Since the end of World War II, prices of manufactured goods of all kinds have gone up, but Western Electric prices have gone up far less than the average—as of the end of 1954, they had gone up less than half as much.
Because it works as a unit of the System rather than toward a separate end of its own. Western Electric plays an essential part in furnishing Americans with the best telephone service at the lowest possible cost.
From Bell to Bell System
This model of Bell’s first telephone is a duplicate of the instrument through which speech sounds were first transmitted electronically, 1875.
The telephone we use today is very different in design from the first instrument invented by Alexander Graham Bell, but it works on the same principle. As soon as Bell proved his invention practical, he foresaw it could link homes with offices, sweep aside the isolation of farms, and bind together cities and nations with electrically transmitted speech.
Alexander Graham Bell had prepared himself to follow the professional footsteps of his father and grandfather in the teaching of proper articulation and the correction of speech defects. He became a teacher of speech to the deaf. Early in his training, his investigations into the nature of sound led him to study electricity. It was out of this work, together with his understanding of the organs of speech and hearing, that his invention grew.
He attempted to apply sound to telegraphy in a device called the harmonic telegraph. He hoped it would transmit several Morse messages tuned at differing levels over the same circuit simultaneously. While he was working with this device, Bell conceived the principle of the telephone.
He told his young mechanical assistant, Thomas A. Watson: “If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in intensity as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech.”