Leaving The Door Open

As I sit here, writing this blog on my laptop, I can't help but fathom the ingenuity that has brought us from writing with quill and paper to posting a message like this on the internet for hundreds of thousands, no millions of people to see. Over the 150 or so years that it took to span that technological gap, inventors were continuously building new devices and modifying old ones, turning “the cycle” that, as Eugene Wu describes in his book The Master Switch, governs the life of all innovations. The cycle, Wu says, is founded on the principle that every so often, a new piece of equipment will come around, rendering its predecessor obsolete. This new, “disruptive” innovation will then go on to function until it too is replaced by something even better. So, on and on the cycle turns, knocking out a dated technology, and sometimes even a company, with each revolution. Over time, however, corporations, obviously wanting to stay in business, did their best to block out the competition and any new innovations that threatened their market. The result was a monopoly that prevented few, if any, innovators from producing their ideas.

Since its founding in 1885, AT&T maintained a monopoly over the phone service industry until its split in the mid 1980’s. During its golden years, however, AT&T, as part of an agreement with the government, used a rule to prevent inventors from modifying the telephone. Specifically, the rule required that “No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, whether physically, by induction, or otherwise” (Wu 102). Yet several small businesses tried their luck against AT&T with little avail. The exception, Hush-A-Phone Incorporated, was a two-man team that marketed a small, rubber cup that fit over the mouth piece of a phone. According to the company motto, Hush-A-Phone was designed to “‘[Make] your phone as private as a booth’” (Wu 101). Yet even though Henry Tuttle, president of Hush-A-Phone Inc., meant no threat to the telephone company, he had still broken federal law, and was now involved in a lawsuit against the Bell affiliate.

So why was AT&T determined to squish its competitor in such a virulent attack? As the key player in the phone service industry, AT&T focused on Hush-A-Phone Inc. because it represented a threat to the industry, an industry that according to Wu was going to be pushed into the future by AT&T and AT&T alone. In fact, AT&T was so determined to keep this industry alive that it even kept its own researchers from innovating something that might make the telephone obsolete.

After losing the first case and having the ruling appealed, Hush-A-Phone was cleared of all charges after Judge Bazelon declared that “‘[the subscriber has the] right reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental’” (Wu 113). So what does this simple court case prove? By winning such a “modest” victory as Wu describes it, the door was left open to all secondary inventors in the late twentieth century who wanted to make money off of improved devices, and eventually lead to the collapse of Bell (Wu 113).


Works Cited:

• Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, 2010. Print.