Western Electric in the context of "Breakup of the Bell System"

A telephone, commonly shortened to phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user. The term is derived from Ancient Greek: τῆλε, romanized: tēle, lit. 'far' and φωνή (phōnē, voice), together meaning distant voice.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice at a second device. This instrument was further developed by many others, and became rapidly indispensable in business, government, and in households.

Elisha Gray (August 2, 1835 – January 21, 1901) was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him. Although Gray had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years previously, Bell's telephone patent was upheld in numerous court decisions.

Gray is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer, and was granted over 70 patents for his inventions. He was one of the founders of Graybar, purchasing a controlling interest in the company shortly after its inception.

A push-button telephone is a telephone that has buttons or keys for dialing a telephone number, in contrast to a rotary dial used in earlier telephones.

Western Electric experimented as early as 1941 with methods of using mechanically activated reeds to produce two tones for each of the ten digits and by the late 1940s such technology was field-tested in a No. 5 Crossbar switching system in Pennsylvania. The technology at that time proved unreliable and it was not until after the invention of the transistor that push-button technology became practical.

Alcatel-Lucent S.A. (French pronunciation: [alkatɛl lysɛnt]) was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France. The company focused on fixed, mobile and converged networking hardware, IP technologies, software and services, and operated between 2006 and 2016 in more than 130 countries.

The American company Lucent Technologies was acquired by the France-based Alcatel in 2006, after which the latter renamed itself to Alcatel-Lucent. Lucent was a successor of AT&T's Western Electric and a holding company of Bell Labs. In 2014, the Alcatel-Lucent group split into two: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, providing enterprise communication services, and Alcatel-Lucent, selling to communications operators. The enterprise business was sold to China Huaxin Post and Telecom Technologies in the same year, and in 2016 Nokia acquired the remainder of Alcatel-Lucent. On 3 November 2016, Nokia completed the acquisition, retired the brand name and merged it into their Nokia Networks division. Bell Labs was maintained as an independent subsidiary of Nokia.

Pulse dialing is a signaling technology in telecommunications in which a direct current local loop circuit is interrupted according to a defined coding system for each signal transmitted, usually a digit. This lends the method the often used name loop disconnect dialing. In the most common variant of pulse dialing, decadic dialing, each of the ten Arabic numerals are encoded in a sequence of up to ten pulses. The most common version decodes the digits 1 through 9, as one to nine pulses, respectively, and the digit 0 as ten pulses. Historically, the most common device to produce such pulse trains is the rotary dial of the telephone, lending the technology another name, rotary dialing.

The pulse repetition rate was historically determined based on the response time needed for electromechanical switching systems to operate reliably. Most telephone systems used the nominal rate of ten pulses per second, but operator dialing within and between central offices often used pulse rates up to twenty per second.

The candlestick telephone (or pole telephone) is a style of telephone that was common from the late 1890s to the 1940s. A candlestick telephone is also often referred to as a desk stand, an upright, a stick phone or in British English a pillar or pedestal telephone. Candlestick telephones featured a mouthpiece (transmitter) mounted at the top of the stand, and a receiver (earphone) that was held by the user to the ear during a call. When the telephone was not in use, the receiver rested in the fork of the switch hook protruding to the side of the stand, thereby disconnecting the audio circuit from the telephone network.