IEEE Spectrum March, 2007 - 27

The AT&T Archives and History Center doesn't make much of a first impression. Located
There, antiquated switchboards and steel shelves filled with
dust-covered telephones stand alongside weird vacuum tubes
and outmoded antennas. Behind a metal cage, a Western Electric
washing machine, from an early experiment in diversification,
stands in the shadows. Beneath a blue tarp lies a three-quarterscale model of the first Telstar communications satellite. A big
wooden packing crate conceals plaster molds from the famous
Golden Boy statue, which once perched atop AT&T headquarters
in downtown New York City. You can even smell the history here:
slightly cold and musty, with an edge of iron and machine oil.
But it's only after your eyes adjust to the dim light that you
finally start to get it. Believe it or not, that bizarre-looking kludge of
camera and turntable was the very first motion-picture sound system. In the archive room, known locally as The Vault, can be found
the world's first solar cell. And that beat-up little notebook holds
the scribblings of none other than Thomas A. Watson, the technical
brains behind Alexander Graham Bell's ingenious telephonic inventions. Here, he captured for the record the first precious words ever
spoken by phone: "Mr. Watson! Come here! I want you!"
In addition to this fascinating assortment of artifacts, there
are tens of thousands of audio and video recordings, a million or
so photographs, and countless other documents deemed valuable
by one AT&T archivist or another over the past century. The
collection is a testament to the enormous resources the oncemighty telecommunications giant used to dedicate to recording
and publicizing its own accomplishments. As Theodore N. Vail,
the visionary AT&T president who engineered the transformation of the Bell telephone system into a national enterprise,

wrote back in 1911: "If we don't tell the truth about ourselves,
someone else will."
And so the company published, and the archives dutifully
preserved, technical journals (Bell System Technical Journal,
Bell Journal of Economics), in-house magazines (Western Electric
Engineer, The 195 Bulletin), and even an annual compendium called
The World's Telephones, enumerating the number of telephones
in the world (195.3 million in 1966) and a country-by-country
tally of telephone traffic (80 060 434 local calls placed in Papua
New Guinea, in 1988).
AT&T also offered to the public a museum of telephone technology at its original New York City headquarters, and a team
of historians and archivists preserved those pieces of history
that signified the company's-and the world's-seminal events
in telecommunications: the invention of the transistor, the first
public demonstration of television, the launching of the first
commercial satellite, among other milestones. Over the years,
scholars combed the archives to produce an impressive body
of work on corporate management, innovation, business policy,
and other topics. Last September, after a several-year hiatus, the
archives once again began hosting scholarly visits.
Any collection of old things can evoke a certain nostalgia. And
any single artifact, stripped of the context in which it was once
used and from the people who gave it life, is like a story waiting,
patiently, to be told. Here are some objects that caught our eyes
and stood up to scrutiny. Their stories are of one of the signature
triumphs of the 20th century: the birth and growth of modern telecommunications, from Alexander Graham Bell to the Internet. n

MIGHTY MICE: To demonstrate his ideas on switching relays for the Bell telephone
system, Claude E. Shannon [above] crafted these wooden mice and used a crude
protocomputer based on electrical relays to navigate them through a maze. Even
with its simplistic "brain" of 40 relays, the mouse could figure out the shortest
path to an electrical terminal that Shannon called a "piece of cheese."

LIKE CLOCKWORK: Decades before he became the most influential president of
AT&T and a champion of universal phone service, Theodore N. Vail invented this
electrical signaling apparatus, designed to enable one station to call up another
without signaling intervening stations. The U.S. Patent Office awarded Vail's
device Patent No. 212873 on 4 March 1879.

32 IEEE Spectrum | March 2007 | NA

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on a quiet wooded road in Warren, N.J., its fluorescent-lit hallways and nondescript offices could easily be mistaken for some
back-office operation. Then you enter the cavernous, 12-meter-high warehouse.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum March, 2007