|
It is hard to think of any single invention
more indispensable to our daily lives and more crucial to
doing the business of the entire world than the "scientific
toy" Alexander Graham Bell invented one hundred years
ago. The telephone has altered social patterns and economic
marketplaces alike, so that gossipy teen-agers and prime
ministers, sick people in remote farmhouses and gold dealers
on international exchanges depend on its being there, working
properly and transmitting their messages to any destinations
they choose.
John Brooks tells for the first time the
century-long story of the telephone and of AT&T, the
giant corporation it spawned. It is exciting history in
his hands. Here are Bell racing to patent his invention,
the bitter legal fights that followed, the jungle war between
Gould and Vanderbilt to control Western Union that ended
with J.P. Morgan's financial control of AT&T. Here too
are the surprisingly vivid and varied big men of AT&T:
Gifford, Kappel and, above all, Theodore Vail, who early
in this century set the company pattern still followed today,
and amazed everyone by offering to submit the company to
government regulation, by allowing competitors to use AT&T
lines, and by insisting that service come before profits
-- all corporate heresies in the era before World War I.
Telephone dramatizes how inextricably
the telephone and AT&T became bound into American life
during a century of invention, corporate growth and social
change that saw the country rise to world power. From a
struggling company it grew -- by sometimes ruthless methods
-- into the richest corporation on earth. Inventions that
touch us all poured from its laboratories: the transistor,
the laser, the talkies, Telstar, the Sentinel and Safeguard
systems -- more than one patent a day from Bell Labs since
its inception, over 18,000 in all. Writers have found rich
material in the telephone, among them Twain, GBS, Frost,
Proust, Joyce, Dorothy Parker. A million Americans work
for AT&T, three million own its stock, countless millions
more reach for their telephones as naturally as they breathe.
There has never before been an independently
written, objective and comprehensive account of the biggest
corporation of them all and its impact on all our lives.
John Brooks has captured the drama and the pervasiveness
of AT&T, the "Colossus of Talk," whose story,
for better or worse, represents a capsule history of the
United States during the past hundred years.
John Brooks' other widely read books
on aspects of American life -- particularly the business
and financial scene -- include The Go-Go Years, Once
in Golconda, and The Great Leap. His articles
have appeared frequently in The New Yorker over the
past two decades. Mr. Brooks, who is president of the Authors
Guild of America, lives in New York City and near Sag Harbor,
Long Island.
|
