David, “Constructing an Industrial Divide: Western Union, AT&T, and the Federal Government, 1876-1971,” Business History Review 76 (Winter 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise, 152-54; Theodore N. Vail to Frederick Fish, 14 Apr. 1906, as quoted in Hochfelder, “Constructing an Industrial Divide,” 719.

³⁰ Edward J. Hall Jr. to John E. Hudson, 21 Jan. 1888, box 1011, ATTA. See also Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise, 79-81.

³¹ Quoted in Brooks, John, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1976), 85Google Scholar. Vail stayed on as president of New York's Metropolitan Telephone Company until 1889.

³² NTEA, Proceedings, 1889, 34-43.

³³ Ibid., 44-45.

³⁴ Ibid., 1890, 43-56. Angus Hibbard remarked on the novelty of Hall's charts in Hibbard, Angus Smith, Hello, Goodbye: My Story of Telephone Pioneering (Chicago, 1941)Google Scholar.

³⁵ E. B. Field to John J. Carty, 8 Sept. 1909, box 2029, ATTA. Emphasis in original.

³⁶ Federal Communications Commission, Proposed Report, Telephone Investigation (Washington, D.C., 1938), 26–28Google Scholar.

³⁷ Stehman, J. Warren, The Financial History of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (Boston, 1925)Google Scholar; Danielian, N. R., AT.&.T.: The Story of Industrial Conquest (New York, 1939), 57–66Google Scholar.

³⁸ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 158-75, 195–203Google Scholar.

³⁹ See, for example, “Consolidation Talk,” New York Times, 3 0 Dec. 1899, 11. See also Stehman, Financial History of AT&T, 56-59; and MacMeal, Harry B., The Story of Independent Telephony (Chicago, 1934), 112Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Edward J. Hall Jr. to Theodore N. Vail, 27 Sept. 1909, box 1010, ATTA.

⁴¹ John J. Carty to Edward J. Hall Jr., 17 July 1907, box 6, ATTA; Aitken, Hugh G. J., The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932 (Princeton, N.J., 1985) 78–79Google Scholar; Wasserman, Neil H., From Invention to Innovation: Long-Distance Telephone Transmission at the Turn of the Century (Baltimore, 1985), 110Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, “Theodore N. Vail and the Role of Innovation in the Modern Bell System,” Business History Review 66 (Spring 1992): 95–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Edward J. Hall Jr. to Frederick Fish, 30 Oct. 1902, ATTA.

⁴³ “Application of Some General Principles of Organization,” Oct. 1909, box 2029, ATTA; Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise, 135-38.

⁴⁴ “The Central Union Telephone Company/Chicago Telephone Company,” Case Histories on the Development of AT&T's Horizontal Structure [1980?], ATTA, 1.

⁴⁵ Nance and Oram, “The Circuits Go Up,” 23. On the technical history of the transcontinental line, see Jewett, Frank B., “Transcontinental Panorama,” Bell Telephone Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1940)Google Scholar; Fagen, ed., Engineering and Science in the Bell System, 195-348; Aitken, Continuous Wave, 233-45.

⁴⁶ AT&T Annual Report, 1914, 42-43.

⁴⁷ Everybody Join In: The Blue Bell Songbook (New York, [1920?])Google Scholar, Donald McNicol Collection, Queen's University Special Collections.

⁴⁸ “The Telephone in Indiana,” Electrical World (26 Sept. 1885): 132.

⁴⁹ Cumberland Telephone Journal (15 May 1903): 12.

⁵⁰ Hume, quoted in Cumberland Telephone Journal (15 May 1903): 15. For Caldwell, see the Annual Report of the Directors of the Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph Company, HBS, various years.

⁵¹ James E. Caldwell to Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph Company stockholders, 27 Dec. 1911, HBS. Caldwell retired after writing this letter, and AT&T moved the headquarters of Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph from Nashville to Atlanta.

⁵² See, for example, Smith, Merrit Roe and Marx, Leo, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)Google Scholar.

⁵³ The literature of scientific and systematic management was candid in asserting this goal. See, for example, Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911)Google Scholar; Hoxie, Robert F., Scientific Management and Labor (New York, 1915)Google Scholar. On the balance of power in the American workplace, see Livingston, James, “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late Nineteenth-Century American Development,” American Historical Review 92 (Feb. 1987): 69–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1923 (New York, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kanigel, Robert, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ In 1907, the Bell System operated roughly 3,013,000 telephones and connected an average of 15,760,000 calls per day. Independent companies operated roughly 3,106,000 telephones and connected an average of 14,024,000 calls per day. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 783Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Telephones and Telegraphs and Municipal Electric Fire-Alarm and Police-Patrol Signaling Systems: 1912 (Washington, D.C., 1915), 35Google Scholar. Independent competition in American telephony has not been closely studied by historians. Many recent histories of the telephone, based on the corporate archives of AT&T, pay little or no attention to independent competition. Earlier works typically describe independent competition only to lament it as an error or aberration. Fischer, Claude S., “The Revolution in Rural Telephony, 1900-1920,” Journal of Social History 21 (Fall 1987): 5–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mueller, Milton L., Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, Mass., 1997Google Scholar), are both useful. The only really detailed histories of independent telephony, however, are celebratory works by self-interested participants. See MacMeal, The Story of Independent Telephony; Latzke, Paul A., A Fight with an Octopus (Chicago, 1906)Google Scholar; Pleasance, Charles A., The Spirit of Independent Telephony (Johnson City, Tenn., 1989)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ George Leverett to Frederick Fish, 17 Oct. 1901, box 1375, ATTA.

⁵⁷ The Telephone: A Description of the Bell System with Some Facts Concerning the So-Called Independent Movement (Boston, 1906)Google Scholar, telephone pamphlets, Widener Library, Harvard University (hereafter TPH), 19; Barrett, Robertson T., “The Growth of America's Communication Needs,” Bell Telephone Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1933)Google Scholar; Langdale, John V., “The Growth of Long-Distance Telephony in the Bell System: 1875-1907,” Journal of Historical Geography 4, no. 2 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mills et al., “A Quarter-Century of Transcontinental Telephone Service”; Walsh, Connecticut Pioneers, 200.

⁵⁸ If long-distance service was not the reason for the Bell System's eventual success against the independents, what was? A complete answer would go beyond the scope of this paper but must surely include a number of key patents, dominance of the country's most lucrative urban markets, a canny public-relations campaign, and a general preponderance of both economic and political clout.

⁵⁹ William Crownover, “Should Independent and Mutual Companies Co-Operate,” Telephony (May 1907): 309; Dickson, Frederick S., “Telephone Investments—and Others,” (Cleveland, Ohio, 1905), HBS, 40Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ “Low Rates and Local Service,” American Telephone Journal, 17 Aug. 1907.

⁶¹ This argument is suggested in Lipartito, Kenneth, The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920 (Baltimore, 1989), 116Google Scholar.

⁶² G. F. Wonbacher, “Proper Development of the Rural Telephone,” Western Telephone Journal (July 1908): 242.

⁶³ Charles E. Tarte, “Long Distance Service—Its Development and Possibilities,” Sound Waves, July 1907.

⁶⁴ Walsh, Connecticut Pioneers, 126-27.

⁶⁵ “The Central Union Telephone Company/Chicago Telephone Company,” 5-6. Some of Sabin's correspondence with American Telephone and Telegraph is in box 1313, AT&T Archives, Warren, N.J., but the exact circumstances of his resignation are unclear.

⁶⁶ Taylor, Graham D., “Charles F. Sise, Bell Canada, and the Americans: A Study of Managerial Autonomy, 1880-1905,” Historical Papers (1982): 11–30.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Bell Canada retained a sizable, though not a controlling, interest in the New Brunswick Telephone Company, and its relations remained close with both the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia firms. Annual Report of the Directors to the Shareholders of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, various years, Bell Canada Historical Collection, NLC. See also Armstrong, Christopher and Nelles, H. V., Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930 (Philadelphia, 1986), 109Google Scholar; Babe, Robert E., Telecommunications in Canada: Technology, Industry, and Government (Toronto, 1990), 74–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rens, Jean-Guy, The Invisible Empire: A History of the Telecommunications Industry in Canada, 1846-1956, trans. Roth, Käthe (Montreal, 2001), 81–84Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ On the “decentralized alternative” in another industry and in other countries, see Berk, Gerald, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar; Davies, Andrew, Telecommunications and Politics: The Decentralised Alternative (London, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ House of Commons, Canada, Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Various Telephone Systems in Canada and Elsewhere, Report (Ottawa, 1905), 771–72Google Scholar, 76.

⁷⁰ Ogle, Edmon B., Long Distance Please: The Story of the Trans Canada Telephone System (Toronto, 1979), 9Google Scholar; MacDougall, Robert, “The All-Red Dream: Technological Nationalism and the Trans-Canada Telephone System,” in Chapnick, Adam and Hillmer, Norman, eds., Cross-Currents: Twentieth-Century Canadian Nationalisms (Montreal, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ On the history of natural monopoly theory, see Sharkey, William W., The Theory of Natural Monopoly (Cambridge, U.K., 1982), 12–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the difficulty of applying natural monopoly theory to the telephone, see Babe, Telecommunications in Canada, 137-49; Milton L. Mueller, Universal Service, 11-20.

⁷² Historical Statistics of the United States, 783.

⁷³ “To Bring Telephone Suits,” New York Times, 22 Jan. 1909, 16; Lindemuth, A. C., Telephone Mergers Illegal (Chicago, 1911), TPH.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Babe, Telecommunications in Canada; Noam, Eli, Telecommunications in Europe (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Cohen, Jeffrey E., “The Telephone Problem and the Road to Telephone Regulation in the United States, 1876-1917,” Journal of Policy History 3, no. 1 (1991): 42–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ Postmaster General, Government Ownership of Electrical Means of Communication (Washington, D.C., 1914)Google Scholar. The AT&T memo is by Chester I. Barnard, “Review of the Government Ownership Situation,” 6 Mar. 1917, box 1364, ATTA.

⁷⁷ Lamoreaux, Naomi R., The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Brandeis, Louis D., Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It (New York, 1914)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Thomas Haskell, Roland Marchand, Robert Wiebe, and others have argued that as the American economy and society became more obviously interdependent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became harder and harder to imagine individuals as solitary masters of their fates. Traditional sources of meaning and order close at hand—the family, the parish, the small community—lost “causal potency” as the prime movers of conditions and events receded farther and farther away. It was not the size or the tactics of large corporations that stirred protest in this era, Marchand argued. It was the ability of corporations and other nation-spanning organizations to act upon no-longer isolated “island communities” from a great geographic distance. Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Chicago, 1977), 15, 40Google Scholar; Marchand, Roland, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, 1998), 2–5Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ This contest also played out in other industries, of course. See, for example, Berk, Alternative Tracks; Schneiberg, Marc, “Organizational Heterogeneity and the Production of New Forms: Politics, Social Movements, and Mutual Companies in American Fire Insurance, 1900-1930,” Social Structure and Organizations Revisited 19 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On correlations between trade networks and long-distance telephone lines, see Weiman, “Building Universal Service.”

⁸¹ Nathan C. Kingsbury, address before the Telephone Society of New York, 17 Feb. 1914, TPH, 3-6.

⁸² The quotations come from a letter Rockefeller wrote to a family adviser one week after the meeting. John D. Rockefeller Jr. to Frederick T. Gates, 27 July 1912, reprinted in Jordan, John M., “‘To Educate Public Opinion’: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the Origins of Social Scientific Fact-Finding,” New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991): 292–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vail's proposals are described in Theodore N. Vail, “Memorandum Concerning a Proposed Economic Bureau,” Rockefeller Foundation Draft Report, Apr. 1914, quoted in Grossman, David M., “American Foundations and the Support of Economic Research,” Minerva 20 (Spring/Summer 1982): 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Discussions apparently trailed off, because Rockefeller wanted to create a research institute, while Vail and Morgan only wanted a public-relations bureau. See also Harr, John Ensor and Johnson, Peter J., The Rockefeller Century (New York, 1988), 127Google Scholar.

⁸³ Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul. See also James D. Ellsworth, “The Start of General Magazine Advertising,” Jan. 1931, box 1066, ATTA.

⁸⁴ “Coordinating the Nation,” 24.

⁸⁵ Griese, Noel L., Arthur W. Page: Publisher, Public Relations Pioneer, Patriot (Tucker, Ga., 2001)Google Scholar; Griese, Noel L., “James D. Ellsworth, 1863-1940: P. R. Pioneer,” Public Relations Review 4 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 48-87.

⁸⁶ American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Telephone Almanac (New York, 1928)Google Scholar; “Coordinating the Nation,” 24.

⁸⁷ AT&T Advertisements, Life, 15 Jan. 1914, 91; Life, 17 Dec. 1914, 1137.

⁸⁸ The Kingsbury Commitment involved AT&T's promise to do three things: give up control of Western Union, sell the stock holdings in the telegraph company it acquired in 1909; agree to stop taking over competing independent systems; allow all independent systems that did not compete directly with Bell to connect to its long-distance lines. Nathan C. Kingsbury to Attorney General James C. McReynolds, 19 Dec. 1913. The letter is reprinted in AT&T Annual Report, 1913, 24-26.

⁸⁹ Quoted in Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 86.