Western Electric

In 1888–1889, Western Electric built a 10-story factory building at 125 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan, to manufacture some of the first telephones. The New York shop that was renting the Western Union building moved to this building.

In preparation for the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1892, Western Electric was responsible for the organized Bell System sales activities and merchandising of apparatus for the 900 long-distance circuit from New York to Chicago. In 1897, the building at 463 West Street, New York was constructed and housed the New York shop as well as the company Eastern headquarters.

Western Electric was the first company to join in a Japanese joint venture with foreign capital. In 1899, it invested in a 54% share of the Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. Western Electric's representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton. The company, later known as NEC, would eventually become a major international manufacturer of electronics equipment including semiconductors and personal computers.

20th century

In 1901, Western Electric secretly purchased a controlling interest in a principal competitor, the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company, but in 1909 was forced by a lawsuit to sell back to Milo Kellogg.

The Manufacturers Junction Railway Company was incorporated in January 1903 to provide rail connections to major railroad systems. There were approximately 13 miles (21 km) of track in and out of Hawthorne Works for rail freight of inbound materials and outbound finished products. Western Electric had a tenure of 50 years up to 1952, in the responsibility and operation of its use for Hawthorne and other nearby industrial companies.

Also, in 1903, the construction of Hawthorne Works first buildings were authorized by Barton.

In 1907, the research and development staffs of Western Electric and AT&T were consolidated to 463 West Street, New York. The location served the newly Western Electric Engineering Department for the responsibility of the testing and inspection of its telephones and equipment. AT&T's Engineering Department retained the responsibility for the growth of the Bell System with compatible equipment and service. Gradually the consolidation improved and advanced the telephony response to expanding use.

On July 24, 1915, employees of the Hawthorne Works boarded the SS Eastland in downtown Chicago for a company picnic. The ship rolled over at the dock and 844 people died.

In 1920, Alice Heacock Seidel was the first female Western Electric employee given permission to stay on after she had married. This set a precedent in the company, which previously had not allowed married women in their employ. Heacock had worked for Western Electric for sixteen years before her marriage, and was at the time the highest-paid secretary in the company. In her memoirs, she wrote that the decision to allow her to stay on "required a meeting of the top executives to decide whether I might remain with the Company, for it established a precedent and a new policy for the Company – that of married women in their employ. If the women at the top were permitted to remain after marriage then all women would expect the same privilege. The policy was expanded quickly, so that a few years later women were given maternity leaves with no loss of time on their service records."

Western Electric was expanding beyond making telephone equipment and American Bell noticed its division from a manufacturing business to a supply business. Western Electric in 1921 split the supply department from the manufacturing business, and this led to a separate entity.

In 1925, ITT purchased the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company of Brussels, Belgium, and other worldwide subsidiaries from AT&T, to avoid an antitrust action. The company manufactured rotary system switching equipment under the Western Electric brand.

Western Electric also managed an electrical equipment distribution business, furnishing its customers with non-telephone products made by other manufacturers. This electrical distribution business was spun off from Western Electric in 1925 and organized into a separate company, Graybar Electric Company, in honor of the company's founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton.

Bell Telephone Laboratories, created from the engineering department of Western Electric in 1925, was half-owned by Western Electric, the other half belonging to AT&T.

The company began to increase its presence in other sectors of industry for new products. In September 1931, the Teletype Corporation headquartered in Chicago on Wrightwood Ave, became a subsidiary of Western Electric and it was a manufacturer of teletypewriters for TWX services. There was the acquisition in 1931 of the Nassau Smelting and Refining plant located in Totenville, Staten Island, New York to recycle Bell System scrap wire, metal, and becoming a subsidiary of Western Electric. The acquisition of the Queensboro factory in Middle Village, New York became a Western Electric Shop in the 1930s to produce wooden telephone booths.

In 1974, the IBEW members at Western Electric's 16 plants went on strike over improved benefits, cost‐of‐living adjustments, and pay increase for up to three years. The ratified contract was agreed on September 3, 1974, with employees at 13 plants returning to work. Only the company's subsidiary Teletype Corporation plant in Little Rock, Arkansas and two plants, the Columbia River Switching Equipment factory in Vancouver, Washington and in San Ramon, California were subject to ratification or in negotiations to settle local agreements.

In 1983, corporate announcements were made at the three oldest manufacturing facilities for product manufacturing transfers and employee expected layoffs. The Kearny Works facility that made systems to convert commercial power to run various telecom equipment, would transfer remaining work to Dallas Works. The shutdown of the plant would eliminate 4,000 jobs. The Baltimore Works facility that made connectors and protectors for wire and cable had work moved to Omaha Works. A total of 2,300 jobs were potentially eliminated after that announcement. The Hawthorne Works facility, had the operations for pulp cable relocated to Phoenix Works. A loss of 400 positions were expected eliminated in the process.

After the Bell System breakup, Western Electric facilities were known as AT&T Technologies facilities in 1984. The three largest and oldest facilities, Hawthorne Works, Kearny Works, and Baltimore Works, were closed shortly thereafter due to "excess space".

Company logos

Western Electric used various logos during its existence. Starting in 1914 it used an image of a statue originally named Electricity, but later renamed Spirit of Communication, which was raised to the roof of 195 Broadway on October 24, 1916.

In 1944, Western Electric purchased a factory in St. Paul, Minnesota to restart manufacture of telephone sets for civilian installation as authorized by War Production Board. By 1946, some of these facilities were relocated to the Hawthorne plant as space became available from war-production scale down.

Also, the reduced production of home telephones because of the war, began to have a backlog of two million orders in late 1945 for the Hawthorne plant. Western Electric had acquired a former Studebaker plant on Archer Avenue (Chicago, Illinois) for assemblers that produced out one hundred thousand Model 302s telephones by March 1946.

After World War II, the National Carbon Company left a facility that had manufactured United States Navy submarine batteries and underwater detonators in Winston-Salem. This facility at 800 Chatham Road, was passed to Western Electric Company and operated until 1966 for production of national telephone companies' switches and circuits. Additionally, the location complex was one of three nationwide Western Electric field engineering sites.

The mid-1940s brought occupancy to locations. A plant was established in 1946 at Tonawanda, New York to produce equipment wiring cable, telephone cords, enamelled wire, and insulated wire. This plant was called "Buffalo Plant." A satellite shop was established in Jersey City, New Jersey called "Marion Shops" and occupied in 1947. This location produced portable test sets, rectifiers, and power equipment for the main plant known as the Kearny Works.

In July 1948, the equipment plant at Duluth, Minnesota was involved in the National Labors Act with bargaining units of IAM and IBEW.

Between 1947 and 1961, eight Works locations were built and occupied, located in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Indianapolis, Indiana, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Merrimack Valley, Omaha, Nebraska, Columbus, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Kansas City, Missouri for the high volume of manufacturing products. The North Carolina Works was located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Merrimack Valley Works location was in North Andover, Massachusetts. The Kansas City Works location was in Lee's Summit, Missouri.

A Lawrence, Massachusetts factory opened on November 13, 1951, and was called the "Garfield Shops." The location started with as a wired units job and there were thirteen workers with a section chief and one maintenance man. In 1955, the Lawrence plant reached its peak employment at more than 2,000 employees. This Bell Labs research and development satellite had 40 Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers and 25 Western Electric employees. Carrier equipment used filters made with Polystyrene condensers at this Garfield Shops or later referred as Lawrence Shops.

In 1952, the Reading, Pennsylvania plant began when Western Electric converted an old Rosedale knitting mill in Laureldale into a factory. On August 22, 1952, the facility opened to produce new electronic components for the U.S. government for use by the military and the space program.

In the mid-1950s, Western Electric established several more satellite "Shops" that were smaller locations reporting to the larger "Works" locations. The "Montgomery Shops" were occupied in 1955 to produce Data-Phone data sets, wire spring relays, and test sets. Although, it was located in Montgomery, Illinois, it reported and supported production of the main plant, Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. The Kearny Works facility had satellite shops that were apart from its location but were part of the manufacturing process. Located in Fair Lawn, New Jersey and occupied since 1956, the "Fair Lawn Shops" produced coils, resistors, transformers, and keys under Kearny manufacturing. The Indianapolis Works facility was producing telephone sets and components with a satellite shop. The Indianapolis shop known as "Washington Street Shop" produced miscellaneous subscriber apparatus since its occupancy in 1957. The "Lawrence Shop" that was occupied in 1957 produced BELLBoy receivers, telephone repeaters and carrier products under Merrimack Valley Works. The "Clark Shop" was occupied in 1959 at Clark, New Jersey and manufactured submarine cable repeaters and components. The satellite shop was under Kearny Works.

The 1960s and 1970s had various new facilities built and occupied by Western Electric to produce new technologies such as electronic switching equipment (Dallas and North Illinois), fiber optic cable networks (Atlanta), power systems (Phoenix), business equipment (Denver), and telephone equipment (Shreveport).

In 1970, Western Electric purchased land in Bishop Ranch, San Ramon, California for a permanent plant. The 200,000 square-foot leased plant began in June 1971. In 1974, there were 490 IBEW employee members on strike over local agreement issues. In 1975, this San Ramon Valley Plant announced a September 30 closure of its telephone transmission equipment manufacturing operations.

On January 27, 1983, the Kearny facility was announced for closure due to technology changes, underutilized, and too costly to maintain. The phase out of the facility jobs started in fall of 1983 and the 59 year old, 3 million-square-foot, 144-acre facility was sold officially on May 21, 1984, with nearly 1000 last employees left at the plant. The former facility was purchased and later existed as warehouses, distribution, research and light manufacturing facilities.

As modern facilities around the country were used for the operations of Hawthorne and its productions distributed, announcement was made on June 24, 1983, for closure. Between 1975 and 1983, the Foundry and most of the Telephone Apparatus buildings were demolished and in 1986–1987, the remaining Telephone Apparatus buildings and the Executive Tower were demolished. The Hawthorne facility was in operations for 83 years when it closed its doors in 1986 and torn down for a shopping center. Another building was demolished on April 10, 1994, for a shopping center parking lot, with a remaining two buildings converted. A water tower is the remaining physical association of the industrial research complex where telephones, electronics, military equipment and business management innovations were produced by a facility that once existed.

The Baltimore facility closed on February 28, 1986. The facility, which had once employed 6,200, was staffed by 65 employees on the closure date.

By the time AT&T was dissolved in the early 1980s, more than twenty production plants around the country ("Works" locations) had been established.

In 1967, a telephone directory provides the following snapshot of manufacturing facilities:

Technological innovations

In 1926, Western Electric issued the first Bell System telephone with a handset containing both the transmitter and receiver in the same unit. Previous telephones had been of the candlestick type which featured a stationary transmitter in the desktop set or the wall-mounted unit, and a hand-held receiver to be placed on the user's ear. The first version of the desktop unit was constructed by shortening the candlestick shaft to about an inch in height and placing a handset cradle on the top. This was the A-type handset mounting, which was replaced by 1928 by the B handset mounting, which featured a streamlined shape integrating the shaft as a short neck for the cradle. It still had the same circular footprint of the candlestick, which proved too unstable when dialing numbers, and was henceforth replaced with a wider design using an oval footprint, the D-type base in 1930.

Concurrently with the mechanical advances, the electrical circuitry of Western Electric telephones saw advances in sidetone reduction. Sidetone is feedback by which the users of the telephone can hear their own voice in the receiver. While a desirable property, this feedback, when too loud, causes most users to lower their voice volume to unacceptable levels. Until after the introduction in 1930 of the D handset mountings, sets still contained no active sidetone compensation. Such handset telephone types were designated with the assembly code 102, while later models containing anti-sidetone circuitry were the type 202 telephone set. These early desktop telephones relied on an additional desk set box or subscriber set (subset) containing the ringer with gongs, the induction coil, and capacitors to interface with the telephone network. These subscriber sets were typically mounted on a wall near the operating location for the telephone.

In 1936 the model 302 telephone was announced, which was the first Western Electric instrument that combined the desktop telephone set with the subscriber set and ringer in one unit. It became the mainstay of American telephone service well into the 1950s, and was followed by the model 500 telephone starting in 1950, which became the most extensively produced telephone model in the industry's history. The 500-set was continually updated over time, reflecting new materials and manufacturing processes, such as quieter and smoother dial gearing and a printed circuit board for the network electronics. The model 500 was discontinued in 1986, in favor of the type 2500, that had been available since 1969. The 2500-series employed dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling for transmitting digits to the central office, replacing the rotary dial. DTMF technology was referred to by the trademark Touch-Tone.

Further innovations were evident when in 1954, the production of color telephones began to outproduce the black sets. Later, for 1958, production of the nite-light telephone, the Speakerphone, and the CALL DIRECTOR telephone were done at Indianapolis Works. Other innovations included the Princess telephones of the 1960s, followed shortly by the Trimline models.

Western Electric's switching equipment development commenced in the mid-1910s with the rotary system and the panel switch, later several generations of cross-bar switches, and finally the development of several generations of electronic switching systems (ESS). The No. 1 ESS was first installed in 1965. The 4ESS was the first digital toll switching system, implemented in 1976. Finally, in 1981, the 5ESS was implemented throughout the United States.

In 1929, Western Electric entered as a market competitor for early cinema sound systems. It created the Western Electric Universal Base, a device by which early silent cinema projectors could be adapted to screen sound films. Western Electric designed a wide-audio-range horn loudspeaker for cinemas. This was estimated to be 25% efficient, thus allowing a cinema to be filled with sound from a 3-watt amplifier. This was an important breakthrough in 1929 because high-powered audio valves (tubes) were not generally available.

In addition to being a supplier to the Bell System, Western Electric played a major role in the development and production of professional sound recording and reproducing equipment, including:

the Vitaphone system which brought sound to the movies;

the electrical recording technology adopted by record companies in the late 1920s (despite the popular electrical system used by Autograph Records and its manager, Orlando R. Marsh);

the Orthophonic phonograph, an acoustical phonograph with a flat frequency response tailored for reproduction of electrically recorded disks;

the Westrex (variable density) optical sound that succeeded it for motion picture film production and release prints;

the Westrex magnetic sound (mono and stereo) that succeeded it for motion picture film production and a few productions' release prints;

the Westrex stereo variable-area optical sound that succeeded it for low-cost stereo release prints;

the Westrex (Model 3, and derivatives) cutter and system for recording stereophonic sound in a single-groove gramophone record (StereoDisk®) that was compatible with monophonic equipment.

For these reasons, many American films of this period feature the Western Electric/Westrex logo in their on-screen credits.

In 1950, at the start of the Cold War, Western Electric was selected to build the first demonstrator for the SOSUS anti-submarine sound surveillance system. Later, the company was prime contractor for the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system, which operated briefly from 1975.

Manufacturing innovations

Western Electric also invested heavily in improving processes and equipment to manufacture their products.

In 1958, the company established the Engineering Research Center (ERC) near Princeton, New Jersey. With a charter distinct from Bell Labs, Western Electric's ERC was one of the first research organizations solely dedicated to the advancement of manufacturing-focused, rather than product-focused science. Here, more than 400 researchers and engineers worked to bring new manufacturing technologies into the company's production environment. Their developments included computer-driven mathematical models and related statistical quality-control systems to improve production flow and logistics, novel metal-forming techniques, circuit board assembly automation, fiber-optic waveguide manufacturing techniques, application of lasers for industrial processes and early efforts in cleanroom robotics for semiconductor production. In the early 1970s, some of the first practical Ion Implanters to make integrated circuits were also developed at ERC and later deployed at Western Electric's chip-making factories.

Although the ERC was later integrated into Bell Labs, it – along with AT&T's nearby Corporate Education Center – was closed by the late 1990s, victims of the deregulation of telecommunications, shrinking revenues from long-distance calls and accelerating innovation in telephone equipment by an increasing number of global manufacturing players.