The New York Telephone Company (NYTel) was organized in 1896, taking over the New York City operations of the American Bell Telephone Company. Predecessor companies The Telephone Company of New York was formed under franchise in 1876. The principals were Charles A. Cheever and Hilborne Roosevelt. Its purpose was to rent telephone instruments to users, who were expected to provide wires to connect them, for example from factory to office. Such connections already existed for private telegraphs, and the new invention promised to save the cost of hiring a private telegraph operator. Manufacturers of steel wire for the Brooklyn Bridge then under construction were especially prominent among the customers under this scheme, using their own product. Western Union subsidiaries, including Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph, Gold and Stock Telegraph, and American Speaking Telephone, based their New York and San Francisco operations on the telephone exchange principle and thus were larger and more advanced than the local Bell operations. Under the November 1879 settlement of the Elisha Gray patent infringement lawsuit, Western Union handed over its telephone operations to National Bell Telephone, which then renamed itself American Bell Telephone. The merged local company was called the Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company. In 1896 the operations of Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Westchester Telephone Company (which served northern suburban areas, including parts of then-Westchester County which subsequently were incorporated into New York City as the borough of the Bronx) were consolidated under the name of the New York Telephone Company. The New York and New Jersey Telephone Company, a Bell licensee serving Long Island and Staten Island, was broken up and its New York properties merged with the New York company as the City and Suburban Telephone Company in 1897. American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) eventually acquired a controlling interest and restored the New York Telephone name. Infrastructure The company went underground in the 1920s, creating expensive new outside plant that fixed its geometry for the century to come. New cable ducts brought more reliable service to customers. They converged at approximately twenty wire centers, which were connected by larger trunk cable ducts running along the East and West Sides of Manhattan. The locations were one to two miles apart, close to concentrations of office workers while avoiding high prices for land. At each wire center a new central office arose to house telephone switchboards, panel switches and other inside plant,