Spirit of Communication
| Spirit of Communication | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Artist | Evelyn Beatrice Longman |
| Year | 1914 |
| Type | Bronze |
| Location | Dallas, Texas |
Spirit of Communication is the formal name for a statue originally called Genius of Telegraphy when it was completed, and has been the symbol of AT&T (and also the former Western Electric) since 1914. It is also known informally as the Golden Boy statue.
In 2009, the statue was relocated to AT&T's current corporate headquarters in downtown Dallas, Texas, USA.
The statue's design by Evelyn Beatrice Longman was selected as the winner of a competition, similar to the 1917 Bell Telephone Memorial. It became New York City's second-largest sculpture, after the Statue of Liberty. The statue's original name as commissioned under the aegis of AT&T's president Theodore N. Vail was Genius of Telegraphy.
Commissioned in 1914, it was crafted by Evelyn Beatrice Longman. The work was completed in 1916 and hoisted to the roof of AT&T Corporate Headquarters at 195 Broadway in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City. By that time, AT&T had spun off its telegraphy component, Western Union, and the work was renamed to Genius of Electricity.
It weighs over 14.5 tonnes (16 short tons) and is 7.3 metres (24 ft) in height with wings that extend 2.7 metres (9 ft) from its body. It is cast in bronze and covered with over 40,000 pieces of gold leaf.
The Genius of Electricity appeared on the cover of Bell System telephone directories for about a decade beginning in the early 1930s and became a very well known symbol for the system and its affiliated companies.
Sometime in the mid-1930s, AT&T changed the name of the statue (and the image) to The Spirit of Communication. It continued to stand atop the 195 Broadway building until 1984. That year marked the opening of a new postmodern headquarters building, designed by Philip Johnson, located at the AT&T Building, 550 Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The roofline of the new building was a derivative of a classical pediment with a cylindrical trough cut into the crest, leaving no place suitable for the statue. Johnson proposed relocating the statue to the cavernous foyer of the new location.
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