Low Down Articles
Echoes from the Past
Article 42 of 111
This article first appeared in the "Echoes from the Past" column of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
o o o
Let There be Light, and it was so
Thomas Leopold ("Carbide") Willson was born at Princeton, Ont. In 1860. By the age of 21 he had invented a steam-driven dynamo and by 22 he had a dozen mixed patents to his credit. In the next ten years he had accomplished incandescent and arc-lighting, an electric locomotive and the electric smelting of ores. Then came the reduction of aluminum to replace steel, an obvious advantage, as when comparing the weights say, of a frying pan of steel and one of aluminum, of the same size.
In 1895 Willson married Mary Parks in Maryville California.
In one of his experiments he accidently produced calcium carbide which had tremendous possibilities, especially for lighting a place which couldn't be reached at the time, by electric line, such as navigation buoys. (As a boy in England, I had an acetylene lamp on my bicycle, a vast improvement over my oil-lighted one - Pat Evans).
Willson's calcium carbide "accident" was to become the Union Carbide Company.
In 1901 the Willsons moved to Ottawa. By 1906 one of his many companies, the International Marine Signal Co. was installed in a long long building on Victoria Island.
In 1907 he built a cottage at Meech Lake, on property he had purchased from the son of Ed Dean. (Ed was the hotel keeper at Old Chelsea whose building is now (1993) The Chelseas Restaurant). Near the cottage "Carbide" had constructed, on Meech Creek which flows out of the lake, a plant to produce fertilizer in impressive quantities. It is now in ruins.
Incidentally the "cottage" was where the "Meech Lake Accord" was hatched and also ended in ruins.
This genius died in 1915.