an application to increase the corporate capitalization of American Bell. With the experience of incorporating Inter-State Telephone in New York, the company formed a new subsidiary in New York City, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, on March 3, 1885, with Theodore Vail as its first president. The new company had the mandate to construct and operate long-distance telephone lines, and would negotiate and facilitate inter-connections to local telephones companies under the umbrella of the Bell System. This original purpose of the business would later be delegated to a division called Long Lines. By 1892, the company's long-distance network reached Chicago,<ref>Bruce, Robert V. Bell: Alexander Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1990)</ref> but the New York–Chicago line did not become commercially successful until after 1900, and the invention of the loading coil. Universal service In 1907, Theodore Vail became president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for the second time, having left the company previously in 1887. Immediately, he steered the company into a new direction. He refined a vision of service, shaped new goals for supporting technological progress, and reorganized the company to facilitate his ideas. He envisioned universal telephone service as a public utility, and the future of the American telephone industry as a unified system of companies under the lead of American Telephone and Telegraph. This required technical standards that were understood and accepted by all cooperating participants in the industry. The Western Electric Company, the AT&T's sole and dedicated manufacturing unit, which was previously not permitted by company policy to sell outside the Bell System, was now directed to advertise and sell its products to the general market, so that independent operators could buy compatible apparatus. Vail organized a distinct research division within Western Electric, the later Bell Laboratories, to focus on basic research and development to solve the problems encountered in improving the technology of telephony. These efforts and this vision were communicated to the public by marketing campaigns under the slogan . Kingsbury Commitment In 1913, AT&T settled pending anti-trust challenges in the Kingsbury Commitment. On December 19, 1913, in a letter by Nathan C. Kingsbury to the U.S. Attorney General, AT&T conceded to restrictions in the acquisition of independent companies, and agreed to the divestiture of Western Union. AT&T's telephone operations thereby essentially became a government-sanctioned natural monopoly, because an essential feature of this commitment was