With an international history that goes back more than a century, Nortel Networks is a true pioneer in telecom. After Alexander Graham Bell's father sold his share in his son's telephone patent to National Bell Telephone of Boston in 1880, a former sea captain, Charles Fleetford Sise, was sent to Montreal to create Bell Telephone Company of Canada. Within two years, the company began to make its own telephones. By 1895, the manufacturing branch was spun off into Northern Electric and Manufacturing and later renamed Northern Electric when it merged with a wire and cable subsidiary of Bell in 1914.