Western Electric Co., Inc. was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that operated from 1869 to 1996. A subsidiary of AT&T Corporation for most of its lifespan, Western Electric was the primary manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for all telephone equipment for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984, when the Bell System was dismantled.
For much of the 20th century, Western Electric's equipment, especially their telephones, was ubiquitous throughout most of the United States and Canada. This was a result of the Bell System's near-total monopoly on phone service, combined with the legal ban on connecting third-party premises equipment to the telephone network.
The company was responsible for many technological innovations, as well as developments in industrial management.
Contents
History
19th century
In 1856, George Shawk, a craftsman and telegraph maker, purchased an electrical engineering business in Cleveland, Ohio.
In January 1869, Shawk had partnered with Enos M. Barton in the former Western Union repair shop of Cleveland, to manufacture burglar alarms, fire alarms, and other electrical items. Both men were former Western Union employees. Shawk was the Cleveland shop foreman and Barton, was a telegrapher from Rochester, New York. During their partnership, one customer was an inventor sourcing parts and models for experiments. That inventor was Elisha Gray, a former physics professor at Oberlin College. Barton thought of future growth in electrical apparatus potential for the company and shared a common enthusiasm with the inventor, who was interested in leading a manufacturing plant capable of long-term developments.
Shawk found those plans were beyond his business goals and offered to sell his half-interest partnership to Gray. Anson Stager, a former Chief of the U.S. Military Telegraphs during the American Civil War, advanced money for Gray to buy the half-interest and become a partner when Gray and Barton moved operations to Chicago. Gray and Barton previously knew Stager and an agreement was signed on November 18, 1869, to launch the company as Gray & Barton. The firm was open for business by the end of the year in Chicago. In December 1869, the location was at 162 South Water Street in Chicago.
On December 31, 1869, Stager entered a partnership with Barton, and later sold his share to inventor Gray. In 1872, Barton and Gray moved the business to Clinton Street, and incorporated it as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company on the Near West Side of Chicago. They manufactured a variety of electrical products including typewriters, alarms, and lighting and had a close relationship with 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 Bell's patent application for the telephone. The ensuing legal battle between Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company over patent rights ended in 1879 with Western Union withdrawing from the telephone market and Bell acquiring Western Electric in 1881. This purchase was a crucial step in standardizing telephone instruments and concentrating manufacturing in a single entity.
20th century
In 1901, Western Electric secretly purchased a controlling interest in a principal competitor, the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company, but in 1909 was forced by a lawsuit to sell back to Milo Kellogg.
The Manufacturers Junction Railway Company was incorporated in January 1903 to provide rail connections to major railroad systems. There were approximately 13 miles (21 km) of track in and out of Hawthorne Works for rail freight of inbound materials and outbound finished products. Western Electric had a tenure of 50 years up to 1952, in the responsibility and operation of its use for Hawthorne and other nearby industrial companies.
Also, in 1903, the construction of Hawthorne Works first buildings were authorized by Barton.
In 1907, the research and development staffs of Western Electric and AT&T were consolidated to 463 West Street, New York. The location served the newly Western Electric Engineering Department for the responsibility of the testing and inspection of its telephones and equipment. AT&T's Engineering Department retained the responsibility for the growth of the Bell System with compatible equipment and service. Gradually the consolidation improved and advanced the telephony response to expanding use.
On July 24, 1915, employees of the Hawthorne Works boarded the SS Eastland in downtown Chicago for a company picnic. The ship rolled over at the dock and 844 people died.
In 1920, Alice Heacock Seidel was the first female Western Electric employee given permission to stay on after she had married. This set a precedent in the company, which previously had not allowed married women in their employ. Heacock had worked for Western Electric for sixteen years before her marriage, and was at the time the highest-paid secretary in the company. In her memoirs, she wrote that the decision to allow her to stay on "required a meeting of the top executives to decide whether I might remain with the Company, for it established a precedent and a new policy for the Company – that of married women in their employ. If the women at the top were permitted to remain after marriage then all women would expect the same privilege. The policy was expanded quickly, so that a few years later women were given maternity leaves with no loss of time on their service records."
Company logos
Western Electric used various logos during its existence. Starting in 1914 it used an image of a statue originally named Electricity, but later renamed Spirit of Communication, which was raised to the roof of 195 Broadway on October 24, 1916.
Development of a monopoly
In 1915, the assets of Western Electric Manufacturing were transferred to a newly incorporated company in the New York City, named Western Electric Company, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T. The sole reason for the transfer was to provide for the issuance of a non-voting preferred class of capital stock, disallowed under the statutes of the state of Illinois.
In the Bell System, telephones were leased by the operating companies to subscribers, and remained the property of the Bell System. Service subscribers paid a monthly fee included in the service charge, while paying additionally for special types or features of telephones, such as colored telephone sets. Equipment repair was included in the fees. This system had the effect of subsidizing basic telephone service, keeping local telephone service inexpensive, under $10 per month. After divestiture, basic service prices increased, and customers became responsible for inside building wiring and telephone equipment. The Bell System had an extensive policy and infrastructure to recycle or refurbish equipment taken out of service, replacing all defective, weak, or otherwise unusable parts for new installations. This resulted in extraordinary longevity of Western Electric telephones, and limited the variety of new designs introduced into the market place. This led Western Electric to pursue extreme reliability and durability in design to minimize service calls. In particular, the work of Walter A. Shewhart, who developed new techniques for statistical quality control in the 1920s, helped lead to the quality of manufacture of Western Electric telephones.
AT&T also strictly enforced policies against using telephone equipment by other manufacturers on their network. A customer who insisted on using a telephone not supplied by the Bell System had to first transfer the phone to the local Bell operating company, who leased the phone back to the customer for a monthly charge in addition to a re-wiring fee. In the 1970s, when consumers increasingly bought telephone sets from other manufacturers, AT&T changed the policy for its Design Line telephone series by selling customers the phone housing, retaining ownership of the internal mechanical and electrical components, which still required paying AT&T a monthly leasing fee.
Starting in 1983, with the breakup of the Bell System, Western Electric telephones could be sold to the public under the brand name American Bell, a newly created subsidiary of AT&T. One of the terms of the Modification of Final Judgment in the Bell System divestiture procedures prohibited AT&T from using the name Bell after January 1, 1984; prior to this, AT&T's plan was to market products and services under the American Bell name, accompanied by the now familiar AT&T globe logo.
Manufacturing plants
In 1903, Western Electric began construction of the first buildings for Hawthorne Works on the outskirts of Chicago. In 1905, the Clinton Street power apparatus shops moved to Hawthorne.
Further expansion of large factories began in the 1920s. In 1923, construction began on the second factory located in Kearny, New Jersey. The location was known as Kearny Works and in 1925 began telephone cable production. On June 15, 1928, Western Electric employees, photographed by Rosenfeld and Sons, were pictured, in a groundbreaking ceremony, for their expansion of the Kearny Works manufacturing facility at 110 Central Ave, Kearny, New Jersey. Kearny Works would achieve the largest square foot size of 3,579,000 throughout the years and be the second largest plant for Western Electric manufacturing plants built before the 1930s, only second in size to the Hawthorne Works at Cicero, Illinois. Here is an aerial image of Kearny Works, between 1925 and 1930, held in the Library Company of Philadelphia. with the picture of the entire plant and railways. In 1929, work began at Point Breeze, Baltimore, Maryland as the third manufacturing location, Baltimore Works, began its occupancy by 1930 for various cable and wire production.
Two manufacturing plants in Lincoln, Nebraska were leased in 1943 to Western Electric to manufacture signal corps equipment and later production demands from Hawthorne Works. The Eighth Street building, known as "Lincoln Shops," and the 13th Street building were the locations, the latter was sold in 1950 for $500,000 to Western Electric. The plants were closed after the Omaha Works opened in 1958.
Western Electric acquired in 1943, the old Grad and Winchell buildings located at Haverhill, Massachusetts. New Jersey supervisors taught former textile and shoe workers the manufacturing process of coil winding. The employees' acquired skills demonstrated their versatility in this new manufacturing process for a Western Electric decision to join Haverhill and Lawrence locations in 1956 as the Merrimack Valley Works.
In 1944, Western Electric purchased a factory in St. Paul, Minnesota to restart manufacture of telephone sets for civilian installation as authorized by War Production Board. By 1946, some of these facilities were relocated to the Hawthorne plant as space became available from war-production scale down.
Distribution houses
Western Electric had nine divisions in the mid-1960s. Manufacturing was one division, service was another, and there was also the distribution division. The distribution division was important for supplying the Bell System with day-to-day supply or emergency needs of the telecommunications supply chain. In 1964, there were 35 Distribution Houses that stocked equipment and supplies. They were the supply centers and repair shops for the Bell System. The distribution houses were established as east and west geographical zones in similarity to the service division. The following table showed the distribution houses at that time.
Technological innovations
In 1926, Western Electric issued the first Bell System telephone with a handset containing both the transmitter and receiver in the same unit. Previous telephones had been of the candlestick type which featured a stationary transmitter in the desktop set or the wall-mounted unit, and a hand-held receiver to be placed on the user's ear. The first version of the desktop unit was constructed by shortening the candlestick shaft to about an inch in height and placing a handset cradle on the top. This was the A-type handset mounting, which was replaced by 1928 by the B handset mounting, which featured a streamlined shape integrating the shaft as a short neck for the cradle. It still had the same circular footprint of the candlestick, which proved too unstable when dialing numbers, and was henceforth replaced with a wider design using an oval footprint, the D-type base in 1930.
Concurrently with the mechanical advances, the electrical circuitry of Western Electric telephones saw advances in sidetone reduction. Sidetone is feedback by which the users of the telephone can hear their own voice in the receiver. While a desirable property, this feedback, when too loud, causes most users to lower their voice volume to unacceptable levels. Until after the introduction in 1930 of the D handset mountings, sets still contained no active sidetone compensation. Such handset telephone types were designated with the assembly code 102, while later models containing anti-sidetone circuitry were the type 202 telephone set. These early desktop telephones relied on an additional desk set box or subscriber set (subset) containing the ringer with gongs, the induction coil, and capacitors to interface with the telephone network. These subscriber sets were typically mounted on a wall near the operating location for the telephone.
In 1936 the model 302 telephone was announced, which was the first Western Electric instrument that combined the desktop telephone set with the subscriber set and ringer in one unit. It became the mainstay of American telephone service well into the 1950s, and was followed by the model 500 telephone starting in 1950, which became the most extensively produced telephone model in the industry's history. The 500-set was continually updated over time, reflecting new materials and manufacturing processes, such as quieter and smoother dial gearing and a printed circuit board for the network electronics. The model 500 was discontinued in 1986, in favor of the type 2500, that had been available since 1969. The 2500-series employed dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling for transmitting digits to the central office, replacing the rotary dial. DTMF technology was referred to by the trademark Touch-Tone.
Manufacturing innovations
Western Electric also invested heavily in improving processes and equipment to manufacture their products.
In 1958, the company established the Engineering Research Center (ERC) near Princeton, New Jersey. With a charter distinct from Bell Labs, Western Electric's ERC was one of the first research organizations solely dedicated to the advancement of manufacturing-focused, rather than product-focused science. Here, more than 400 researchers and engineers worked to bring new manufacturing technologies into the company's production environment. Their developments included computer-driven mathematical models and related statistical quality-control systems to improve production flow and logistics, novel metal-forming techniques, circuit board assembly automation, fiber-optic waveguide manufacturing techniques, application of lasers for industrial processes and early efforts in cleanroom robotics for semiconductor production. In the early 1970s, some of the first practical Ion Implanters to make integrated circuits were also developed at ERC and later deployed at Western Electric's chip-making factories.
Although the ERC was later integrated into Bell Labs, it – along with AT&T's nearby Corporate Education Center – was closed by the late 1990s, victims of the deregulation of telecommunications, shrinking revenues from long-distance calls and accelerating innovation in telephone equipment by an increasing number of global manufacturing players.
Management innovations
Western Electric were pioneers of the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Walter A. Shewhart developed the control chart at the Hawthorne Works in 1924.
Joseph M. Juran pioneered the use of statistical analysis for quality assurance at the Hawthorne Works.
At Hawthorne Works, Cicero, Illinois, Elton Mayo conducted research of the effect on manufacturing productivity of lighting changes and work structure changes, such as working hours or break times. The reactivity identified in the studies became known as the Hawthorne effect.
The Hawthorne experiments in industrial productivity were conducted there from 1924 to 1936.
Western Electric's reputation for sound management was such that in 1949 President Truman requested that Western Electric manage a major defense laboratory, Sandia National Labs.
National defense and Nike-Zeus
Western Electric was authorized on November 15, 1955, with Air Force Contract AF33(616)-3285 to conduct a competitive study directed solely to anti-ICBM (AICBM) defense. In February 1957, the U.S. Army awarded the company, as a contractor, responsibility in developing an AICBM defense system called Nike Zeus. On February 12, 1959, a test program for Nike-Zeus was approved by Department of Defense for Kwajalein as the down-range test site. After the site was inspected on August 4, 1959, by Western Electric project managers and various agencies/contractors, the completion of the technical building and launch facilities were done. Shortly after, Western Electric equipment engineers and installers arrived for the installation of the NIKE-ZEUS test site. The North Carolina plant made the R&D models for the system elements and installed, tested, and operated the components at the test site.
NASA and Project Mercury
In 1960, NASA awarded Western Electric a contract for over $33,000,000 (equivalent to $359,139,483 in 2025) for engineering and construction of a tracking system for the Project Mercury program. As part of this effort, Western Electric engineers trained remote-site flight controllers and Project Mercury Control Center and operations personnel.
Closure
As of January 1, 1984, a newly formed company, AT&T Technologies, Inc., assumed the corporate charter of Western Electric, which was split into several divisions, each focusing on a particular type of customer, e.g., AT&T Technology Systems, and AT&T Network Systems. Telephones made by Western Electric prior to the breakup continued to be manufactured and marked with the company emblem, however, lacking the Bell System logo, or having it hidden by metal filler inside of all telephone housings and most components, including new electronic integrated circuits with the initials WE. Electronic switching systems, outside plant materials, and other equipment produced for the consumption of the RBOCs continued to be marked "AT&T Western Electric" well into the 1990s.
Cost-cutting measures resulted in the consumer telephones being redesigned and modernized in 1985, as well as more plastic being used in place of metal in the 500 & 2500 series phones, as well as the Princess. In 1986, the Indianapolis Works telephone plant closed, and US production of AT&T single-line home telephones ended. Business telephones and systems continued production in the Shreveport Works plant until 2001. Home telephones were redesigned, and production was moved to Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Thailand. Western Electric no longer marked housings of telephones with "WE", but continued to mark the modular plugs of telephone cords with "WE".
Western Electric came to an end in 1995 when AT&T changed the name of AT&T Technologies to Lucent Technologies, in preparation for its spinoff. Lucent became independent in 1996, and sold more assets into Advanced American Telephones, Agere Systems, Avaya, and Consumer Phone Services. Lucent itself merged with Alcatel, forming Alcatel-Lucent, which was acquired by Nokia in 2016. Western Electric's structured cabling unit, once known as AT&T Network Systems or SYSTIMAX, was spun off from Avaya and became part of CommScope.
Subsequent developments
Since the demise of Western Electric, telephone equipment design and manufacturing is an open market place in which numerous manufacturers compete. As a result, modern telephones are now manufactured in Asia, generally using less expensive components and labor.
Some telephone subscribers declined to purchase their existing telephones after the AT&T breakup, and continued to lease their existing Western Electric models from QLT Consumer Lease Services, formerly known as AT&T Consumer Lease Services. Such subscribers paid leasing fees for their telephones far in excess of the purchase price, but the phones were perceived by some users to be superior to telephones commonly made today in aspects of durability and sound quality. Today, many of these Western Electric telephones have become collector's items.
Western Electric's audio equipment from the 1920s and 30s, designed to be used in movie theaters, is now prized by collectors and audiophiles due to its quality construction and sound reproduction. This includes its massive horn loudspeakers designed to fill a large theater with sound from a relatively low-powered tube amplifier.
Name acquisition
In 1995, the license to manufacture vacuum tubes, audio equipment, and the stylized brand name Western Electric trademark was acquired by Western Electric Export Corporation, a privately owned high-end audio company in Rossville, Georgia. The company specializes in manufacturing vacuum tubes and high end audio equipment. Amongst other products, the company has revived the Western Electric 300B electron tube.
Publications
During the span of its existence of over a dozen decades, Western Electric published a variety of publications for various audiences, including periodicals for employees and customers.
The first employee magazine was Western Electric News, commencing in March 1912 (Volume 1, Number 1) under company president Harry Bates Thayer. Its purpose was to provide a forum where ideas could be exchanged, the company events and activities could be recorded, and to serve as clearing house for technical and commercial information of value to the employee.
In November 1935, Western Electric published a magazine, Pickups, for its developments in sound transmissions, mostly for its radio and communications customers. The magazine changed its name to Oscillator after the May 1942 issue was published and returned in September 1944 with the issue after a hiatus. There are approximately thirty-three issues archived of Western Electric's radio history up to November 1948.
In 1948, Western Electric began publishing the monthly house magazine WE for employees of the company. The magazine was published into the 1980s.
Starting in 1957, Western Electric published The Western Electric Engineer (ISSN 0043-3659), later known as The Engineer, on a subscription basis.
Educational films
Western Electric produced many educational and marketing films that focused on the products associated with telephony or the company's inventions. For example,
"Finding His Voice" (1929) is an animated cartoon produced by Fleischer Studios. The animation shows using a sound booth to pick up sound on a microphone. It also explains the process of using a machine to record sound to film. The cartoon shows a picture and sound projector called the Vitaphone, which was invented in 1926 and sold to Warner Bros. Pictures, but had its exclusivity rights lapsed by 1929.
"Bottling Electrons" (1930s) is a treatise on the manufacture of vacuum tubes.
"A Miracle for Mrs. Smith" (1940s) is a film showing "how the Bell telephone system works and how Western Electric manufactures the materials and products used in the telephone industry."
"Adventure In Telezonia" (1950) is a puppet film intended to teach proper telephone usage. It uses puppets by Bil Baird.
"A Family Affair" (1955) is a promotional film about using telephones in a home environment. There is an appearance by actor Steve McQueen.
"Tools of Telephony" version 1 (1956) introduced telephones, cables, and switching frames that were made, installed, warehoused, or bought by Western Electric. The film promoted the manufacturing and supply unit for the Bell System with twenty-one manufacturing locations, seventeen installation areas, twenty-nine distribution chain warehouses, and purchasing systems for its plants and operating companies.
"Tools of Telephony" version 2 (1958) introduced the teletype, remote feeding of electronic brain calculators, nationwide television transmission, remote control of systems for industry, and telephones. It promoted the manufacturing and supply unit for the Bell System with manufacturing locations, seventeen installation areas, a purchasing system, and a chain of distribution houses.