In 1895, Bell Canada spun off its Montreal-based manufacturing division as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Co. Ltd., manufacturing telephones, telephone switches and related products. In 1909 they were also making electric motors and other products related to power generation and distribution. In 1914, the company merged with the Imperial Wire and Cable Co., with the merged business named the Northern Electric Co.; over the next decade the product line expanded to include wire and cable, vacuum tubes, radios, and home appliances. Most of these business ventures were short-lived, and by the mid-1930s the business had contracted back to their telephony-related products.

In 1976, as the company announced a focus on digital technology the name was changed to Northern Telecom Ltd. Northern Telecom's DMS line of digital telephone switches was enormously successful and forced other telecom switch makers to follow their lead. In 1998 the name was changed to Nortel Networks as the company once again began to diversity out of the old-school telephony business, which was seeing telephony increasingly being carried on data networks. Nortel had difficulty coping with the rapid evolution of the data networking market, and the company's financial information systems were not able to provide the same real-time financial data that their competitors, most notably Cisco Systems, had. In 2004, based on the results of a forensic audit the board of directors fired the three most senior Nortel executives for financial mismanagement. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police filed charges against the three for fraud. A multi-year investigation and trial followed that resulted in a strong acquittal for all involved. Meanwhile, the new senior management—who were selected more for their financial background than their ability to lead a high-tech manufacturing business—were distracted by the ongoing legal process and the company failed to show technological leadership. Sales sagged, thousands of employees were laid off, and then in 2009 the company filed for protection from creditors. In a drawn-out process the company was broken up and liquidated.

The only reason this company is listed on this site is that in 1909 they were manufacturing and selling "Hawthorn" brand induction motors. We have never actually seen a surviving example but would be most interested to hear of any. These Hawthorn motors are believed to have been produced under design license from Western Electric Co., which was a part-owner of Northern Electric.

Information Sources

• Advertisement for Hawthorn induction motors in the 1909-10-01 issue of Canada Lumberman and Woodworker.
• The Wikipedia page on Nortel provides an excellent summary of this company's history.
• Ottawa Citizen business reporter Jim Bagnall wrote a series of articles on the Nortel financial-fraud trial that provides a convincing viewpoint that the fraud never existed but was due to misinterpretation of complex financial dealings and sub-par internal information systems.