Bell Canada

The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, which came to be called Bell Canada, is the country's largest provider of telecommunications services, supplying voice, data, and image communications to customers in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the Northwest Territories. Most of Bell Canada's revenues are generated from its provision of local telephone service and long-distance service, which includes Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS), 800 service, message revenues, and data transmission. The company also owns a one hundred percent interest in the directories division of Tele-Direct Inc., which sells telephone directory advertising and publishes white pages and Yellow Pages phone books. Canada can rightfully trace its history of telephone service back to 1874 Brantford, Ontario, where Alexander Graham Bell discovered a way to transmit speech electrically. Bell transferred his Canadian patent rights to his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who established Canada's first telephone network by leasing telephones in pairs to be used on private lines and by contracting with the Dominion Telegraph Company to create exchanges in concentrated areas. Telephone service did not begin as a monopoly. The Montreal Telegraph Company used Thomas Alva Edison's version of the telephone to establish competing service in that city. The telegraph companies, seeing telephone service as auxiliary to their main function, offered it at low rates or even free of charge. Its value was not perceived to be very high; when Melville Bell offered his patent for sale in 1879, no Canadian would pay his price of C$100,000. The National Bell Telephone Company of Boston eventually took the patent off Melville Bell's hands. The company enlisted the aid of Hugh C. Baker, head of the Hamilton District Telegraph Company, to apply for a charter from the Canadian Parliament. On April 29, 1880, a special act of Parliament incorporated the Bell Telephone Company of Canada. Next, National Bell Telephone Company of Boston hired a former sea captain and insurance executive, Charles Fleetford Sise, to negotiate with the telegraph companies for their interest in the telephone business. Sise's labors resulted in his appointment as vice-president and managing director of the new company, and his successful efforts to organize the company led to his reputation as the founder of Bell Telephone Company of Canada. Bell Canada's early goal was to extend service throughout Canada. The country's vastness, however, precluded one company managing all of it. Bell Canada never held a license to provide service in British Columbia, and it sold its plant and interests in Prince Edward Island in 1885. Within four years, it had sold its interests in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Early in the next century, many citizens of the Prairie Provinces wished to transfer the ownership of telephones to the government, so the company sold its interests in Manitoba and Alberta in 1908 and in Saskatchewan in 1909. Bell Canada maintained its operations in the remaining provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and the Eastern Arctic. The company was most successful in establishing service in urban areas, since voice clarity was possible only over distances of less than 20 miles. To provide rural residents access to the city, public telephones were installed at the end of the lines. Although long-distance lines were originally considered the lines from a large city to neighboring towns, Bell Canada was already attempting a line between Toronto and Hamilton in 1881. It succeeded in October of that year, but the expense forced the company to operate with funds borrowed from Sise. A continuous but undependable route was created from Montreal to Detroit in 1885, and in 1886 the advent of copper wire vastly improved transmission over long distances. Northern Advance newspaper reported in 1886, 'Officials say they could easily guarantee a satis-factory conversation from Buffalo to Owen Sound about 290 miles if anyo