The saga of Western Electric is irrevocably woven into the tapestry of United States history. From the very beginning, Western Electric forged thousands of new technologies, inventions and innovations into reality, while also being responsible for the advancement of business practices, employee benefits, quality assurance and research-development methodologies. Through the years, Western Electric has thrived in adversity and succeeded through many tragedies. The Eastland disaster struck a terrible blow to the heart and spirit of Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois during the early years of the telephone. Today, perhaps not in name but indeed in spirit, Western Electric lives on as Lucent Technologies. But few know the story of Western Electric...

The year 1844 saw many new and amazing inventions, among them the telegraph, as Samuel F. B. Morse opened his first telegraph system. In the following years, widespread telegraphy demand spawned numerous telegraph companies throughout the United States. By 1856, many of these widely dispersed telegraph companies consolidated into one company, the Western Union Company. The manufacturing shops also consolidated into two facilities, one at Cleveland, Ohio and the other in Ottawa, Illinois. George Shawk purchased the small Cleveland shop, which made working models of inventions and manufactured telegraph instruments as well as fire and burglar alarms.

The Early Years and Western Union
It was at this time that former Oberlin College physics professor and inventor, Elisha Gray, came to depend on this Cleveland firm for parts and models for his numerous experiments. Gray was so impressed with this company, he offered to partner with George Shawk and his other partner, Enos Barton, who had been the chief telegraph operator for Western Union in Rochester, NY. Shawk rejected his proposition because "Gray would want to put every man in the shop into his darned inventions." Barton recognized the genius and market potential of Gray's work, and encouraged Gray to buy out Shawk's interest, which he did in 1869.

Later that year, Western Union's general superintendent, Anson Stager, became a third partner with Gray and Barton. Stager began his telegraph career in Philadelphia in 1846, later helping to organize telegraph lines, which eventually became part of Western Union. During the Civil War, he served General George McClellan as Chief of the United States Military Telegraph. With his stellar credentials and powers of persuasion, he convinced Gray and Barton to move their shop to Chicago.

In 1872, Stager convinced his boss, Western Union president William Orton, to invest in the Chicago manufacturing enterprise. Gray and Barton reorganized as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, a company with strong ties to Western Union. Three of the company's five directors were also directors of Western Union. Furthermore, one-third of the capital for the newly named Western Electric Company came from Western Union's William Orton; one-third came from Western Union's Anson Stager; and the remainder came from Gray, Barton and their employees. Western Union further demonstrated its commitment to Western Electric by closing its Ottawa plant in the expectation that the Chicago plant would meet its needs for telegraph equipment.

Western Electric gained prestige at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, when its products won five gold medals. In addition to its telegraph equipment, the company offered a variety of electrical products, including various forms of alarms and mimeograph pens. The most significant product to the company's future, however, was one unveiled at the Exposition in June by Alexander Graham Bell: the telephone. On February 14, 1876, Bell sent one of his financial backers, Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to file a patent for his new telephonic device. Hubbard arrived at the U.S. patent office only hours before Bell's closest competitor: Elisha Gray, who had sold his interest in Western Electric in 1875 and retired from the business.

Less than a year after the cash-strapped Bell's patent was approved, Hubbard offered to sell the telephone patent to Western Union for one hundred thousand dollars--and Orton turned him down because he saw little future for the telephone. A year later, Orton changed his mind, and Western Union established the American Speaking Telephone Co., with Western Electric agreeing to manufacture telephones for the new company. Western Electric brought divided allegiances to that arrangement, already being a distributor of telephone equipment for Bell. For some time, Western Electric straddled the fence, acting as distributor for Bell and as captive supplier to its only competitor. Eventually, a struggle for control of the telephone erupted between the leviathan Western Union and the thinly capitalized Bell.

In September 1878, Bell Telephone Co. sued to protect Alexander Graham Bell's patents from infringement by Western Union. By June 1879, testimony in the patent suit was complete. The battle lasted a little over a year with Bell's 1876 patent as principal evidence, leading him to victory. Five months later, Western Union abandoned the field.

The Bell System
Western Electric joined the Bell system in 1881, when Bell purchased a controlling interest in its stock. Bell was having trouble meeting market demand. The manufacture of telephones was spread across separate companies in Baltimore, Chicago, and Cincinnati. While this arrangement solved Bell's difficulties in meeting demand promptly, the licensees were difficult to control. That led Bell to search for a single manufacturer with the resources to handle a large volume. Bell found it in Western Electric, which by then was the largest electrical manufacturer in the United States.

By 1882, Western Electric and Bell signed an agreement, which made Western Electric Bell's exclusive manufacturer of telephones in the United States. In return, Western agreed to sell only to the American Bell Telephone Company (which became AT&T in 1899), who leased the equipment to regional operating companies, who in turn leased the phones to end users. The following decade was both profitable and rewarding for both companies.

With Bell's original patent set to expire in 1894, Bell decided to depend on outside inventors and patents to fuel innovation, thereby pushing Western Electric's engineering department to concentrate on improvement and adaptation rather than invention and creation. This policy changed in 1907 when John J. Carty and Frank Jewett seeded a new "research branch" of Western Electric, which eventually would become Bell Laboratories, one of the greatest research organizations in the world.

The company made tremendous breakthroughs. In 1913, Western Electric developed the high vacuum tube, ushering in the electronic age. The company subsequently invented the loudspeaker, successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications, which culminated in the cellular telephone.

The Hawthorne Plant
Western Electric founder and still president, Enos Barton, moved the company's main manufacturing plant from downtown Chicago to a more rural setting on the outskirts of the city in 1905. Barton's urban-to-rural move contrasts his move 36 years earlier, when he mortgaged the family farm in Jefferson County, New York, to raise money for his original investment in his Cleveland based partnership with George Shawk.

The rural Hawthorne plant became a virtually self-sufficient city, with a power plant, hospital, fire brigade, laundry, greenhouse, a brass band, and an annual beauty pageant. Hawthorne boasted a staff of trained nurses--who made house calls! Hawthorne absorbed the operations of the company's existing plants in New York and Chicago, and by 1914 it was Western Electric's only manufacturing facility. During the next seven decades, the Hawthorne works--including more than 100 buildings--would produce telephones, cable and every major telephone switching system plus the equipment necessary to operate it. Western Electric even owned and operated the Manufacturer's Junction Railway at Hawthorne, "the biggest little railway in the world," which transported raw materials and completed cable around the plant. Hawthorne was also the cradle of industrial psychology, with a series of experiments that began in 1924. In the span of five year (1909-1914), the research branch at the Hawthorne Works made transcontinental telephone service a reality.

The Eastland Disaster
On January 25, 1915 as part of the Panama Pacific Exposition and 39 years after the first telephone conversation, the original participants reprised their roles: Alexander Graham Bell, from New York, called his associate Thomas Watson, who sat in San Francisco. After some initial pleasantries, Bell said, "I have been asked to say to you the words you understood over the telephone and through the old instrument, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you."' From across the continent, Watson reminded Bell, "It would take me a week to get there now!" It would not take an additional 39 years to reach Europe. By 1927, a Western Electric radio-telephone link-up from New York to London established transatlantic service.

It was in the euphoria of these events that the Western Electric Employee Association planned their annual picnic. Last year's picnic in Michigan City, Indiana had been a great success. A similar outing was planned again, using the Indiana Transportation Company to handle the chartering of vessels to transport the enormous numbers of employees, family and friends to Michigan City on Saturday, July 24th, 1915. The first ship to depart for the picnic, the Eastland, capsized at its wharf in the Chicago River, killing 844 of 2500 passengers. Immediately following the disaster, broad, sweeping accusations of criminal activities and conspiracies were levied against the ship's crew, operators, leasing company, and even Western Electric.

Monday, July 26, 1915 was a very somber day at the Hawthorne Works. Workers spent most of the day gathered in small groups, discussing the hellish nightmare they had all witnessed. The entire plant closed for funeral services on Tuesday and Wednesday. In addition, the Bell System called for a day of mourning later that week, with all but essential employees excused from work to attend memorial services in cities across the United States. The top executives of the company attended a service as a group in Chicago. The shock was slow to wear off at Hawthorne Works.

Although Alexander Graham Bell had been out of the phone business for a number of years, he still held considerable amounts of stock in both AT&T and Western Electric. In early August, Bell and his wife, Mabel, spent most of a day touring Hawthorne Works, pausing at each work station and desk to shake hands and spend a minute talking with employees about the disaster. Mabel took careful note of the names of the people who had died, along with the names of their family members. Mabel had to relay these conversations to Bell, as he had become nearly deaf and required the use of a speaking tube. These employees later received personal notes of condolence from the Bell's along with gifts, it was reported, which were deemed appropriate in each case. In late August, nearly a month after the catastrophe, Western Electric began hiring to replace those who had perished.

Epilogue
During the first two decades of the 20th century, Western Electric became one of the largest distributors of electrical equipment in the United States. In some respects, this was a continuation of the original business of Gray and Barton. As demand increased, Western Electric began stocking items made by dozens of other electrical manufacturers, including Sunbeam lamps, sewing machines, electric fans, washing machines, vacuum cleaners--even toy ranges. The company's catalogue grew to 1,300 pages, as the Western Electric name in electrical appliances rivaled those of General Electric and Westinghouse.

In 1925, AT&T restructured its business. What was once called the supply department would be organized as a separate corporation called the Graybar Electric Company, Inc. (after Western Electric founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton). Three years later, ownership of Graybar passed to its employees.

AT&T also established another separate entity called the Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., which took over work previously conducted by the research division of Western Electric's engineering department. Bell Labs was 50 percent owned by Western Electric, and 50 percent owned by AT&T. Nine years later, AT&T's development and research group also joined Bell Labs.

In 1974, the Justice Department began antitrust proceedings to seek dismemberment of AT&T, which was the largest corporation in the world. Eight years later, AT&T agreed to divest its 22 wholly owned operating companies, which provided local exchange service. AT&T's work force shrunk from more than a million to less than four hundred thousand. In exchange for the divestiture, AT&T was allowed to compete in non-telephone business, such as computers and information services.

AT&T also abandoned two names, which had been associated with the company for more than a century: Bell and Western Electric. The government ordered that AT&T forfeit use of the Bell name and logo to the operating companies (except the name Bell Laboratories). Western Electric disappeared as a separate entity when AT&T restructured according to its new competitive situation. One of the two primary parts of the new, smaller, AT&T was the old company's long lines department, now called AT&T Communications, which offered regulated long distance service. The second part of the new company, called AT&T Technologies, inherited the other two segments of the old Bell System: equipment manufacture and supply (the old Western Electric) and research and development (Bell Labs). Bell Laboratories has helped weave the technological fabric of modern society. It is the birthplace of the transistor, the laser and the communications satellite, and continues to make major technological advances, including Internet switching and transmission products and pace-setting optical networking systems.

On November 29, 1995, a Delaware corporation, named NS-MPG Inc., was incorporated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T Corp. In February, 1996, NS-MPG entered into a contract with AT&T, pursuant to which NS-MPG acquired certain assets and assumed certain liabilities of AT&T. On February 6, 1996, NS-MPG changed its name to Lucent Technologies Inc. and in April, Lucent sold 17% of its stock to the public. Now, as an independent $20 billion manufacturing company, Lucent Technologies will easily break into the ranks of the Fortune 50.

^** The Genius of Electricity ("Golden Boy") Trademark of Western Electric. Renamed "The Spirit of Communications" by the local Bell operating companies, it was designed by Evelyn Beatrice Longman in 1916. Miss Longman wanted "The Genius" to symbolize Mercury's speed, the era's continuing sense of mystery about all things "electric" and the modern Messenger, the telephone.

^***At 195 Broadway, home of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and the Western Electric Co.¾ fronting on Broadway, Dey and Fulton Streets. Twenty-seven stories above street level. Height of Fulton Street wing including Tower, 422 ft.