At&t and Monopoly

McConell and Brue (2004) define monopoly as “market structure in which one firm is the sole seller of a product or service” (Chapter 23: Pure Competition). When reading this quote the first company that comes to mind is the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, now AT&T. AT&T began in 1875 and is as old as the telephone itself. The mastermind behind AT&T is none other than Alexander Graham Bell. Bell along with two friends, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, had the brilliant idea that people on one side of the world can talk to people on the other side of the world by way of electrical lines, they called this the “talking telegraph” (A Brief History, 2008). Bell, Hubbard, and Sanders started acquiring patents and had the monopoly on their invention until 1894 when their final patent expired. For the next ten years, the telephone was the new hot item on the market. “Between 1894 and 1904, over six thousand independent telephone companies went into business in the United States, and the number of telephones boomed from 285,000 to 3,317,000” (A Brief History, 2008). Because of their invention the coasts were united and although