The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was the first company set up to develop the then-new telephone. It lasted just a year, from 1878 to 1879, and had no direct relationship to the later New England Telephone, which after the breakup of Ma Bell in 1984 was part of NYNEX, now part of Verizon.

History

The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was formed February 12, 1878, by investors in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island at the behest of an agent of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The following year, it merged with the Bell Telephone Company. They became the National Bell Telephone Company. It was started on the basis of holding "potentially valuable patents".