ringdown magneto phones to highway establishments. The US Army system was turned over on April 1, 1946, to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). In 1948, the RCAF turned it over to the federal Department of Transport (DOT), which contracted the operation to Canadian National Telegraphs (CNT). Postwar development Other independent companies were established in Yellowknife in 1947 and Fort Smith and Hay River in the late 1950s. All of the systems were purchased by CNT between 1961 and 1964. The independent Yellowknife Telephone Company began to be formed in the spring of 1947 with a buy-in of $50 per share and has its own colourful history. To obtain the franchise, it had to have 100 telephones operating by December 31 at midnight, but by early December, only 15 had been connected. They rushed by putting five or six phones in some homes. The inspector attempted to call 100 numbers and received 100 answers although only a quarter functioned properly. Service was problematic, with many unhappy customers, and up to ten people were partied on a line. By 1958, the Yellowknife company's service had improved, with 700 phones hooked up. During the 1950s, one of the major shareholders in Yellowknife, Jim Mason, learned that second-hand cables were for sale from a company in Stewart, British Columbia. The owner had died and his brother, the executor, did not know much about the company and accepted an offer of $1,000 for the cables, to be shipped by the executor. The cables arrived at a desperate time long after they were expected, which allowed an upgrade of the lines. The cables turned out to be worth $35,000. An opportunity for CNT to acquire telephone services from the Canadian government telephone services in the area of Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, British Columbia, was not acted on. On 1 July 1956, those areas through which CNT later ran a microwave line became owned by the North-west Telephone Company, which was a subsidiary of the B.C. Telephone Company. In October 1958, CNT purchased the Whitehorse-based Yukon Telephone Company and also the DOT system (established by the US Army) outright. From there, it began to develop a complete public telephone exchange service in the Yukon. Whitehorse converted from partial dial to full dial service on October 31, 1960. The local communities' ring-down phones were then replaced with local exchange service by using surplus central office