The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage)

Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become

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For example, when given an opportunity to buy the patents for the telephone shortly after it was invented, William Orton, the president of Western Union (then the dominant telegraph company), reportedly dismissed the device as an “electrical toy.” The view prevailing at the time was that the telephone would be used merely for short updates—a purpos... See more

AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.11 In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial conf

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One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped o

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At the time of the breakup, in fact, it was widely assumed in the business press that IBM and AT&T would now struggle for supremacy. What undermined such an assumption was the historical record: Everything Bell Labs had ever made for AT&T had been channeled into a monopoly business. “One immediate problem for which no amount of corporate bu

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