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The AT&T Archives Post-SBC Merger?
mrfantasy writes "An article in the Newark, NJ Star-Ledge discusses the possible fate of the AT&T Archives, which is a huge, irreplaceable historical repository of most of the advancements of late 19th and 20th century communications. Corporate archives are often casualties of companies when they are subsumed by a parent organization. The archives include such things as long-distance telephone directories from the mid-1890s, containing every long distance subscriber in the country, including Alexander Graham Bell himself; and a microphone from Warren Harding's 1921 inauguration, the first heard by the crowd thanks to AT&T amplification equipment."
When I worked for AT&T, one could go to Murray Hill and it would be an educational experience. No "business requirement" needed. It was like a university setting where one went to learn from the masters.
Now... the masters are gone. The company as it was is gone. Who cares?
Sounds like the perfect archive of "stuff" you might expect to see in the smithsonian? /shrug
Having been at the San Francisco SBC museum a few weeks ago, (located in the Bell building at 140 New Montgomery, open 10AM-2PM Mon-Thurs) I can candidly say it sucked elephant nuts through nanopore straws. The volunteer mentioned that most of the good stuff went to the archives when a consultant curator came through and turned it into a museum rather than the collection of interactive exhibits it was before. It used to be cool, now it's basically a couple phone books from 1919, a princess phone, and half a frame from 1936. So, yes, SBC == Slash and Burn Corporation.
... deep, deep, inside, is a copy of the infamous ( mythical ? ) issue of the Bell Technical Journal that described the operator-assited long distance dialing mechanism, and how easily it could be defeated. It gave rise to the "phone phreaks" and "blue box" devices in the 1960's, and rest is hacker history.
Interesting. But your link has (at least) a factual error of its own -- Edison's electric chair didn't use DC. His own systems used DC, and he wanted to show that Tesla's AC was horribly dangerous -- so, basically, he made the thing run on AC as a marketting ploy.
I'm very amazed by you giving so much credit on the history books you've read. Actually, history books change a lot in different countries.
Every italian history book always treated Meucci as the inventor of the phone, followed closely in time by Bell (much like Daimler and Benz for the car), but when i was an exchange student in the US, nobody ever heard of him.
Also, i remember the history books and teachers in high school stressing a lot the fact that basically everything was invented by americans: motion pictures were Edison's invention, for example (whatever happened to the Lumiere brothers?), and i had a strong argument with the history teacher, who claimed that pizza was an american dish.