Word: ampersand
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dropping the Ampersand. International Telephone & Telegraph came into being in 1920 when Sosthenes Behn, a young entrepreneur born in the Virgin Islands of Danish-French ancestry (though "Sosthenes" is Greek for "of sound strength"), founded it as a New York-based holding company for several Caribbean telephone companies he had recently acquired. Behn's choice of a corporate name was an unabashed effort to trade on the reputation of the giant American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Behn was successful in creating this confusion; even today, many people think of ITT as the international division of A.T. & T. Behn received...
...when the rest of the business world was moving at a breakneck clip. In 1956, a year before he died at 75, Behn finally relinquished his tight grip on the company. About the only achievement of his immediate successors (and Geneen's immediate predecessors) was to drop the ampersand-making it ITT instead...