from hookswitch to grave

Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally. While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history. Much of the work of the early independent telephone industry has been lost in the voluminous achievements of AT&T. Even very basic facts become obscure. For example, who invented the telephone? Well, we all know the answer: Alexander Graham Bell. We have mostly forgotten that, at…