Project: Build a Better Ma Bell History Chart
I presume many of you have seen this chart showing the AT&T divestiture showing the various companies which sprang from Ma Bell's sundered body, only to coalesce back into a few major corporations. (I believe it's from Freepress, although I'm not positive they created it.) It's a good start, but not as comprehensive as it could be.
Simply for my own edification and entertainment, I'd like to start putting together a chart that shows the entire history of the privatized phone infrastructure in the U.S., from Ma Bell along with the other LECs, RBOCs, and long-distance carriers over the years that have occasionally spun apart, but more frequently glommed together into great telecommunication companies, as well as their logos and iconography.
The Bell System article on Wikipedia has a good place to start, but is missing many of the smaller regional carriers.
I'm happy to make this a collaborative project, but it's really just the sort of collect-them-all thing I usually start and then, in a stunning failure of OCD pretensions, never complete, so I don't want to make a big thing of it. But if you've got any suggestions on the best way to tackle this, specifically good ways to track down all the local phone carriers that existed outside of the Bell system (and may still to this day), I'd love to hear them. The end result would be a chart that documented every local carrier, flowing downward by year, to show various acquisitions, spin-offs, and eventual shut-downs.
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Does anti-trust law prevent the almost inevitable final act, where all three companies merge into AT&T again?
Who knows, Simon? It doesn't seem like anti-trust means all that much these days.
I did just find a cool out of print book on Amazon that might help called "Telephone: The First $100 Years." I just ordered a used copy.
The re-merging into AT&T is inevitable, simply because landline telephones are becoming more and more obsolete by the day, and while AT&T and Verizon are two of the major cell carriers in the US, Google winning the 700Mhz spectrum auction is going to create healthy competition. The only question is, which baby bell's going to get assimilated into Mama first? My money's on Qwest.
Yeah, this does need an update to include all the cellular operations. Right now it's missing my all-time favorite mashup, Bell Atlantic-NYNEX Mobile. What a mouthful.
Where is the bigger image? I don't see a link anywhere but i might be missing something
@IRONCLADLOU... I doubt it. You are right that landline is in a decline, but: (i) you are overrating the potential impact of Google, which knows nothing about wireless; (ii) the baby bells have already "been assimilated" in the sense that out of the original 7, four assimilated into the new AT&T and two into Verizon; (iii) no one gives a hoot about Qwest, which has horrendous geography to cover. This chart neglects Sprint and T-Mobile, which are sort of wireless powerhouses. Also ignores CATV providers, who have some resources. Even if they did reassemble, the world isn't the same as it was in 1982.
This dual login thing is a pita and I refuse to get a separate login for BBG. If you do want help with such a chart, I'd be happy to pitch in; contemplate whether you really want to go OCD and add in CATV, wireless, and international. I would maintain traditional mass media is a separate chart, but CATV looks a lot more like telco. Maybe a tiddlywiki to get the info together or something. I'll keep looking back at this thread.
About the login thing: I know it's screwy, but I think you can log out with your BB login, then log back in here with the same login, and you'll be good to go. (Well, you'd have to log back in to BB again, too.)
I'll definitely toss up my notes when I've got more to show. Right now I'm going to wait for that book and slurp all the info out of that before I put anything up publicly.
Sounds like an interesting project. I'll start using the powers of Google to see what else can be found online. I'm really interested in how to collect all of this information. While I like the idea of eventually boiling it all down into a giant poster/diagram, it seems one would need a database-driven tool of some sort to capture the data and make meaningful connections between companies that are purchased/absorbed/spawned/etc. I'm all ears if anyone has ideas on that. A wiki of some sort does seem like the right forum if it can be made to handle the data properly.
I do think it would be interesting to collect the same info for wireless and international carriers but perhaps small steps are wise and starting with American landline companies is a good start? It stays true to the inspiration if nothing else.
Here is the link to the large image:
http://www.freepress.net/ownership/att_history.jpg
I figure start with the landline and wireless carriers for now, then use those skills later to track the other media companies, if'n we want. I also like the idea of doing a big chart of breweries in the US, but we'd have to go back a lot further than the 1880s. :)
I think a wiki is pretty much where it's at for this. I'm operating at half steam today, but I'll see about putting something together this week.
Here's a similar chart (well, with similar information) done by seemingly random blogger Tom McMahon (first published in Nov 2005):
http://www.tommcmahon.net/2005/11/baby_bells.html
There are some comments with additional info and suggestions.
Oh, and Joel, quick -- In the U.S., what is the top-selling beer *not* brewed by A-B, Miller, or Coors? Ahhh, trick question, it's Corona. Okay, in the U.S., what is the top-selling *domestic* beer *not* brewed by A-B, Miller, or Coors?
By the way, I don't know the answer.
Am I missing the link to a readable image?