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,
Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy hooked up into the circuit. These experiments, with a vibrating wire touching a liquid, anticipated the liquid transmitter of Bell's telephone in March, 1876 three years later. (Compare Fig. 3 and Fig. 7, for example.) Initially, Bell was trying to develop a telegraph capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously over the same wire. Most of these early experiments involved "liquid transmitters" based on the Helmholtz model. On November 9, 1874, Bell's friend and neighbor, P.D. Richards, wrote the inventor a letter at Bell's request describing the experiments and transmission of telegraphic messages over wires using a liquid transmitter filled with