Daily Notes

Well, sort of. AG Communication Systems (external link), a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, claims parentage of A.E. It thus marks the triumph of the now defunct Western Electric against its greatest and oldest rival, Automatic Electric. Which is also now defunct. It is as if two ghosts have finished a battle that their corporeal forms did not complete in life. Check out the time line below which comes from the A.G. site.

Click to enlarge

Rather than disappearing completely in the mid 1980s, remnants of GTE's manufacturing arm continued on, being absorbed by AG Communication Systems in 1989. The "A", by the way, stands for AT&T, and the "G" for General Telephone and Electronics. A.G. contains many old Western Electric elements, especially Lucent, which continues to manufacture telecom equipment, much to telephone companies formerly of the Bell System.

A.G.'s ownership settles a David and Goliath type battle that raged for nearly one hundred years. In this case, Goliath won, but it does not diminish the contributions A.E. made over the years, particularly with Strowger or step by step switching equipment. Steppers were the first workable system that allowed automatic dialing, letting people place calls without an operator. A.E.'s steppers let Automatic Electric and the independent telephone companies keep close to Bell System's subscribership levels until the early 1920s. Read more about these things in my telephone history series.