# Western Electric The manufacturing arm of the [[wiki/AT&T|AT&T]] Bell System, founded in 1869 and incorporated as a subsidiary in 1882. Western Electric produced the physical infrastructure of American telecommunications — telephones, switching equipment, cable — and managed [[wiki/Sandia National Laboratories|Sandia National Laboratories]] from 1949 to 1993, embedding Bell System methodologies in the heart of the American nuclear weapons complex. After the 1984 divestiture, Western Electric was renamed AT&T Technologies and later absorbed into Lucent. Its SYSTIMAX structured cabling standard passed through Lucent and Avaya to [[wiki/CommScope|CommScope]], where it continues to provide physical layer infrastructure for global data centers. The full succession chain is mapped in [[articles/Bell Labs and the Distributed Architecture of American Power|Bell Labs and the Distributed Architecture of American Power]].