ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to portray the development of the German telephone system as it resulted from the interaction among a set of corporate actors. The telephone system is a technical system because its central function is the transmission of spoken information by electrical waves. The decision can be interpreted as an example of the growing mood for state intervention in economic affairs among German politicians that started at the end of the 1870s. The telephone system became so large that the casuistic solution of political problems characteristic of the initial phase had to be replaced by a more generalized way of solving conflicts with the political environment. The integration into the existing communication systems, the weak legal base of the integration of the telephone into the state telegraph, the form of tariff regulation and its impact on early spatial growth can be deduced from the starting conditions.
