Inventor Name
AT & T Corporation
Repository
AT & T
Corporate Archives
5 Reinman Road
Warren, NJ 07059-4904
908-226-2396
Physical Description
(over 50,000) collection of laboratory notebooks or in the project file collection (over 70,000 volumes of paper)
Summary
The AT & T Corporate Collection includes material dating from Alexander Graham Bell's original inventions and the birth of the telephone industry to the present. This collection is particulary strong in material on the evolution of AT & T's business structure and policies, products, and services. The Western Electric Museum Collection and Hawthorne files includes records of Gray and Barton, the corporate predecessor of Western Electric, and thousands of photographs and documents illustrating the development of Western Electric products, plants, and people. The Bell Laboratories R&D collection documents the remarkable range of scientific and technological discoveries made at Bell labs since 1925 and includes laboratory notebooks, technical memoranda, photographs, and artifacts. Among the technical innovations documented are the transistor (John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley), the laser, sound motion pictures, high fidelity sound recordings, early digital computers, the UNIX operating system, polymers and material science, and all aspects of telephone switching and transmission technology. Individuals represented in the collections include AT & T executives such as Theodore Vail (whose vision of "one system, one policy, universal service" led to the evolution of AT & T's international telephone network), J. J. Carty (the chief engineer who turned to physicists Frank B. Jewett and Harold D. Arnold to solve the challenge of transcontinental telephone transmission using the new technology of the vacuum tube), and W. S. Gifford (AT & T president from 1925 to 1948); Bell Laboratories Executives including Frank B. Jewett (who became the first president of Bell Laboratories at its founding in 1925), H. H. Arnold, Edward Beech Craft, Oliver E. Buckley, Mervin Kelly, William Oliver Baker, John Mayo, and Ian Ross; and papers of diverse AT & T scientists and inventors, including Sidney Cyril Abrahams, Philip W. Anderson, Solomon Jan Buchsbaum, Joseph Ashby Burton, Joseph John Carty, Dawon Kahng, Rudolf Kompfner (well known for his 1943 invention of the travelling wave tube), James Brown Fisk, Calvin Souther Fuller, Lester Halbert Germer, Alan Holden, Warren Perry Mason, George Edward Moore, John Robinson Pierce (a pioneer in satellite communications), Joseph Peter Remeika, George Clark Southworth, Theodore Newton Vail, and Bell's collaborator Thomas A. Watson. The AT & T Archives, is the repository for the historical records of all present and former operations of the company. It includes major holdings on the AT & T Corporation, The Western Electric Company (AT & T's manufacturing subsidiary until 1984), and Bell Laboratories (AT & T's research and development division until 1996). AT & T funded its archives in 1921. It has been located in Warren, NJ since 1987.