Southwestern Bell

Alexander Graham Bell and two partners created the Bell Telephone Co. in 1877 with plans to begin marketing the newly-invented telephone. Bell Telephone licensee New Haven District Telephone Co. developed the world's first telephone exchange and issued the world's first telephone directory one year later. To handle the licensing of various patents, Bell Telephone founded the New England Telephone Co. In 1879, Bell Telephone merged with New Haven District Telephone to form the National Bell Telephone Co., which reorganized as the American Bell Telephone Company in 1880, after acquiring various holdings from Western Union. A year later, American Bell acquired Western Union's telegraph equipment supplier, Western Electric Manufacturing Co. As a result of the purchase, American Bell became the sole manufacturer of Western Union equipment. The firm diversified into long-distance telephone operations with the formation of American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T) in 1885. American Bell hoped its new subsidiary would be able to create a widespread national telephone network before several of its patents expired in 1893.

Shortly after its inception, AT&T began building its first long-distance telephone line, which would connect New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1888, after several blizzards in the northeastern U.S. destroyed long-distance lines, AT&T began looking into underground cable options. Two years later, American Bell began upgrading its one-wire circuits to two-wire circuits to allow for long-distance transmissions. Within two years, these two-wire, or metallic, circuits connected roughly 12 percent of American Bell's 240,000 customers. When Bell's original telephone patent expired in 1893, several competitors emerged, prompting lawsuits by AT&T, which strove to retain its monopoly in the long-distance market. Busy with this litigation, AT&T eventually lost substantial market share to rivals in the West and Midwest.

909 Chestnut Street, St. Louis, Missouri One AT&T Center (formerly One SBC Center and, originally, One Bell Center) is a 44-story building in Downtown St. Louis, Missouri that is Missouri's largest building by area with 1,400,000 square feet. The building was built to replace the Southwestern Bell Building as the Southwestern Bell world headquarters.

AT&T's network comprised more than 2.2 million telephones in 1905. Although that number rose to more than 3 million in 1907, the firm struggled with public relations problems, low employee morale, and mounting debt. These problems prompted management to begin taking over competitors, rather than engaging in litigation against them.

During World War I, AT&T supplied phone service to the U.S. military. The firm also put in place a communications system of radios, telephones, and telegraph lines in France for use by American forces. In 1918, President Wilson nationalized the U.S. phone network, promising that rates would fall under public control. However, expenses related to wartime activities prompted AT&T to raise prices, and U.S. citizens began calling for the government to release control of the phone system. By then, AT&T operated a network of roughly 10 million telephones. Mounting public pressure prompted the government to privatize AT&T in 1919. Two years later, AT&T linked Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba, via its first submarine cable. After the government began allowing telephone company mergers in the early 1920s, AT&T launched an expansion effort that was fueled by several acquisitions. AT&T spun off its research and development arm as Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925. The new firm was funded by both AT&T and Western Electric.

1010 Pine Street, St. Louis, Missouri The Southwestern Bell Building is a 28-story building that was built to be the headquarters of Southwestern Bell Telephone in Downtown St. Louis, Missouri. At the time of its construction it was Missouri's tallest building. The building which was one of the first in St. Louis to use set backs has 17 individual roofs.

Southwestern Bell Telephone Company was created in 1920 from about 20 predecessor companies. The four largest of these were American District Telegraph Company, formed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1878; the Kansas City Telephone Exchange, formed in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1879; Southwestern Telegraph & Telephone Company, which began serving Texas and Arkansas in 1881; and Pioneer Telephone & Telegraph Company, which provided telephone service beginning in 1904 in Oklahoma - not then a state, but known as Indian Territory - and in parts of Kansas. During their early years these four companies became affiliated with the Bell System, acquired other companies, and went through a number of name changes. In 1912 they consolidated various operating functions and became the Southwestern Bell Telephone System.

In 1917 the four companies began moving toward a more formal merger, with the Missouri & Kansas Telephone Company - the new name of the Kansas City Telephone Exchange & Bell Telephone Company of Missouri, successor to American District Telegraph. The resulting company was named Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (Missouri). In 1920 this company bought Southwestern Telephone & Telegraph and Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (Oklahoma), the successor to Pioneer Telephone & Telegraph, establishing the new Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, which was a subsidiary of AT & T. The new company had headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, but moved to St. Louis the following year. Its president was Eugene D. Nims, a veteran executive at several other companies.

During the 1920s Southwestern Bell absorbed several other companies. In 1923 it bought the Kinloch Telephone System, which had been a competitor in St. Louis. Southwestern Bell and Kinloch had been two of the last telephone companies to compete in a major U.S. city. In 1925 Southwestern Bell bought back from the Dallas Telephone Company the Dallas-based telephone business that Southwestern Telephone & Telegraph had sold in 1918. In 1927 Southwestern Bell Telephone made another reacquisition, this time of the Kansas City phone business, which the Southwestern system had sold to a non-Bell company in 1919. Southwestern Bell did divest itself of a few operations, selling 23 Missouri telephone exchanges to Southeastern Missouri Telephone Company in 1929.

In 1926, the year Southwestern Bell installed its one millionth telephone, the company completed its new operations center in St. Louis. At 31 stories, the building was the tallest in Missouri at that time. New or renovated administrative offices followed in Dallas, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City in 1929.

During the Great Depression that followed the 1929 stock market crash, Southwestern Bell bought up numerous small telephone companies in its region. Often these companies were on the brink of insolvency. The largest Depression-era purchase was United Telephone Company of Kansas, bought in 1938. In the Depression years, Southwestern Bell took on some employees from its parent company, AT & T, which did not want to lay them off; the Bell System operating companies were not hit as hard by the Depression as AT & T's Western Electric manufacturing arm. Southwestern Bell felt the effects of the Depression sufficiently, however, to give employees incentives to bring in new customers or to persuade existing customers not to have their phone service shut off. During the Depression, unionization of Southwestern Bell's workforce was heightened. Several of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, such as the Wagner Act of 1935, encouraged the formation of labor unions and protected workers from being penalized for joining unions. Southwestern Bell and its unionized employees had relatively cordial relations during this period.

More than 3,000 Southwestern Bell workers served in the armed forces in World War II. The company took steps to conserve materials, such as copper and rubber, that were in short supply during the war. Telephone sets also were scarce, but Southwestern Bell's territory held a position of priority in their allocation, because the five-state area contained many defense plants and military training facilities. Other Bell operating companies transferred parts of their inventory to Southwestern Bell. The number and length of telephone calls, particularly long-distance calls, increased greatly during the war, often resulting in long delays for callers. Southwestern Bell launched an advertising campaign encouraging customers to hold their calls to five minutes each, and operators interrupted conversations that went past this limit.

After the war ended, Southwestern Bell expanded its engineering operations to meet pent-up demand for phone service; at one point in 1945 the company had a waiting list of 205,000. The number of phones the company operated had reached two million in 1944 and soared to three million by 1948. Southwestern Bell also stepped up the marketing of enhanced telephone equipment and services, such as extensions; this effort had begun in the late 1930s but was pushed aside by more pressing matters during the war.

The late 1940s brought a break in the company's peaceful labor relations. The National Federation of Telephone Workers, the union that later became the Communications Workers of America, organized the first nationwide strike against telephone companies in 1947. The strike lasted more than 40 days. In 1953 Missouri governor Phil Donnelly signed the King-Thompson Act that outlawed utility strikes in the state, but unions and their supporters subsequently won a repeal of the act.

In 1951 Southwestern Bell acquired Southeastern Missouri Telephone Company, the company that had bought some of Southwestern Bell's exchanges in 1929. In 1952 it added Southwest Telephone Company of Kansas. The number of phones operated by Southwestern Bell reached four million in 1952, five million in 1956, and six million in 1960. The figure was ten million by 1969.

The 1950s and 1960s brought a wave of new products and services from Western Electric and Bell Laboratories, two other AT & T companies. These innovations included phones in various colors and styles, the ability to interrupt or forward calls, and push-button service. To sell all these products, Southwestern Bell Telephone created its first marketing department in 1967.

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