Phone eventually secured a Supreme Court ruling allowing them to attach that device to phones provided by the local telephone company. This paved the way for today's competitive telephone equipment indus- try, but Hush-A-Phone remained obscure, even after the court ruling. Then a gentleman named Tom Carter, from Gun Bar- rel, Texas, used the Hush-A-Phone case as a basis for an anti-trust case against the Bell System. His Carterfone device used a technique called acoustic coupling that en- abled a mobile radio to talk to a telephone or vice versa. Carter was looking for a way to help people working in the Texas oil fields, but AT&T and Southwestern Bell (the local telephone company in Texas) had a tariff that restricted the attachment of any device to telephone com- pany property. Carter's anti-trust suit eventually found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and then to the FCC for resolution in 1969. This was the first time that tele- phones and business telephone systems could be purchased and owned, rather than rented from the tele- phone company. Around the same time, Jack Goeken, a GE mobile radio distributor in Joliet, Illinois, wanted to construct a 300 35 The Telecom Handbook CHAPTER 14 microwave network between Chicago and St. Louis that his customers could use to dispatch cars and trucks. AT&T, Illinois Bell (local telephone company in Chicago), South- western Bell (local telephone company in St. Louis) and Western Union (company who sent telegrams) all opposed that license, SO Goeken amended his application to be- come a specialized common carrier. He'd provide services that weren't available from the traditional carriers. The filing by Goeken's company - Microwave Communica- tions Inc. or MCI - produced the FCC's 1969 decision creating the competitive long-distance industry. Who would have thought that opposition to a micro- wave license would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the breakup of the Bell System? Some years after the FCC's decisions, an AT&T attorney who par- ticipated in both