Walter Sherman Gifford

Walter Sherman Gifford
Born January 10, 1885(1885-01-10)
Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Died 1966
Occupation President of AT&T
Ambassador to the U.K.

Walter Sherman Gifford (1885–1966) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, United States. He is best known as the president of the AT&T Corporation from 1925-1948.

Contents

Biography

Walter Sherman Gifford was born in Salem, Massachusetts on January 10, 1885. He graduated from Harvard University in 1905. In July 1906 he joined the Western Electric Company in Chicago as Assistant Secretary and Treasurer. After three years he became Chief Statistician of American Telephone & Telegraph, the job he held until 1916, when he went into war work.

During the war he became Supervising Director of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness of the National Consulting Board, Director of the U. S. Council of National Defense and Advisory Commission, and Secretary of the U. S. Representation on the Inter-Allied Munitions Council. After the war he returned to AT&T and soon became a Vice President. In 1925, at the age of only 40 years, he became the president of the AT&T Corporation when the existing president Harry Bates Thayer was made chairman of the board of directors. That same year he established the Bell Telephone Laboratories as a separate entity which would take over the work being conducted by Western Electric's engineering department's research division. In 1927, Gifford became the first to have a video telephone conversation with Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, through AT&T's pioneering technology in television transmission over wire. He was awarded the Vermilye Medal in 1943.

During Gifford's presidency lasting 23 years, AT&T experienced tremendous growth. Gifford increased operating revenue from $657 million to $2.25 billion. In 1927, Gifford relaunched his firm's overseas operations and by 1948, 72 foreign countries were linked by wire and radio with AT&T lines. In 1950, he retired from the post of chairman of AT&T which he occupied from 1948-1950. By then he had served AT&T for 45 years.

Other information

Kenneth Bilby (1986) tells of Gifford's courage in business:

..despite his conservative orthodoxy, there were elements of daring in Gifford's character, and he was innovative in corporate finance. In 1919, when utility bond issues were not in great favor in Wall Street, he persuaded his management to go directly to market with a $90-million offering of its own securities. It was a gargantuan sum at the time, larger than any ever raised without the underwriting support of investment bankers. But the over-the-counter offer was quickly subscribed, and AT&T received the full amount without payment of large brokerage commissions.[1]

In 1922 Gifford was became one of the founding trustees of the Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists' cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others[2]. Also on the board were the Galleries' architect, William Adams Delano; Robert DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago[3]; Irving T. Bush, president of the Bush Terminal Company; and Clark. Gifford served as secretary and treasurer for the organization[4].

After his retirement from AT&T, Gifford served as the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain from 1950-53.

References

  1. ^ Kenneth Bilby (1988) The General, page 71, Harper & Row ISBN 0-06-015568-X
  2. ^ "Painters and Sculptors' Gallery Association to Begin Work," New York Times, December 19, 1922
  3. ^ "Frank G. Logan (1851-1937)," Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago
  4. ^ 1934 Grand Central Art Galleries catalog, Smithsonian Institution website.

External links

Ministers Plenipotentiary to
the Court of St. James's
1785–1811

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Ambassadors Extraordinary
and Plenipotentiary to
the Court of St. James's
1893–present

Thomas F. Bayard, Sr. 1893–1897 · John Hay 1897–1898 · Joseph Choate 1899–1905 · Whitelaw Reid 1905–1912 · Walter Page 1913-1918 · John W. Davis 1918–1921 · George Harvey 1921–1923 · Frank B. Kellogg 1924–1925 · Alanson B. Houghton 1925–1929 · Charles G. Dawes 1929–1931 · Andrew W. Mellon 1932–1933 · Robert Bingham 1933–1937 · Joseph P. Kennedy 1938–1940 · John G. Winant 1941–1946 · W. Averell Harriman 1946 · Lewis W. Douglas 1947–1950 · Walter S. Gifford 1950–1953 · Winthrop W. Aldrich 1953–1957 · John Hay Whitney 1957–1961 · David K. E. Bruce 1961–1969 · Walter H. Annenberg 1969–1974 · Elliot L. Richardson 1975–1976 · Anne Armstrong 1976–1977 · Kingman Brewster, Jr. 1977–1981 · John J. Louis, Jr. 1981–1983 · Charles H. Price II 1983–1989 · Henry E. Catto, Jr. 1989–1991 · Raymond G. H. Seitz 1991–1994 · William J. Crowe 1994–1997 · Philip Lader 1997–2001 · William Stamps Farish III 2001–2004 · Robert H. Tuttle 2005–2009 · Louis Susman 2009–