Word: vail
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...Theodore N. Vail, though, who invented the Bell System. Brilliant, sweeping, subtle, an organizing genius with uncanny foresight, Vail was boss from 1878 to 1887, during which time he put together all the pieces of the modern goliath. He built up an engineering department to develop new phone technology, and a manufacturing department to build telephone equipment. All the while he systematically sought to exclude non-Bell phone companies from his network. But Vail felt thwarted by Boston financiers more interested in fast profits than his far-reaching ideas, and so he quit at 42 and went into retirement...
...after a 20-year absence, bankers summoned Vail back to save AT&T from financial ruin. The company was a mess. The original Bell patents had expired. Populists were attacking the firm over rates, and farmers were
...organizing their own telephone companies. The system was becoming technically obsolete; independents offered dial phones before Bell. Within a decade, Vail had transformed AT&T into a communications power. By the time he died in 1920, he had set the foundation for vigorous growth. Indeed, AT&T by 1929 was the first corporation to generate annual revenues of more than $1 billion...
...series of famous essays, Vail put forth the idea that fatter profits are not the be-all and end-all of a corporation. Service counts more, he wrote, and the Bell System could deliver it best by being a regulated monopoly that struck a balance between public and private interests. In a 1908 advertising campaign, Vail sounded the theme that prevailed until the current divestiture: "One system, one policy, universal service...
Monopoly, to Vail, meant that AT&T would have U.S. telephone service mostly to itself, in exchange for submitting its rates to federal and state regulatory authorities for approval. Non-Bell phone companies, which handled about half the phones in the U.S. at that time, did not like that idea. Neither did the Federal Government. It questioned Bell at every turn. As far back as 1913, when European phone systems were being nationalized, the Postmaster General advocated Government ownership of the phone system. But a privately controlled monopoly seemed to be the most efficient way to run a national phone...