ephone lines. Noted British physicist Oliver Heavyside had proposed the idea a few years earlier; both Pupin and a Bell engineer, George Campbell, filed to patent the technique at nearly the same time. Load- ing coils (inductors placed in series with the line at fixed intervals) cancelled the capacitance between the two paired wires on the line, greatly reducing the voice-frequency attenuation of the line and allowing calls to go for at least tens of miles. Unlike the more famous Gray-Bell patent dispute of 1876, the patent office ruled in favor of Pupin. Bell purchased the patent from Pupin for $455,000, giving the company control of the only method then known for allowing intercity telephone calls. (Amplifiers came later, after the vacuum tube was invented.) So while local telephone service was, at that time, competitive, only the Bell Company could provide any sort of long distance service. The Great Telecom Meltdown The Kingsbury Commitment The telephone industry reached a turning point in 1912. Before then, AT&T (a name adopted in an 1899 corporate reorganization) had refused to interconnect its network to the thousands of independent telephone companies. Controlled at that point by famed robber baron J. P. Morgan, AT&T sought instead to purchase its competitors or otherwise use its strength to monopolize the indus- try. The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit, and in 1913, AT&T Vice Presi- dent Nathan Kingsbury agreed to a settlement that became known as the Kingsbury Commitment. This provided for interconnection between AT&T and all of the independent telephone companies [4]. AT&T also agreed to stop buying up independents, except under special circumstances (such as bank- ruptcy), and it sold the controlling stake in Western Union that it had acquired in 1909. Kingsbury marked the beginning of a new industry structure. AT&T was to remain the undisputed king of long distance and by far the largest of the local service providers, whereas independent telephone companies were allowed to carve out their own 