The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was the first company set up to develop the then-new telephone. It was formed February 12, 1878 by investors in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island at the behest of an agent of Gardiner Hubbard, the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

That company had no direct relationship to the later New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, which is now part of Verizon.

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