The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was a very early, short lived company set up to develop the then-new

telephone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into e ...

. It should not be confused with the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company that was formed a year later and was one of the largest of the regional Bell Telephone Companies. New England Telephone and Telegraph lasted only a year as a separate entity, from 1878 to 1879, and had no direct relationship with the later company of the same name, which after the breakup of the Bell System in 1984 became part of the NYNEX Corporation, now part of

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

History

The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was formed February 12, 1878, by investors in the states of

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...

and

Rhode Island Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area and the seventh-least populous, with slightly fewer than 1.1 million residents as of 2020, but it ...

at the behest of an agent of

Gardiner Greene Hubbard Gardiner Greene Hubbard (August 25, 1822 – December 11, 1897) was an American lawyer, financier, and community leader. He was a founder and first president of the National Geographic Society; a founder and the first president of the Bell Tel ...

, the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. New England Telephone and Telegraph merged with the Bell Telephone Company (which was started on the basis of holding "potentially valuable patents"), on February 17, 1879, to form the National Bell Telephone Company, at which time

Theodore Vail Theodore Newton Vail (July 16, 1845 – April 16, 1920) was president of American Telephone & Telegraph between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919. Vail saw telephone service as a public utility and moved to consolidate telephone networks u ...

took over its operations. The National Bell Telephone Company merged with others on March 20, 1880, to form the American Bell Telephone Company.Pizer 2009, pg.125

Later acquisition of American Bell by AT&T

The American Bell Telephone Company was later purchased by its own subsidiary,

American Telephone & Telegraph AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...

(AT&T) on December 30, 1899. Thus share ownership of New England Telephone and Telegraph evolved into ownership of AT&T. AT&T would later undergo mergers with SBC Communications and

BellSouth BellSouth, LLC (stylized as ''BELLSOUTH'' and formerly known as BellSouth Corporation) was an American telecommunications holding company based in Atlanta, Georgia. BellSouth was one of the seven original Regional Bell Operating Companies after ...

to become ''

The New AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

''.

References

;Notes ;Bibliography * Bruce, Robert V. ''Bell: Alexander Bell and the Conquest of Solitude''. Ithaca, New York:

Cornell University Press The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University; currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, making it the first university publishing enterprise in t ...

, 1990. . * Pizer, Russell A
The Tangled Web of Patent #174465
AuthorHouse, 2009, , .

History

Later acquisition of American Bell by AT&T

See also

References

Further reading