New England Telephone and Telegraph Co. - Specimen Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company. The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was one of the earliest enterprises established to advance the newly invented telephone. This company existed as an independent entity for a brief period, from 1878 to 1879, and had no direct connection to the later organization of the same name, which, following the dissolution of the Bell System in 1984, became part of NYNEX Corporation, now integrated into Verizon. Established on February 12, 1878, by investors from Massachusetts and Rhode Island at the request of an agent representing Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who was the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the company had a short-lived existence.

On February 17, 1879, New England Telephone and Telegraph merged with the Bell Telephone Company, which had been founded to manage "potentially valuable patents," resulting in the formation of the National Bell Telephone Company, with Theodore Vail assuming control of its operations. Subsequently, on March 20, 1880, the National Bell Telephone Company merged with other entities to create the American Bell Telephone Company. This company was later acquired by its own subsidiary, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), on December 30, 1899. Consequently, the ownership of New England Telephone and Telegraph transitioned into that of AT&T, which would later merge with SBC Communications and BellSouth to become The New AT&T.