Bell Canada Alexander Graham Bell, providing stovepipe wire with which Bell conducted his early telephone experiments from his father's home in Tutelo Heights, Ontario, and also building some 2,398 telephones to Bell's specifications for the Canadian market until James Cowherd's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1881. With a government-granted monopoly on Canadian long-distance telephone service, The Bell Telephone Company of Canada was serving 237,000 subscribers by 1914. Since its early years The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd. had been known colloquially as "The Bell" or "Bell Telephone". On March 7, 1968, Canadian federal legislation renamed The Bell Telephone Company of Canada,
New England Telephone and Telegraph Company of an agent of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. New England Telephone and Telegraph merged with the Bell Telephone Company (which was started on the basis of holding "potentially valuable patents"), on February 17, 1879, to form the National Bell Telephone Company, at which time Theodore Vail took over its operations. The National Bell Telephone Company merged with others on March 20, 1880 to form the American Bell Telephone Company. The American Bell Telephone Company was later purchased by its own subsidiary, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) on December 30, 1899. Thus share ownership