the time. Their representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton. By the turn of the century, Western Electric had become the main producer of telephone equipment in the United States. It also manufactured arc lamps, lighting equipment and power apparatus, ranging from small fans to huge motors and generators. Alongside manufacturing, the distribution business continued to grow, handling an extensive line of electrical supplies such as wire, conduit, wiring devices and pole line material. By the 1910s, the company became the world’s largest distributor and the United States’ leading wholesaler of electrical supplies. These facts attracted investment by the American Bell Telephone Company, which also discovered that Gray and Barton could purchase supplies and sell them to the telephone companies more efficiently than the companies could acquire the supplies themselves. A chain of warehouses was established across the nation, and the growth of the distributing business continued to increase through World War I and into the post-war period. Formation of Graybar On December 31, 1920, the supply department of Western Electric was divided by forming operating divisions for general electrical supplies and telephone equipment. In 1923, the general supply business opened separate general offices in the newly constructed Pershing Square Building in New York City. Scores of electrical supply manufacturers were using the company's distribution network, and business relationships were formed. Some of these relationships, such as with General Electric and the Square D Company, are more than a century old and still exist today. Having become the largest merchandizer of electrical supplies in the world and close to fifty distributing houses in the United States, the division was incorporated as a separate entity on December 11, 1925 with the name Graybar Electric Company, in honor of Western's original founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton. Albert Salt, in the 1920s, was Western Electric's Vice President of purchasing and became responsible for leading Graybar and established Graybar's first New York corporate office on the world's largest office building. On January 1, 1927, Western Electric's holdings in Graybar were transferred to Electric Research Holdings, a Western Electric company. Graybar was sold to the Graybar Management Corporation on December 31, 1928, a company held by the employees of Graybar, who purchased their shares for its capitalized value of $9 million, which consisted of $3 million in cash and $6 million in cumulative preferred stock. During the 1930s, the company explored many avenues of