[ih] early competition and networking

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>On 4/14/2024 1:07 PM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>>   It is unclear to me what precisely the solution to internetworking was?
>
>Apparently there used to be at least some competition, with multiple 
>telegraph companies. 

George Oslin's "Story of Telecommunications", published by Mercer
University Press, is the best history I know of the telegraph business.

Western Union consolidated most of the telegraph companies before
1900, other than Postal Telegraph which struggled along until WW II.
It was much smaller than WU and often had to pay WU to deliver
telegrams to places its wires didn't go. By the 1930s it was owned by
Sosthenes Behn's well connected ITT, and finally was merged into WU in
1945 by congressional action on extremely favorable terms to Postal
employees, a wound from which Oslin (a WU lifer so not a impartial
source) says WU never recovered.

Starting in the 1930s there was also AT&T's TWX, competing with WU's
Telex. There were many missed opportunities, as when WU could have
bought the Teletype company, making AT&T's TWX a captive customer, but
Behn said no so they sold to Western Electric. Telex and TWX
interconnected sometime in the 1950s but Oslin doesn't give details.

The best reference on the history of telephone interconnection and
consolidation is Milt Mueller's thesis which he published as
"Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the
Making of the American Telephone System." It is now online (legally)
at https://surface.syr.edu/books/18/

Since it's Milt, I'd check the references, of course.

R's,
John