Manufacturing the future

by Stephen B. Adams

Manufacturing the Future is the first full-length history of the Western Electric Company, which was founded in 1869 and served for more than 100 years as the manufacturing and supply unit of the Bell System. Western Electric was a leading manufacturer in the communications revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making not just telegraphs, telephones, and switches, but radios, sound systems for motion pictures, and radar - even an early computing machine. As captive supplier for a regulated monopoly, Western Electric's situation was far from typical, but its story offers broader lessons - such as the difference between innovation and implementation.