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A Bell System logo, called the Blue Bell, used from 1889 to 1900. The Bell Telephone Company and its successors created the Bell System and drove its expansion. The Bell Telephone Company was the initial corporate entity from which the Bell System originated to build a continental conglomerate and monopoly in telecommunication services in the ...

This lesson discusses the history of the Bell System, focusing primarily on the growth of the company founded by Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor of the telephone), including the spread of the telephone and its importance in society; the dominance of the Bell System and its resultant wealth; and, finally, the 1984 federally mandated breakup ...

The Bell Telephone System was once called "Ma Bell" or "the telephone company." The system consisted of 24 Bell operating companies that became the "Baby Bells," comprising a huge network of telecommunications equipment.

A detailed history of the Bell System is available at The Bell System Memorial. Southern New England Telephone Company: The First Fifty Years On January 28, 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell was awarded a patent on his primitive telephone, the world’s first commercial telephone exchange opened for business in New Haven, Connecticut.

This collection contains 145,000 items, some 4,695 of which are online. Among the contents correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell's invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, among other things.

Browse Encyclopedia. Before AT&T was broken up in 1984 by court order, the Bell System referred to AT&T and all the Bell Telephone companies that were part of it, but had separate names to provide ...

The Bell System Practices ( BSPs) is a compilation of technical publications which describes the best methods of engineering, constructing, installing, and maintaining the telephone plant of the Bell System under direction of AT&T and Bell Telephone Laboratories. [1]

The Western Electric model 500 telephone series was the standard domestic desk telephone set issued by the Bell System in North America from 1950 through the 1984 Bell System divestiture. Millions of model 500-series phones were produced and were present in most homes in North America.