You expected tin cans & waxed string perhaps?
Although his first patent was filed in the U.S., A.G. Bell was originally a Scotsman who spend a great deal of his life and 'electro-acoustical' experimentation in his home in Brampton Ontario. He was back and forth between his home in Brampton and his Lab in Boston when he invented the telephone. (Patent wars aside.)
The U.S. based Bell Telephone Company started only 3 years prior to the first Bell branded Telco. in Canada and they share the same origin.
The first Canadian telephone company began in 1879 after Alexander G. Bell granted 75% of the Canadian telephone patent rights to his father Melville Bell who still lived in Canada. Melville sold his Canadian rights to the patent to the National Bell Telephone Company of Boston after being unable to find a Can. buyer. It is said he wanted to join his son Alexander in the U.S.
In an odd twist, the National Telephone Company of Boston diversified North and started "The Bell Telephone Company of Canada" in Montreal & Toronto in 1980.
It's morphed & diversified a lot since then, turning into what is now BCE or "Bell Canada Enterprises," but with over 135 years of shared history in the very genesis of the "Bell" branded telephone business, I find it odd you would find the above shocking.
Not to "pick any nits" here, but when it comes to the work and history of A.G. Bell you may have offended some of the good folks of "Brantford", Ontario, where he spent much of his research time and where there is, among other things, a large monument to his legacy NOT Brampton, Ontario.
Incidentally, the pay phone as shown in the picture shown above is gradually being phased out of existence.
