Bell Canada owner of several Toronto professional sports franchises. BCE ranked number 262 on the 2011 edition of the Forbes Global 2000 list. Historically, Bell Canada has been one of Canada's most important and most powerful companies and, in 1975, was listed as the fifth largest in the country. The company is named after the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who also co-founded Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Bell Canada operated as the Canadian subsidiary of the Bell System from 1880 to 1975. However, unlike the other regional Bell operating companies, Bell Canada had its own research and development
Bell Telephone Company American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), at times the world's largest telephone company. The Bell Patent Association (February 27, 1875 – July 9, 1877, a name later assigned by historians), was not a corporate entity but a trusteeship and a partnership. It was established verbally in 1874 to be the holders of the patents produced by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson. Approximate one-third interests were at first held by Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer and Bell's future father-in-law; Thomas Sanders, the well-to-do leather merchant father of one of Bell's deaf students (and who was the first to