LUCENT FEATURE: 1876: Elisha Gray lost his race to invent the telephone; Alexander Graham Bell put in a patent application just hours before Gray filed one.

Gray, however, had already left his mark on telephony when, in 1869, he and Enos N Barton formed Gray and Barton, a small manufacturing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Three years later, the then Chicago-based firm was renamed the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.

1880: By this time it was the largest electrical manufacturing company in the US, noted for its production of a variety of electrical equipment, including the world's first commercial typewriters, telegraph equipment and Thomas A. Edison's electric pen.

1881: The growth of the telephone network was outstripping the capacity of smaller suppliers, and American Bell bought a controlling interest in Western Electric and made it the exclusive developer and manufacturer of equipment for the Bell telephone companies.

1907: Theodore N Vail combined the AT&T (formerly American Bell) and Western Electric engineering departments into a single organisation that, in 1925, would become Bell Telephone Laboratories. In the course of its ongoing research, Bell Telephone Laboratories made several discoveries which would touch the lives of millions in years to come.

For example, it developed the first commercially viable system for adding sound to motion pictures.

Combined with studio and theatre equipment manufactured by Western Electric, this system moved Hollywood quickly from silence to sound.

1927: The first long-distance television transmission from Washington, DC to New York City.

1937: Dr Clinton J. Davisson became the first of 11 Nobel Prize winners from Bell Laboratories for his experimental confirmation of the wave nature of electrons.

After playing a critical role in providing communications and command equipment for the U.S. military during World War II, Western Electric was able to direct its efforts toward filling the pent-up demand for telephones.

1946: The company produced a record four million telephones.

Bell directed its research in new areas as well. Three of its scientists received the Nobel Prize for their invention of the transistor in 1947.

Bell moved on from there to develop distinguished firsts in communications that include the laser, Telstar satellites, electronic switching, UNIX operating system and packet data switching.

1956: AT&T signed a consent decree to settle a 1949 anti-trust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The decree limited Western Electric to manufacturing equipment for the Bell System and contract work for the government, so Western quickly sold its small non-telephone subsidiary Westrex to Litton Industries and its holdings in Northern Electric (now known as Nortel Networks) to the general public.

1979/1980: The federal authorities restricted Western Electric from selling enhanced services, except through a fully separated AT&T subsidiary.

1983: That subsidiary, American Bell (later called AT&T Information Systems), began operations.

1996: The soon-to-be-spun-off systems and technology unit of AT&T renamed itself Lucent Technologies and launched its separation with an initial public offering of stock issued that April.

1996 to 2001: The company completed 38 acquisitions more than $46 billion, including a $24 billion purchase of Ascend Communications, which made Lucent the leading provider of data networking equipment for service providers.

2001: Lucent repositioned itself to focus on the world's largest communications service providers and streamlined its portfolio to deliver products and services for the next generation of wireline and wireless networks.