International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT)

The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) was an American conglomerate with extensive interests in telecommunications, manufacturing, and defense contracting. ITT began as an international operator of telecommunications systems in 1920, acquiring and building telegraph lines and telephony, including undersea cables, and radio systems, including radiotelegraph and radiotelephone, that spanned North and South America, Europe, and Asia, in addition to manufacturing electrical communications equipment. During the 1960s through the 1970s, ITT aggressively expanded through acquisition by leveraged buyouts of a variety of companies outside the company's traditional scope, including everything from defense manufacturing to financial services to hoteliers to food production. This trend continued until the 1980s, when ITT began to divest itself of these acquisitions, and then was itself broken up into three new companies: of these, ITT Industries (a.k.a. ITT Corporation), the manufacturing and defense contractor wing of the company, carried on the name. In 2011, ITT Corporation again broke up into three separate companies: the ITT Industrial Process & Flow Control division continued on as ITT Corp. (being rebranded as ITT Inc. in 2016); the ITT Water & Waste Water division became Xylem, Inc.; and the ITT Defense Electronics and Services division became Exelis, Inc.