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> Year after year, for decades, AT&T manufactured millions of telephones

And those phones were very well made. My parents had the same Western Electric rotary dial phones in their house for close to 30 years, and they never had an issue.

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The reliability goal for a lot of Western Electric equipment (at least in the first half of the 1900s) was an average lifespan of 40 years. They were one of few shops outside of Japan that took statistical process control seriously.

Western Electric people helped to teach Japan these skills post war.

Ours was this ugly, vomit colored wall mounted monstrosity from South Central Bell that lived in our kitchen not 10 feet from the stove. It was heavy, and persistently covered in the grease du joure, but likewise, never a single issue with it.

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