Bell System

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The Bell System, which was named for Alexander Graham Bell, the technologist popularly credited with the invention of the telephone, was a trademark and service mark used by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, or AT&T, a United States telecommunications company, and its affiliated companies to co-brand their extensive circuit-switched telephone network and their affiliations with each other. The telephone system had a near-monopoly on the U.S. telephone market until its divestiture in 1984.[1] The Bell System was commonly referred to by the nickname Ma Bell.

Contents

[edit] History

Bell System trademark used by AT&T and affiliated companies from 1921 to 1939
Bell System trademark used by AT&T and affiliated companies from 1921 to 1939
195 Broadway, HQ for most of 20th century
195 Broadway, HQ for most of 20th century

The Bell trademark (pictured right) used by both the AT&T corporation and the regional operating corporations from 1921 to 1939 to co-brand themselves under a single Bell System trademark would have the regional operating corporation's name where the "name of associated company" appears in this boilerplate version of the trademark. Phones themselves were made by Western Electric, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T, who also owned or controlled the local Bell System companies responsible for local phone service. Member telephone companies paid a fixed fraction of their revenues as a license fee to Bell Labs.

As a result, by 1940 the Bell System effectively owned most telephone service in the United States, from local and long-distance service to the telephone itself. With control of the phone system, Bell could effectively prohibit its customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell companies to the system without leasing fees. For example, if a customer desired a type of phone not leased by the local Bell monopoly, one had to purchase the phone at cost, give it to the phone company, then pay a 're-wiring' charge and a monthly lease fee in order to use it. An oft-heard remark at the time was "Ma Bell has you by the calls".

A 1956 consent decree, to which AT&T and the United States Department of Justice agreed as a resolution of an antitrust lawsuit filed in the United States in 1949, limited AT&T to engaging in only activities related to a maximum of 85% of the United States' national telephone network and certain government contracts, which precluded the Bell System from extending its reach into the fledgling computer industry and from continuing to hold interests in Canada and the Caribbean. The Bell System's Canadian operations included the Bell Canada regional operating company and the Northern Electric manufacturing subsidiary of the Bell System's Western Electric equipment manufacturer. Northern Electric and Bell Canada were spun off in 1956 as separate companies outside of the Bell System proper. The Bell System's Caribbean regional operating companies were sold to the International Telephone & Telegraph Co., later known as ITT.

The Bell System also owned various Caribbean regional operating companies, as well as 54% of NEC and a post-WW II re-construction relationship with NTT before the 1956 boundaries were emplaced. Before 1956, the Bell System's reach was truly gargantuan, as the list below of now-divested formerly-held corporations indicates. Even during the period from 1956 to 1984, the Bell System's dominant reach into all forms of communications was pervasive within the United States and influential in telecommunication standardization throughout the industrialized world.

The 1984 Bell System divestiture that brought an end to the affiliation branded as the Bell System was the result of a lawsuit alleging illegal practices by the Bell System companies to stifle competition in the telecommunications industry; the lawsuit was brought against it by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). That lawsuit was filed in 1974, and was settled on January 8, 1982, displacing the former restrictions that AT&T and the DOJ had agreed to in 1956 based on a previous anti-trust lawsuit filed by the DOJ in 1949 that alleged that AT&T and its Bell System operating companies were using its near monopoly in telecommunications to attempt to establish allegedly unfair advantage in related technologies, especially the fledgling computer industry.

Prior to the 1984 break-up that ended the Bell System, the Bell System included not only AT&T corporate and its long-lines long-distance routing but also Bell Operating Companies.

Logo history

[edit] Present-day usage of the Bell name

Bell System trademark used by AT&T and affiliated companies from 1969 to 1983
Bell System trademark used by AT&T and affiliated companies from 1969 to 1983

The Bell System trademark (as diagram) and service mark (as the words Bell System in text) was used before January 1, 1984, when the AT&T divestiture of its regional operating companies took effect.

Of the various resulting 1984 spinoffs, only BellSouth actively used and promoted the Bell name and logo for its entire history, from the 1984 break up to its merger with the new AT&T in 2006. Similarly, cessation of using either the Bell name or logo occurred for many of the other companies more than a decade after the 1984 break up as part of an acquisition-related rebranding. The others have only used the marks on rare occasions to maintain their trademark rights, even less now that they have adopted names conceived long after divestiture. Examples include Verizon, which still uses the Bell logo on its trucks and payphones, and Qwest, formerly US West, which licenses the Northwestern Bell and Mountain Bell names to Unical Enterprises, who makes telephones under the Northwestern Bell name. Qwest also has a rural subsidiary in Oregon, Malheur Bell, that continues to use the Bell name and logo.

Cincinnati Bell, a local franchise of the Bell System that was never wholly owned by AT&T and existed separately prior to 1984, also continues to use the Bell name. It stopped using the Bell logo in the summer of 2006.

In 1984, each regional Bell operating company was assigned a set list of names they were allowed to use in combination with the Bell marks. Again, aside from Cincinnati Bell and Malheur Bell, none of these Bell System names are currently in use in the United States. For example, Southwestern Bell used both the Bell name and the circled-bell trademark until SBC opted for all of its companies to do business under the "SBC" name in 2002. Bell Atlantic used the Bell name and circled-bell trademark until renaming itself Verizon in 2000.

Of the various resulting 1956 spinoffs, only Bell Canada continues to use the Bell name, although cessation of using either the Bell name and circled-bell trademark occurred for some of these companies multiple decades later. For example, for the multiple decades that Nortel was named Northern Telecom, their research and development arm was Bell Northern Research. Bell Canada and its holding-company parent, Bell Canada Enterprises, still use the Bell name and used variations the circled-bell logo until 1977, which until 1976 strongly resembled the 1921 to 1939 Bell System trademark shown above.

[edit] Subsidiaries and Bell Operating Companies Today

See also: Bell System Divestiture

Before the 1984 break-up, the Bell System consisted of the companies listed below. These companies were divested from AT&T in 1984, except as noted. The former operating companies of the Bell System listed below are organized according to the current owners of the companies (or their successors). All of these companies, except for Cincinnati Bell, which remains independent, belong to AT&T, Verizon, or Qwest, the three remaining Regional Holding Companies (RBOCs).

Beginning in 1991, the Baby Bells began to consolidate operations or legally rename their Bell Operating Companies according to the parent company name, such as "Bell Atlantic – Delaware, Inc." or "U S West Communications, Inc.", to "unify" the corporate image. To this day, the only remaining Baby Bell that has not renamed its operating companies is AT&T, formerly SBC Communications. Since 1995, there have only been 19 Bell Operating Companies, following the mergers of US West's and BellSouth's operating companies. Only 9 of those 19 have retained their original corporate name since their incorporation before 1984.

Before the 1956 break-up, the Bell System also included the companies listed below. Bell Canada, Northern Electric, and the Caribbean regional operating companies were considered part of the Bell System proper before the 1956 break-up. Nippon Electric was considered a more distant affiliate of Western Electric than Northern Electric, where Nippon Electric via its own research and development adapted the designs of Western Electric's North American telecommunications equipment for use in Japan, which to this day gives much of Japan's telephone equipment and network a closer resemblance to North American ANSI and Telcordia standards than to European-originated ITU-T standards. Before the 1956 break-up, Northern Electric was predominantly focused only on manufacturing without any significant amount of separate telecommunication-equipment research & development of its own. The post-WWII-occupation operation of NTT was considered an administrative adjunct to the North American Bell System.

  • Bell Canada Enterprises, Inc., a currently-existing regional operating company
  • Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly Northern Telecom, a currently-existing equipment-manufacturing company
    • Northern Electric, a former telecommunications equipment-manufacturing subsidiary of Western Electric
    • Dominion Electric, a former recording equipment-manufacturing company
  • Various former Caribbean regional operating companies, sold to ITT
  • NEC, a currently-existing equipment-manufacturing company in Japan
    • Nippon Electric, a former telecommunications equipment-manufacturing company 54% owned by Western Electric
  • NTT, a currently-existing telecommunications company in Japan that was administered by AT&T as part of General Douglas MacArthur's post-WWII reconstruction

[edit] Pop Culture

  • Hip Hop artist MF Doom refers to the Bell System in a verse of "Beef Rapp", his first track on MM..Food?. The verse goes as follows:
"Keep a cooker where the jar fell, And keep a cheap hooker that's off the hook like Ma Bell"
"Like Ma Bell, I got the ill communication"
  • The Beastie Boys again reference the Bell System in the song "Root Down", also off the Ill Communication album, with the line
"MCA grab the mic' and Ma Bell will connect you"
  • Kurtis Blow refers to the Bell System in the song "The Breaks."
"And Ma Bell sends you a whopping bill...With 18 phone calls to Brazil"
  • In the book The Outcasts of 19 Schulyer Place, by E.L. Konigsburg, there are many references to the Ma Bell phone company, because phone towers are one of the main topics of the book. (mg)
  • In the climax of the 1967 satirical film The President's Analyst, it is revealed that "The Phone Company" (TPC) - an obvious allusion to Bell Telephone - is planning a massive conspiracy to surgically implant communications devices into the brains of its customers. Also featured is a TPC-produced propoganda film that parodies the educational shorts that Frank Capra produced for Bell Laboratories in the 1950s.
  • Steven Spielberg's 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial includes a scene where the title character watches a television commercial for the Bell System, prompting the famous line, "E.T. phone home!" Later that same year the E.T. character appeared in one of Bell's "Reach out and touch someone" ads.
  • In the 1990 film "Home Alone" after a tree branch falls on the McAlister's telephone lines, a repair man reports to Mrs. McAlister, "We got the power lines up, but the phone lines are a real mess. It's gonna take Ma Bell a couple a days to fix." This lead to the family being unable to call Kevin after they left him home alone.
  • In the 1960s the company sponsored The Bell Telephone Hour on television.
  • A payphone in 2001: A Space Odyssey has the Bell System logo.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ AT&T Corporation. AT&T History: The Bell System. Retrieved on 2006-11-28.

[edit] External links

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Bell System
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