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Telephone Era in Alberta >> The People
>> Bios >> John T. Moore
Red Deer promoter John T. Moore incorporated the Western
Telephone Company 5 January 1903, and by 1904 was also supplying the
town with its first electricity through the Western General Electric
Company.
The former Toronto alderman, engineer and land developer came
west in 1881, first to Saskatchewan, and then Alberta. In 1903, Red
Deer town council granted him a 25-year franchise for combined
telephone and electrical service through the Western General
Electric Company. The telephones using a central-energy or
common-battery system, the first of its kind in Alberta. However, as
Moore continued to establish his sevice, so, too did the Bell
Telephone Company enter the community, at the behest of the federal
government in Ottawa, to string pole lines on Red Deer’s major
streets. Simply put, Bell was more efficient in providing service to
Red Deer than Moore, despite the fact that Bell was not welcome by
the town’s administration. As the Red Deer Advocate wrote on 15
December 1904: "The avarice of the Bell Telephone Company. in
overriding the decisions of municipalities by its having a Dominion
charter is leading many places to advocate government ownership of
trunk lines. Municipalities who fail to encourage the growth of
telephone competition still further strengthen a monopoly which
every year will acquire a tighter hold upon the people who will
become more and more powerless to get their right which have been
voted away by the men whom they elected to protect them."
In 1904, then, this naturally instigated something of a telephone
war in Red Deer, the first and only Alberta town to experience such
a conflict. Moore lost the contract for long-distance service to the
Bell Telephone Company, and sold Western General Electric to Red
Deer in 1926.
Little wonder, then, that Moore favoured a government-owned
telephone system that in 1908 would buy out Bell for $675,000.
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