Alexander's Folly

In 1959, the Eighty-one year old Bell System that had exclusively served America's communications needs was one of the country's most revered institutions, having served the country brilliantly with its research, its inventions and the only decent telephone service in the world at the time. A dozen Nobel Prize winners developed the transistor, radio astronomy, the laser and discovered cosmic background radiation at the edge of the universe. But the days of glory were ending, as growing central control began to strangle the company and change it from innovative and forward-looking to a reactionary, insular and hide-bound bureaucracy. By the mid-1960s, it took seven years to bring out a pink plastic Princess telephone.