"Bell Telephone" redirects here. For other uses, see Bell Telephone (disambiguation)."Ma Bell" redirects here. Not to be confused with Ma Belle (disambiguation).
Bell System
Final logo designed by Saul Bass
Industry
Telecommunications
Founded
1877; 147 years ago (1877)
Founder
Alexander Graham Bell
Defunct
January 8, 1982; 42 years ago (January 8, 1982)
Fate
Breakup of the Bell System
Successors
Regional Bell Operating Companies AT&T Corporation
Headquarters
Dallas,
Texas
,
U.S.
Parent
Bell Telephone Company (1877–1885) AT&T (1885–1983)
The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell (as in "Mother Bell"), as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion (equivalent to $440 billion in 2023) and employed over one million people.
Beginning in the 1910s, American antitrust regulators had been observing and accusing the Bell System of abusing its monopoly power, and had brought legal action multiple times over the decades. In 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, anticipating that it could not win, AT&T agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven "Regional Bell Operating Companies" (known as "The Baby Bells"). This ended the existence of the conglomerate in 1984. The Baby Bells became independent companies and several of them are large corporations today.
The BellSystem was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company...
The breakup of the BellSystem was mandated on January 8, 1982, by a consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed...
diving bell is not designed to move under the control of its occupants, or to operate independently of its launch and recovery system. The wet bell is a...
awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs had its origin in the complex corporate organization of the BellSystem telephone conglomerate. The...
multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken...
company was formed in 1984 as Bell Atlantic as a result of the breakup of the BellSystem into seven companies, each a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC)...
The Bell Telephone Company was the initial corporate entity from which the BellSystem originated to build a continental conglomerate and monopoly in telecommunication...
Bell Canada (commonly referred to as Bell) is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of...
called a pocket bell (ポケットベル, poketto beru) or pokeberu (ポケベル), which is an example of wasei-eigo. Pagers operate as part of a paging system which includes...
subsidiary of the BellSystem. It was a division of Southwestern Bell Corporation. It continued to operate as Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems until 2000, when...
depends on which Bell's state the two qubits are in initially. Bell's states can be generalized to certain quantum states of multi-qubit systems, such as the...
yearly by the IEEE society. The journal was originally established as the BellSystem Technical Journal (BSTJ) in New York by the American Telephone and Telegraph...
Alexander Graham Bell (/ˈɡreɪ.əm/, born Alexander Bell; March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor, scientist and...
1910s through the 1984 BellSystem divestiture was The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. As of 2002, the name “Pacific Bell” is no longer used in...
as an "ILEC" (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) they were the former BellSystem or Independent Telephone Company responsible for providing local telephone...
The BellSystem Practices (BSPs) is a compilation of technical publications which describes the best methods of engineering, constructing, installing...
standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the BellSystem in the United States in the 1960s that replaced rotary...
Cincinnati Bell was founded in 1873 as a telegraph company and for much of its history was a BellSystem franchisee. In the 1990s, Cincinnati Bell expanded...
communications devices and switching centers. DTMF was first developed in the BellSystem in the United States, and became known under the trademark Touch-Tone...
years as a research and development facility, initially for the BellSystem and later Bell Labs. The centerpiece of the campus is an Eero Saarinen–designed...
BellSouth, LLC (stylized as BELLSOUTH and formerly known as BellSouth Corporation) was an American telecommunications holding company based in Atlanta...
were first defined in the Universal Service Ordering Code (USOC) system of the BellSystem in the United States for complying with the registration program...
The ascent propulsion system (APS) or lunar module ascent engine (LMAE) is a fixed-thrust hypergolic rocket engine developed by Bell Aerosystems for use...
While part of the BellSystem, it was at times the biggest Bell Operating Company of AT&T's 22 local telephone companies. Southwestern Bell continued to grow...
Electric for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the BellSystem in the United States. It came into service in 1982 and the last unit...
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