ved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telephony Chapter 3 innovation, however, direct long-distance dialing did not become a real- ity until 1951. Soon the network had evolved to a point where it could handle thou- sands of simultaneous calls. As the technology evolved, SO too did the business. In 1892 Alexander Graham Bell inaugurated a 950-mile circuit between New York and Chicago, ushering in the facile ability to carry out long-distance telephony. Meanwhile the company continued to change; after acquiring Western Electric it changed its name to American Tele- phone and Telegraph (AT&T) and, in an ongoing attempt to protect its fiefdom, began buying up small competitors as they emerged. In 1909 the company purchased a controlling interest in Western Union, thus gar- nering the attention of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the federal agency responsible (as of 1909) for the oversight of American wire and radio-based communications. That responsibility would later be passed on to the newly created Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In 1913, in the first of a series of antitrust decisions, the Kingsbury Commitment forced AT&T to divest its holdings in Western Union, stop buying its competition, and provide free interconnection with other net- work providers. AT&T did not realize it then, but the Kingsbury Com- mitment was the harbinger of drastic things to come. In the years that followed, a number of significant technological events took place in telephony. Load coils were created and installed on telephone lines, extending signal strength dramatically and reducing bandwidth requirements for each customer. In 1915, the first repeaters were installed on long-distance telephone circuits, making it possible to install circuits of essentially unlimited length. In fact, later that same year a circuit was successfully installed between New York and San Francisco. In 1934, President Roosevelt created the Federal Communications Commission with the signing into law of the Communica