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Telephone Era in Alberta >> The People
>> Bios >> John Lister Kay
The Medicine Hat-based British financier owned the Canadian
Agricultural, Coal and Colonization Company, as well as the 76
Ranching Company, which controlled 11 ranches and over 40,468.5
hectares along the CPR rail line. In March 1896, he encouraged John
Ellis, his manager at the Stair Ranch, to devise the first recorded
barbed wire telephone system in Alberta.
The Stair Ranch was located 12.8 kilometres west of Medicine Hat
on the present site of the town of Redcliff. The fence used for
transmission belonged to the CPR, and the telephone was installed in
the CPR station. The wire then ran across the railroad bridge, and
connected to the fence’s top strand, and from there into the ranch
house.
As Tony Cashman writes in Singing Wires: "When the homesteaders
arrived and began stringing them across the land they appeared to be
barriers to communication. But as John Ellis was first to
demonstrate they could be a means of communication."
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