In radio's infancy, the American phone company tried to rent out the airwaves
In the early 1920s the telephone giant AT&T looked at the new craze for radio and saw a phone line to the masses. It launched a New York station, WEAF, rented out airtime, and wired stations together with long-distance lines. The result, the WEAF chain, was an early template for network broadcasting.
The company grew out of a legal body formed in 1874 to guard Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents. Its long-distance arm was incorporated in New York in 1885 as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, reached Chicago in 1892, and in 1899 became the parent of the whole Bell business, partly because Massachusetts law capped how much capital a company there could raise. Under Theodore Vail, president from 1907, it chased the slogan One Policy, One System, Universal Service and swallowed smaller rivals, including Western Union.
Regulators grew uneasy. In the Kingsbury Commitment AT&T agreed to give up its Western Union stake in exchange for being allowed to operate as a telephone monopoly, an arrangement that largely held until the breakup of 1984. Nicknamed Ma Bell, it once employed a million people.
Radio came via vacuum tubes. In 1915 AT&T engineers broadcast speech from Arlington, Virginia, that was heard in Hawaii and in Paris, the first documented voice transmission across the Atlantic. One early radio link to Avalon Island in California was swapped for an undersea cable because local amateurs kept eavesdropping on private calls. When broadcasting exploded in 1922, AT&T used its patents to demand licences from stations; a settlement with WHN in New York, which paid 2,000 dollars, set the pattern for the industry. The WEAF chain grew to 17 stations, and an evening hour across all of them cost 4,080 dollars.
The corporation itself ended quietly. In 2005 its former offspring SBC Communications bought it for more than 16 billion dollars and took the AT&T name. The old company lived on as a long-distance subsidiary until it was dissolved on May 1, 2024.
Source: AT&T Corporation
