Western Electric

We almost didn't notice them happening.

And there's so many other examples of this, right? Like the feel of a, like, old-school Western Electric style telephone handset, the heft of it, the, the kind of intimacy of your voice in your own ear and against your mouth, the ability to, to smash it down on the hook to hang it up, the, the sound of the, of the ring, uh, the quality of, of the, of the sound along the, the copper line, uh, the feeling of dialing the rotary mechanism or pressing the touch tone buttons.

It's like that was just what making a phone call was, you know? And now it's like, well, I've got this phone and the...

and this has an app for a phone app on it, and it doesn't really work well, but, like, that's...

But this was highly sensitive new technology and it required a power supply.

And so this early condenser is from Western Electric and it had a power supply in the base in a wooden box.

But as time went on, the condensers... got smaller.

This is from the, is this the 40s, early 40s? Late 40s, I think.

But you can see, like, this is another Western Electric.

Now the condenser capsule is only that big, and it's removable.

So you could have different types of capsules.

What year is this that we're talking about? This is...

Initial jobs out of school.

I worked for Western Electric.

They were a phone manufacturing company as a junior engineer.

Yeah.

He nationalized the nation's railroads.

He nationalized dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Company, the Hughes Tool Company, Goodyear Tire and Rubber.

and even Montgomery Ward, along with 17 foreign companies doing business in the United States.

After FDR died, Harry Truman came along, finished the war.

... still with the BBC.

They had, uh, Adam Savage on, and his choice was the Western Electric 500 Series phone.

Oh, wow.

Which was around for 40 something years, you know? Uh-

Taking apart a-

... version of himself

... yeah, taking apart a Western Electric 500 Series phone to see how it worked.

100%.

No, we don't.

I grabbed a pickup truck and the speakers on the right, those are 1932 Western Electric 16-foot folded horns.

There were four of them.

I also garnered another couple of besides loads from another theater.

Which takes us up to summer 1915.

And there was a company in Chicago known as Western Electric.

And it was a big company.

Thousands, if not over 10,000 or something employees.

Hop on a hop on a steamship and take a, you know, hour to hour boat ride there.

Hop off and then you have the company picnic for the day.

And this was a super popular event for Western electric employees.

The first picnic started in 1911 and saw 3,500 employees.

His sound simply translated better to wax than virtually anyone else's alive.

Electrical recording, developed by Western Electric and first used commercially in 1925, transformed everything.

For the first time, a microphone could capture sound with genuine fidelity, picking up nuance, subtlety, and the full emotional register of the human voice.

The guitar, previously almost inaudible on record, could now be captured.

Yeah, really interesting, Cathy, when you talk about the power of employees and resiliency.

Graybar has a particularly distinctive business model as employees purchased the company, I believe, from Western Electric in 1929, making Graybar one of the first and largest employee-owned corporations in the U.S. Nearly a century later, employee ownership remains central to the company's future.

and its approach to financial stewardship.

Graybar also explicitly identifies a long-term view as one of its core values.

The core value about the long-term view is extremely important when you look at our longevity.

And it comes back to what you just described.

In 1925, when the company first broke off from Western Electric, it was one of the first initial public offerings of the United States.

It was actually offered up to the public market saying, we want to sell this, but there's a condition on the sale.

Some action had to be taken quickly, so licenses were given to four other manufacturers to make bells, switchboards, and so forth.

By this time, the Western Electric Company of Chicago had begun to make the infringing Gray Edison telephones for the Western Union, so that there were soon six groups of mechanics puzzling their wits over the new talk machinery.

By 1880, there was plenty of telephonic apparatus being made, but in too many different varieties.

Not all the summer gowns of that year presented more styles and fancies.

It was a step of immense importance.

Had it not been taken, the telephone business would have been torn into fragments by the civil wars between rival inventors.

From this time, the Western Electric became the headquarters of all telephonic apparatus.

It was the big shop.