Ericsson
Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (lit. L.M. Ericsson Telephone Corporation), doing business as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company offers services, software and infrastructure in information and communications technology for telecommunications operators, traditional telecommunications and Internet Protocol (IP) networking equipment, mobile and fixed broadband, operations and business support services, cable television, IPTV, video systems, and an extensive services operation.
Ericsson had a 27% market share in the 2G/3G/4G mobile network infrastructure market in 2018.
The company was founded in 1876 by Lars Magnus Ericsson and was took over by the Wallenberg family in 1960; today, the family, through its holding company Investor AB, owns a controlling 22.53% voting power. As of 2016 it is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The company employs around 95,000 people and operates in around 180 countries. Ericsson holds over 49,000 granted patents as of September 2019, including many in wireless communications. Ericsson is the inventor of Bluetooth technology.
Lars Magnus Ericsson began his association with telephones in his youth as an instrument maker. He worked for a firm that made telegraph equipment for the Swedish government agency Telegrafverket. In 1876, at the age of 30, he started a telegraph repair shop with help from his friend Carl Johan Andersson in central Stockholm and repaired foreign-made telephones. In 1878 Ericsson began making and selling his own telephone equipment. His telephones were not technically innovative. In 1878 he made an agreement to supply telephones and switchboards to Sweden's first telecommunications operating company, Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.
Also in 1878, local telephone importer Numa Peterson hired Ericsson to adjust some telephones from the Bell Telephone Company. He bought a number of Siemens telephones and analyzed the technology; Ericsson had a scholarship at Siemens a few years earlier. He was familiar with Bell and Siemens Halske telephones through his firm's repair work for Telegrafverket and Swedish State Railways. He improved these designs to produce a higher-quality instrument to be used by new telephone companies such as Rikstelefon to provide cheaper service than the Bell Group. Ericsson had no patent or royalty problems because Bell had not patented their inventions in Scandinavia. His training as an instrument maker was reflected in the standard of finish and the ornate design of Ericsson telephones of this period. At the end of the year, he started to manufacture telephones much like those of Siemens; the first product was finished in 1879.
Ericsson became a major supplier of telephone equipment to Scandinavia. Its factory could not keep up with demand; joinery and metal-plating were contracted out. Much of its raw materials were imported; in the following decades Ericsson bought into a number of firms to ensure supplies of brass, wire, ebonite, and magnet steel. Much of the walnut wood used for cabinets was imported from the United States.
Stockholm's telephone network expanded that year and the company reformed into a telephone manufacturer. When Bell bought the biggest telephone network in Stockholm, it only allowed its own telephones to be used with it. Ericsson's equipment was sold mainly to free telephone associations in the Swedish countryside and in other Nordic countries.[citation needed]
The prices of Bell equipment and services led Henrik Tore Cedergren to form an independent telephone company called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag in 1883. As Bell would not deliver equipment to competitors, he formed a pact with Ericsson to supply the equipment for his new telephone network. In 1918 the companies were merged into Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.
In 1884, a multiple-switchboard manual telephone exchange was mostly copied from a design by C. E. Scribner at Western Electric. This was legal because the device was not patented in Sweden, although in the United States it had held patent 529421 since 1879. A single switchboard could handle up to 10,000 lines. The following year, LM Ericsson and Cedergren toured the United States, visiting several telephone exchange stations to gather "inspiration". They found U.S. switchboard designs were more advanced but Ericsson telephones were equal to others.
In 1884, a technician named Anton Avén at Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece of a standard telephone into a handset. It was used by operators in the exchanges where operators needed to have one hand free when talking to customers. Ericsson picked up this invention and incorporated it into Ericsson products, beginning with a telephone named The Dachshund.
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