Northwestern Bell in War circa 1943 Northwestern Bell Telephone Company; WWII

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• published: 03 Mar 2014
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more at http://phones.quickfound.net "The purpose of this film is to acquaint telephone employees with the scope and nature of telephone work and facilities required to meet the extraordinary service demands created by the war... The telephone industry today is a war industry..." Public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_Bell 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... 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... Telephone companies in the Northwestern Bell Group included the Tri-State Telephone Company, the Dakota Central Telephone Company, the Iowa Telephone Company, the Nebraska Telephone Company and the Northwestern Telephone Exchange. Casper E. Yost served as the president of all the companies. It was a confusing arrangement to regulators, employees and even to the parent company, AT&T;. In a letter to AT&T;, Yost explained that when he was answering a question, making a proposal or discussing a problem in his correspondence with AT&T;, he would use the letterhead of the particular company to which the question, problem or proposal related. One problem with this arrangement, especially for local telephone staffers and historians, is that the carbons of Yost's letters contain no letterheads. Things became less confusing when the Tri-State and Dakota Central companies were folded into the Northwestern Exchange Company. In 1909, a single general office staff for the Iowa, Nebraska and Exchange companies was established in Omaha. On December 10, 1920, Iowa Telephone changed its name to Northwestern Bell Telephone Company. On January, 1921, the Nebraska and Northwestern Exchange companies were merged into the new company. While the new company was incorporated in Iowa, its headquarters remained in Omaha... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_West US West, Inc. was one of seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC's, also referred to as "Baby Bells"), created in 1983... related to the antitrust breakup of AT&T...; US West was a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "USW" with headquarters at 1801 California Street in Denver, Colorado. Until 1990, US West was a holding company with three Bell Operating Companies: Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph (or Mountain Bell, based in Denver, Colorado); Northwestern Bell, based in Omaha, Nebraska; and Pacific Northwest Bell, based in Seattle, Washington... On January 1, 1991, Northwestern Bell and Pacific Northwest Bell were legally merged into Mountain Bell which was renamed US West Communications, Inc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest Founded in 1996 by Philip Anschutz, Qwest began in an unconventional way. Anschutz, who owned the Southern Pacific Railroad at the time, established the subsidiary Southern Pacific Telecommunications Company and began installing the first all-digital, fiber-optic infrastructure along his railroad lines... Qwest merged with "Baby Bell" US West on June 30, 2000 through an apparent hostile takeover. Philip Anschutz owned 17.5% of the resulting company...