Northern Electric Co.

Northern Electric was founded in 1882 as the manufacturing division of the Bell Telephone of Canada and began life in a rented space surrounded by lunchrooms on Craig Street, Montreal. The company grew rapidly, being formally incorporated as a separate but closely affiliated company in 1895. By 1913, a new factory was constructed on Shearer Street to handle the manufacturing of the company’s products which included through the 1910s to 1930s, electrical wire and telephone cables, telephone equipment, gramophones, radios, and even electrical equipment for theatres. By the onset of World War II, when production was substantially directed to the war effort, the company’s production facilities employed thousands of people.

The No. 19 radio transceiver—a transmitter and receiver combined—was manufactured by Northern Electric at the Shearer Street factory. Northern Electric took photos of its Wire and Cable, Telephone and Electronics manufacturing divisions at work during World War II. These photographs extensively depict the transceiver’s production—this was a major product of the company during the war—numbers listing components produced for the No. 19 Wireless Set, which was made starting in early summer 1942, number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting enormous wartime production.

Company listings seem to show the company made 299,115 Receiver Units for the No. 19 Radio between May 1942 and sometime in 1945. This suggests the company was turning out approximately 205 of these units a day, a staggering amount if accurate. Some of these were shipped as spare parts or potentially used as multiples (or, potentially in other equipment or being transferred to other companies manufacturing the same equipment), so actual production at Northern Electric of the No. 19 is unclear, but likely numbers at around 10,000 units.

As a heavy piece of equipment, the No. 19 wireless transceiver was largely installed in tanks and armoured vehicles, and buildings. It was based on a British design by Pye Radio, but further developed and improved in Canada during production—Northern Electric was the progenitor of the Canadian design, with its engineers travelling to the UK in 1941. Two other companies in Canada also produced the No. 19 set, Canadian Marconi and RCA Victor.

The images of the production rooms show a workforce packed closely together in close quarters, with women making up the vast majority of factory assemblers, but also appearing in other roles, such as testers and supervisors. Sets or parts of sets were subject to numerous tests, including drop testing, humidity and vibration to ensure these radios were robust enough to survive the challenges of their rough field use in vehicles. The radios were boxed and packaged carefully, with the final stage involving the package being dipped entirely in wax, to ensure they remained dry during shipping.

After the war, Northern Electric entered enthusiastically into research. Northern Electric founded a new plant at Belleville Ontario in 1947. Becoming wholly Canadian-owned following a US antitrust ruling, the company began to devote more time to research and development with facilities first at Belleville and then, in 1959, at Crystal Bay in Ottawa (on Carling Ave., Ottawa). At the Belleville research facility, one of the engineers who had travelled to the UK to retrieve the plans for the No. 19 transceiver, Sydney Sillitoe, was involved in the design of an early wave-soldering machine, used for production of printed circuit boards, alongside other developments.

In 1972, the company changed its name to Northern Telecom, then adopted "Nortel Networks" in 1995, before collapsing in the first decade of the 21^st century.