Nearly 700,000 stockholders were pleased last week by a letter they received from Walter Sherman Gifford. As president of their American Telephone & Telegraph Co. he was able to tell them that in 1936 their company had earned full dividends on its common stock for the first time in five years. Since 1930 this $5,000,000,000 enterprise has maintained its $9 annual dividend only by dipping freely into surplus. The number of Bell telephones in service dropped from a peak of 15,500,000 in 1930 to 12,700,000 in 1933, earnings from $12.57 per share in 1929 to a low of $6.52 in 1934.
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