Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 2.
Carbide Willson — 1860-1915
Mrs. Marion Roberts
THOMAS LEOPOLD WILLSON was born in Princeton, Ontario, in 1860, on a farm. The farm had been given to his parents by his grandfather, Hon. John Willson, a United Empire Loyalist who sat continuously in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada from 1809-1835, was Speaker of the House from 1825-1829, and was known as the father of the Ontario Common Schools Act, having introduced the first legislation in Canada for public education. When the boy was no more than five the farm was lost. His father had stood guarantor for a friend who failed to meet his obligation. After taking the family to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he launched a short and unsuccessful venture in the then budding field of manufacturing, his father died, leaving the widow and three children unprovided save for a house to shelter them in Hamilton, Ontario, to which they had returned.
By teaching Spanish guitar and painting, and by taking a boarder, she put the two boys through high school, at the Hamilton Collegiate. The daughter married, the younger boy died, and Thomas Leopold at the age of 19 apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in Hamilton with the understanding he could use the facilities of the shop for his own work.
By the time he was 21 he had designed and made a dynamo, applied for a U.S. patent, and hung the first electric light seen in Hamilton from the upper window of the shop. It was proposed he light Hamilton's park, but it was too indefinite so he went to New York.
When he was 22, obviously in reply to a letter from W.E. Sanford of Hamilton, he wrote bitterly he would have preferred to stay at home, but no firm offer had been made to him so he had accepted a position in New York that promised advancement. He also proudly denied Mr. Sanford’s right to enquire into the extent of his indebtedness to Mr. Mackelcan in Hamilton. There were letters to a few people enclosing $5.00 on account, promising more later.
The next ten years Willson took out over a dozen patents. First, arc and incandescent light, electric locomotive, and improvements on his dynamo. He became concerned with electric furnaces, arc and incandescent, and many patents were issued to him on electric smelting of ores.
During that period, while conducting unceasing experiments, he struggled sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to form companies to promote his inventions, sell his patents in Great Britain, raise money for his U.S. work.
Willson formed his first company when he was 26 in Akron, Ohio, where he was working at the time. It was to promote an electric lighting machine. He turned it over to his partners so he could go on to other work, and they were not successful, so when he returned to New York he formed another company to take over the patents.
A year or two later he formed yet another company in New York to make and sell his dynamo for which he patented a constant stream of improvements. He also patented a cannon which was favourably considered for the U.S. navy, but finally rejected, again dashing his high hopes for sudden fortune.
After taking out patents on the reduction of aluminum, confident that the new metal would replace steel to a great extent, he formed the Willson Aluminum Company using the water power of one of the shareholders, at Spray, N.C. During experiments he accidentally discovered a process for producing calcium carbide in crystaline form. He recognized the tremendous commercial possibilities and succeeded in selling his U.S. patents to what became Union Carbide.
Willson was so immersed in his multitude of experiments, and so intense in his efforts to promote them commercially, he made few friends. He enjoyed vigorous exercise, however, and was strongly competitive by nature. He joined a bicycle racing club in Brooklyn where he raced on high wheel bicycles, and in Spray he participated in pole vaulting contests.
The few friends he had were those who showed a lively interest in his work. One of these was George Frederick Seward, nephew of Secretary Seward who bought Alaska for the U.S. G.F. Seward had been American Consul General at Shanghai for many years, and after that, American Minister at Peking. His wife was a beautiful Californian who spoke French, Italian and German, was an accomplished pianist who could play several Beethoven sonatas from memory, and had been the darling of the diplomatic set.
The Sewards issued a standing invitation to the young inventor to Sunday dinner and frequent musical evenings at their East Orange, N.J., home. Their son and daughters were so proficient on the cello, violin and piano that musicians from the New York Symphony used to join them in chamber music.
Perhaps the Sewards saw in the young man a suitable match for one of their daughters, but he was bewitched by a photograph on Mrs. Seward's piano, of a young cousin of hers. Miss Parks, then 18, the daughter of one of the founders of the State of California, was expected shortly to come east to stay with the Sewards for two or three years to study piano in New York.
Willson was as persistent and undaunted in his suit as in his scientific experiments and efforts to promote companies. ln seven years he succeeded in winning his bride, Mary Parks, in Marysville, California.
The year before his marriage he built a $90,000 house in Woodstock, Ontario, for his mother, to whom he was devoted. He very likely felt not only that he wished to repay her years of struggle, but he wished to see her established in dignity before the eyes of the Willson family whose members had perhaps looked on his father as a failure, and who had neglected the widow, too proud to ask for help.
He had sold his U.S. Patent to what became Union Carbide Company, and rushed back to Canada with his bride in 1896, when he was 36, to build a carbide plant for fear of losing the Canadian market. He and Mrs. Willson lived in a hotel in St. Catharines for a year or two while the plant at Merritton using power from the Welland Canal was established.
From the very beginning he was able to sell all he could produce at a profit. Expansion required power that could be leased cheaply or produced profitably. The enormous potential of the Saguenay captured his imagination.
Even though it was so remote from centres of population, and there was no long distance transmission of electricity in those days, the power interests of Quebec Province were alarmed lest production of cheap power threaten their returns, so a bitter struggle ensued, but by 1900 Willson succeeded in obtaining rights to both the Shipshaw and the Saguenay.
The Provincial Minister thought the scheme utterly impractical so did not exact that development take place within the time specified in the contract. ln other cases rights were repossessed by the Province the instant the time limit elapsed, in order to pass them on to another bidder so the growth of industry would be accelerated for the benefit of the provincial economy.
To make the enormous project feasible Willson needed consumers for the power he would produce. Naturally he had difficulty persuading industry to move so far into the wilderness.
In 1901 the Willsons moved to Ottawa where it would be possible to make contact with the financial interests by association with Members of Parliament and Senators influential among capitalists and industrialists, and the following year they established an imposing home on Metcalfe Street to entertain important British and American investors.
Many Ottawa debutantes were presented at Mrs. Willson’s balls. Many politicians played billiards in the conservatory at the end of the sun porch. Young Mr. Mackenzie King was assiduous attending the dinners and parties, where he met men who played an important role in his political rise.
Willson wrote the Price Bros. asking them to build a paper mill on the Saguenay and use his power, and in due course had some success in that direction. He also wrote a New England capitalist suggesting that he would build a carbide plant for him for a hundred thousand dollars and immediately after, another at three hundred thousand dollars, and would lease him power from the Shipshaw development.
Why was he offering to build carbide plants for a competitor? Because he could not meet the demand for his product.
As soon as he moved to Ottawa he built a carbide plant there, on Victoria Island, using power from the Chaudière Falls. In a year he had another under way at Shawinigan. Those two companies he did not own himself. They were bought from him by issuing stock to him and they produced under license to him so he received both dividends and royalties.
Carbide was similarly being made in England under his patents. Union Carbide, the English companies and the Canadian worked in a syndicate, agreeing to what markets each would sell, not to sell in producing countries without written consent of the producers, and to expand sales in the colonies. They hoped to secure the co-operation of Continental companies producing under Moisson's patents, and they agressively determined to beat the Europeans if they would not enter into agreement.
While Willson was hurriedly multiplying carbide companies he was also actively expanding the Canadian market. He had his St. Catharines Company form the Acetylene Construction Company to build acetylene town lighting plants in the North West, again taking payment in the form of stock. Thus profit was made on sales of carbide to the town plants, and he received dividends as well.
At this time Sir William Van Horne became a director of some of the carbide companies and a contract was obtained through him to light railway carriages. Also, Willson tested an acetylene gas buoy which ran for nine days at Lachine, and he promptly secured a contract to light the St. Lawrence.
He was taking patents out in countries all over the world.
In connection with a machine shop he operated in Ottawa he took out an iron and steel patent. The shop made equipment for his carbide plants, but also did work under contract for others.
This was surely a fair amount of activity to engage one man during one year, but it was not the work on which he had set his heart.
By March, 1903, he had completed a laboratory in the basement of his Metcalfe Street house which was his pride and joy. He wrote glowingly that he had equipped the finest laboratory on the continent for its purpose. This was his dream, to do scientific research on nitrogen. He promptly took out Nitrogen patents he claimed were as important, if not more, than his Carbide discovery.
But catastrophe struck. ln 1904 there was a disastrous explosion at Kingston in handling the compressed acetylene light buoys. Four or five people were killed. There was extensive property damage. In Sarnia there was another. More followed.
By August Willson had application filed for patents on a low pressure acetylene gas buoy he had designed which was not explosive like those using compressed gas.
His international Marine Signal Company whose plant on Wellington Street was said to be the longest building in the British Empire, obtained orders from governments all over the world, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, three hundred and fifty, and more.
He offered the Hon. Clifford Sifton the responsibility of negotiating with foreign governments in most of the forty countries in which he had patents, except England, Australia and the United States which were covered by agreements since 1895.
The Willson’s association with the Gatineau probably began in 1904 when they rented a cottage up the slope at the southwest end of Meech’s Lake, as it was called in those days. By September 1906 Mr. Willson had started to acquire lakefront property. By 1909 he had 460 acres at an average cost of $22 an acre. He had about a half mile of waterfront on Meech Lake, entirely enclosed Little Meech, had the beginning of Meech creek and the waterfalls. Some was bought from Mrs. Rosina Wright Lawless, a descendant of Philemon, some from Frederick Dixon and from Freeman T. Cross, who were about 4th or 5th owners after Wright, and from Catherine Mulvihill and her husband John Dean whose father had bought from Philemon.
The Secretary-treasurer of the Township of Hull, at Ironsides, was P. Murtagh and of the School Commissioners was M. McCloskey, Chelsea.
The house was built in 1907, and from then on the family lived at Meech's Lake from the melting of the snow in spring, to snowfall in November. The house had 2 furnaces and 7 (seven) fireplaces.
Willson, himself, was often absent on business trips, to the Saguenay, New York, Montreal, St. Catharines, Buffalo, and when he was in residence at the Lake it was necessary that he be able to be reached by phone and telegraph by his associates in West Virginia, North Carolina, New York and elsewhere, so he personally put the phone in from Old Chelsea.
He was constitutionally unable to use mechanisms without attempting to improve them. When he first acquired a camera, and he became a keen photographer, he immediately constructed an additional chamber to attach, which he patented. So with the telephone. In 1907 he took out a Canadian Patent listed in the Patent Office Index as “Telephone System in a telephone substation, the combination with a plurality of telephones connected in multiple", which to the lay mind, long familiar with the multiple party line, has implications of infernal complications experienced in the not too distant past.
However imperfect the telephone connection to Meech’s Lake, from the time the line was put in, all the great happenings or catastrophes of the cottagers were phoned from the Willson's, though it was a long walk to the house in those days with no automobiles, and not many carriages.
Life at Meech's Lake was secluded bliss. Mrs. Willson, though, felt the need for colour in spring, perched on the barren rock point, and begged to have earth for a small flower garden in front of the house, and for one apple tree. Mr. Willson, occupied by so many huge enterprises, kept deferring action. When someone said a perennial border at the base of the cliff beside the meadow would be spectacular, immediately the farmer was set to preparing the soil, and Mrs. Willson had a border of delphinium, fox glove, hollyhock, which was showy below the red cliff. But it was across the meadow from the road to the gate, a few minutes walk and well out of sight from the house. Again, it was suggested that up the hill beyond the farm there was a wonderfully sheltered hollow where an orchard would thrive. In went apple, crab apple, pear, plum, in orderly rows, so in spring it was a bower of fragrance. But this was farther from the house, and visible from absolutely nowhere, because it was in an enclosed basin, very lovely, with a cliff on one side on which a ledge half way up had huge bolders behind which young children, cautioned not to eat unripe fruit, could hide and gorge undiscovered.
Next, another red sandstone cliff with straggling fir growing in clefts was discovered over a swamp near the property gates, deep in the woods. Here was a beautiful setting for a pond to reflect the cliff. Forty thousand dollars went into a wall, and over a three mile lake on which he owned at least a half mile of shore, and in fact an entire lake at the outlet of Meech’s Lake, a fish pond was created where no one could see it in the dense bush, a miracle of beauty.
One thing that fortunately never did get done was suggested by the architect of the house, a tower behind the house on the height of land with a roadway up which a car could drive. Cars were by 1910 one of the toys in which Willson interested himself.
He was the first person in Ottawa to own a car, and the first person to own a second one, and a third. He was too nervous to drive himself, so it was necessary to have a chauffeur. At least one of the cottagers at the Lake was driven in to Ottawa to the Hospital where her baby was safely delivered, though with holes like bathtubs on the Chelsea Road it is hard to believe.
By 1909 Willson had sold the international Marine Signal Company to Americans and the buoys were being made in Buffalo on his patents which he had been taking out thick and fast over the years. He used the Wellington Street factory as a machine shop.
Now he turned again to the laboratory and patented a fertilizer so revolutionary the chemist sent up from J.P. Morgan's thirty million dollar fertilizer corporation said it would put every fertilizer company in the world out of business. The President of Morgan's corporation said that if Willson put his product on the market for the same price as theirs they would be forced into liquidation. Willson estimated his would be sold for less, as it could be cheaply made.
At that stage the double super phosphates were being produced by the pound per day in the laboratory on Metcalfe Street. It was necessary to produce tons per day experimentally to prove the commercial value of the patent. This was the beginning of a marked decline in popularity at Meech’s Lake.
ln 1911 Willson built a dam on Meech Creek using 1004 bags of cement, four or five railway carloads. In the next two years he put up a power house. This was a hundred thousand dollar experimental station. He was proud of the acid tower he built and believed it to be a perfect acid condensation plant, the first Phosphoric Acid Condensation Plant in the world.
No sooner did his experiments commence than the summer residents at the Lake were up in arms. One day their boat houses would be six feet under water, then they would be six feet from the water. He wrote Mrs. Mary A. Tilley on June 19, 1912, that he would arrange her boat house so that it would be comfortable no matter what height the water might be.
Mrs. Willson was known to be interested in the Arts. Since both the town and country houses were designed for entertaining and could afford privacy to visitors she was on occasion asked to have celebrities stay for a day or two as her guests, people who had been brought to Ottawa to lecture, or perform, by groups interested in the humanities, but with small treasuries. One who came to Meech‘s Lake about 1911 was Rupert Brooke. Duncan Campbell Scott, a close friend of the Willsons, was also a frequent visitor.
The power development at Shipshaw was dragging along. Willson had been acquiring timber limits over the years, and had finally the largest freehold rights held by anyone in Quebec, the next biggest holders being the Price Bros.
In order to use his power he tried to interest Hearst in joining him to produce paper, sulphite and newsprint. He proposed to build plants for each to produce six hundred, two hundred and eight hundred tons respectively, daily. To another potential investor he said he had reduced his plans and would need only ten million dollars to get started, and five million to begin operation of plants.
But the fertilizer appeared to be reaching the stage of practical commercial production. So instead of starting the paper plants on the Saguenay, Willson got backing for the fertilizer project instead. In order to get the first capital he sold all his companies, and mortgaged all his patents, property, rights and water power to J.B. Duke, the American tobacco king. He was not able to meet the time limit and Duke in one ruinous sweep took all Willson‘s assets, wiping him out in a terrible debacle.
It was supposed that Willson's patents all over the entire world were gone. But it turned out that Newfoundland was not covered. Within two years of his complete ruin on the Saguenay he formed a twenty million dollar corporation and succeeded in having legislation passed in Newfoundland giving him two years to develop the Hamilton in Labrador, and the Humber and Junction Brook in Newfoundland and build fertilizer, carbide, cement or by-product plants at both places.
He had money raised for this enormous development, much of it in Britain, by July, 1914. The legislation was not finally passed until 1915, and by then due to the Great War export of British funds was prohibited. While Willson was in New York pressing for an alternate source of capital he died of a heart attack.
So the vast industrialization which undoubtedly would have changed the history of Newfoundland, did not take place. It is only now, fifty years later, that Hamilton Falls are being harnessed.
Phoenix did not rise from the ashes and a remarkable career was ended.
This paper was the subject of a talk given at a meeting of the Society in 1966 by its author, Mrs. Marian Roberts who is the daughter of Mr. Willson.
Note that although it is now ‘Meach’ the Lake was originally ‘Meech' after Rev. Asa Meech for whom it was named.