Western Electric

~ the last words ~

It began in January 1869 in Cleveland as a repair shop for Western Union equipment, run by George Shawk and then by Enos Barton, and incorporated as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company in 1872. It made telegraph keys and burglar alarms for the electrical trade. Then in 1881 the Bell Telephone Company bought a controlling interest, and from that year until 1984 Western Electric was the sole manufacturer and purchasing agent for the entire Bell System.

That arrangement is the whole story. A Bell operating company took its telephones from Western Electric at a price Western Electric set, and the cost went into the rate base that the states approved. Every desk set in the United States was a Western Electric product, rented to the subscriber and built to be repaired for decades. The model 500 of 1949 is the black telephone that stands in for the whole century in photographs, and it was engineered for thirty years of service because the company that made it was also the company that would have to fix it.

The manufacturing itself deserves to be separated from the economics. Western Electric built the first commercial transistors. It built the sound systems that put recorded audio into cinemas from 1926, and during the war it built the radar sets the Army ordered. Its plants were where Bell Labs designs became physical objects, and the two organizations sat inside the same corporate parent with the same budget behind them.

The Justice Department sued in 1949 to pull the manufacturer away from the operating companies, and settled in 1956 with a decree that left the structure standing but confined AT&T to regulated telecommunications. It sued again in 1974 and that one stuck. The settlement announced in January 1982 broke off the local operating companies, and on 1 January 1984 a new entity called AT&T Technologies assumed Western Electric's charter. The name came off the letterhead and the equipment stamps.

~ the record ~

~ hawthorne ~

The Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois opened in 1905 and became the largest single thing the company ever built. It had its own power plant and its own railroad. It made the cable and the switchgear for the network, and the workforce peaked near 48,000 during the Second World War. For a few decades it was effectively a company town bolted onto Chicago.

It is also where the Hawthorne studies ran between 1924 and 1936, the productivity experiments that raised the lighting and found output went up, then lowered the lighting and found output went up again. The conclusion drawn from it, that people work differently when they know they are being observed, attached the plant's name to a permanent term in psychology. AT&T announced the closure on 24 June 1983 and a shopping mall went up on the site.

~ antwerp, then istanbul ~

Western Electric had an international arm, and losing it turned out to matter more than anyone noticed at the time. International Western Electric owned factories across Europe, among them the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company in Antwerp, which had been building telephone exchanges since 1882. In 1925 AT&T sold the entire international business to a young holding company called ITT, largely to reduce its antitrust exposure at home. ITT spent the next sixty years being the telephone equipment industry everywhere outside the United States.

That chain is what eventually reaches Turkey. When the PTT went digital in the 1980s the exchanges came through Teletaş, which licensed the technology from Antwerp, and BTMC took a stake in the Turkish company in December 1984. A dial tone on a Turkish line in the 1990s came out of equipment whose design lineage ran back through Belgium to a business that had been cut away from Western Electric before the Second World War.

The Turkish thread therefore runs through the piece of Western Electric that got sold off in 1925. The company itself shipped almost nothing outside the Bell System, which was the arrangement the Justice Department kept suing over, and a market like Turkey was structurally out of its reach in both directions.

~ the name on the tubes ~

In 1995 the Western Electric trademark was picked up by an audio company in Georgia that makes the 300B, a directly heated triode the original firm designed in 1938 for cinema amplifiers. Tubes sold under that name go for four figures a pair to people who build valve amplifiers by hand. It is the strangest possible afterlife for a purchasing agent.

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