It was a cold, blustery day in December of 1958 when Western Electric President Arthur B. Goetze and Oklahoma U.S. Senator Robert S. Kerr used a detonator and several sticks of buried dynamite to break ground on what would become a 1,300,000 square-foot manufacturing facility, a plant that would be among the largest in the Southwestern United States. The Oklahoma City Works structure, covering 30 acres under one roof, was completed in May of 1960.

Start-up, pilot operations had begun in 1957 in a leased 153,000 square-foot facility provided by the city. The first plant manager, Joseph T. West, directed these operations. The pilot plant shipped its first electromechanical Crossbar frame in March of 1958, and in May of that year, the first completed system shipped to the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company in Baltimore, Md. The Oklahoma City Works would ultimately employ nearly 10,000 workers and become one of the premier manufacturing facilities in the telecommunications industry, a focal point for product shipments worldwide.

In the 1960’s and early `70’s, Oklahoma City was known as the Crossbar Capital of Western Electric. Western Electric introduced its first Electronic Switching System (No. 1 ESS) in 1965 and three years later, Oklahoma City was the high volume producer of ESS frames and systems. By 1976, the Oklahoma City Works had completely converted from manufacturing electromechanical equipment to Electronic Switching Systems. In 1977, two powerful switching processors known as 1A and 2B were added along with the No. 3 ESS.

AT&T was late moving to digital switching, but when the decision was ultimately made, the 5ESS quickly became the world’s most reliable and robust digital switch. On September 7, 1982 the Oklahoma City Works shipped the first 5ESS office to the Western Electric Product Engineering Control Center (PECC) at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Ill. By post-divestiture1985, the Works had shipped more than 5 million lines of the world-class 5ESS switch.

When the 3B processor was introduced at the Oklahoma City Works in 1980, it was characterized as the powerful brains behind AT&T switching systems. In 1984, AT&T announced its entry into the computer market using the 3B family of computers produced at the Oklahoma City Works. Subscriber Loop Carrier (SLC) systems manufacture was transferred to Oklahoma City in the early `90’s and the introduction of the ANYMEDIA SLC product in 1998, the first SLC product to bring merged voice, data and video lines into homes, offered great promise for the future. However, by the late `90’s and early 2000, the telecommunications downturn had begun with declining demand for wireline based systems. The Oklahoma City Works had gone through the transition from Western Electric, to AT&T Network Systems and now Lucent Technologies, and as the downturn continued, a struggling Lucent began searching for dramatic cost cutting opportunities. In July of 2001, Lucent signed an agreement to lease its manufacturing facilities at Oklahoma City to Celestica, Inc., a Toronto based electronics manufacturer. At that time, Works employment had dropped to 2,700 employees.

A year later, Lucent sold the Works to Celestica and employment dropped to 945. As a final blow, Celestica announced in February of 2003 of its plans to close the Oklahoma City plant and move operations to other Celestica locations. Thus came to an end an historic 40 year run for one of the premier manufacturing facilities in the world. During this impressive run, the Works had garnered numerous awards, including the prestigious Malcom Baldridge National Quality Award for the 3B Computer Product Line as well as numerous other quality and safety awards. The people of the Oklahoma City Works delivered quality, high tech products that played a major role in building the telecommunications infrastructure across this vast land, and, indeed, around the world. The Oklahoma City Works – a major contributor to our shared Western Electric history.