Northwestern Bell
 |
|
| Industry | Telecommunications |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged |
| Successor | U S WEST Communications |
| Founded | 1896 |
| Defunct | 1991 |
| Headquarters | Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Products | Local Telephone Service |
| Parent |
American Bell (1896-1899) AT&T (1899-1983) US WEST (1984-1990) |
Northwestern Bell Telephone Company served the states of the upper Midwest opposite the Southwestern Bell area, including Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska.
It has never been definitively established where Northwestern Bell's earliest roots lie. The earliest record of telephones in the Northwestern Bell service area was a two-telephone intercom circuit used by a Little Falls, Minnesota druggist and his clerk in 1876. A Bell-licensed exchange is believed to have opened in Deadwood, South Dakota between March and August 1878, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and several months before President Rutherford B. Hayes could use his phone in a little wooden booth outside of his office in the White House.
The earliest documented telephone exchange in Northwestern Bell territory was opened by the Western Union Company in Keokuk, Iowa, on September 1, 1878. Using superior equipment designed by Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray, Western Union was in a competitive shoot-out with local licensee of the National Bell Telephone Company in Boston. On November 10, 1879, Western Union settled a Bell patent infringement suit by getting completely out of the phone business and selling all of its exchanges, including the Keokuk exchange, to the Bell Company.
In the fall of 1878, the Northwestern Telephone Company opened an "experimental" exchange in Minneapolis-located in City Hall, it served the city government as well as the Nicollet Hotel and Pillsbury Mills*. This exchange was the forerunner of the Bell-licensed Northwestern Telephone Exchange Company which was incorporated on December 10, 1878.
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Wikipedia