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Interesting to read the history of the telephone as it was seen 40 years ago - before the internet, before cell phones, before the ATT breakup. All those things were unthinkable (after all, the transistor was only about 20 years old), and ATT represented the most solid business enterprise in the world. Reading Brooks's history today reminds us that small changes, mounting up, can revolutionize the world - and that more has changed than we can explain easily to our children and grandchildren. A w...
I did not expect very much interesting information from this book but it did surprise me a bit. There were parts about the role ATT played in WW1 and WW2 which I did not know about. The business parts were a total bore. The selection of books I have at my disposal is running low is the only reason for reading this.
Very enjoyable read, a fascinating depiction of; an industry, the company that epitomised it & the technology that under wrote it.Additionally, a great account of the sentiment within America toward service & monopoly.
As others have mentioned, this book focuses mostly on the Bell System and the US market, especially government interaction and business matters. Being a technical reader that gravitates more to the engineering side of things, I found the business history fascinating. At the time the book was written, Ma Bell was coming under increasing scrutiny for breakup, and the future of this natural monopoly was still unknown. In fact, the author does a decent job in the final chapter, describing the situat...
Although there are some interesting nuggets within, it is basically a biography of a company, AT & T. In other words, if you want to know about each and every president of a telephone company for a century- this is the book to go for.
This book is really more a corporate history of AT&T than a history of the telephone. After the first chapter about the genesis of the invention (the most compelling chapter, in my opinion), the book stays solidly in AT&T territory - the various CEOs, the long lines across the country and the Atlantic, technical improvements, etc. The author isn't a total corporate cheerleader, but he comes close.
This book documents the rise of modern telephony (from Bell to AT&T in the 70s when the book was written). The author apparently did research and also had access to some of AT&T's internal info for the book. An interesting mix of technology and business. I guess it's a good story, but maybe the business aspect is what dragged it down for me.
