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In 1855, the muddy rough-and-tumble lumber centre known as Bytown gave birth to the city of Ottawa, not yet even close to a bustling metropolis but certainly on its way to greater things, including its soon-to-be-announced position as the central governing hub of the young nation.
Gas lights had only just been introduced to Ottawa’s business area, while whale oil lamps were used elsewhere in town. Citizens still had their water delivered by cart or drew it themselves from wells. The first paid police force was still eight years down the road (and the first paved road a further three decades away).
Thomas Ahearn
Into this was born, also in 1855, on Duke Street in LeBreton Flats, Thomas Franklin Ahearn, the son of Irish immigrants Norah and John Ahearn, the latter a blacksmith.
Tom, as he was known his entire life, grew up in lockstep with the new city, and it’s impossible to imagine what Ottawa might look like today without his influence. Along with his business partner, Warren Young Soper, Ahearn touched the lives of everyone in Ottawa, through transportation, electricity, beautification and leisure and entertainment. The pair’s interconnected business enterprises very much shaped how and where the city grew, as its population soared from just over 10,000 when Ahearn took in his first breath, to about 150,000 when he exhaled his last.
“Even (Ahearn’s) contemporaries would speak about his importance to the development of the city,” says Laura Ott, who is writing the first extensive biography of Ahearn and Soper. “The streetcar, especially, was spoken of as bringing the city into the modern era; a step out of the sawdust city and into a modern city that the country could be proud of as a capital.”
Indeed, Ahearn & Soper’s Ottawa Electric Railway, which began operations in June 1891, was instrumental in guiding the city’s expansion, especially to the west, as “streetcar suburbs” sprang up near the tracks. The Bank Street line out to Lansdowne Park, for example, led Alexander Mutchmor to subdivide his family farm, creating the Glebe.
Old Ottawa South. The extension of the streetcar service to Ottawa South was a major issue in the annexation debate.
To encourage the use of their streetcars on weekends and evenings, Ahearn and Soper opened amusement parks outside the city: one in Rockcliffe; a second, West End Park (later renamed Victoria Park) just south of the present-day Queensway opposite Fisher Park Community Centre; and a third at Britannia. Along with other speculators, they also formed the Ottawa Land Association, which bought hundreds of acres of land along those streetcar routes, then subdivided and sold the lots to the city’s new suburbanites.
“So you had communities developing all along there and allowing for that commute to be made much more easily,” says Ott.
The mid- to late 19th-century was an exciting time in electricity. Telegraphy and the Morse code were invented in 1844, telephony was proposed in 1856, and the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866. The telephone, arc lamp, phonograph, loudspeaker and incandescent light bulb were all products of the 1870s.
Ahearn, like most electrical enthusiasts at the time, was self-taught, his career beginning at age 14 when he offered to work for free as a messenger with the Montreal Telegraph Company at its Chaudière office so he could learn to operate a telegraph key. Within a year, he was promoted to the company’s Sparks Street office.
At 19, he moved to New York and was hired by Western Union. Two years later, he returned to Ottawa as chief operator for the Montreal Telegraph Company, and when Bell Telephone was incorporated in 1880, he was, at just 25, hired to manage its Ottawa operation. This latter development was not without some irony: In 1878, Ahearn, perhaps unaware of the misdeed he was committing, infringed on Alexander Graham Bell’s patent when, after reading an article in Scientific American, made the first successful long-distance telephone call from Ottawa using handmade sets he’d built from cigar boxes to place a call to Pembroke. Ahearn later sold the boxes for $16 to settle an outstanding hotel bill.
Telegraph operators key. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.
Two years after being hired by Bell, Ahearn formed a partnership with Soper, his close childhood friend from the Flats and a like-minded electrical enthusiast. According to Ahearn, the partnership came about after Soper encouraged Ahearn to double the price of an invoice he was sending rich industrialist E.B. Eddy for installing bells in his home. When Eddy paid the bill, he included a note indicating the fee was less than he expected. “When I got that cheque,” Ahearn recalled in a Montreal Gazette story, “it set me thinking. I knew the practical end of the electrical business; but I needed someone to look after the financial end.” Before long, Ahearn and Soper were dubbed “the Edisons of Canada.”
A sign advertising Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper’s electrical contracting business.
The list of firsts and feats by A&S is impressive. They installed a telephone switchboard in the Parliament Buildings in 1882, and interior lights in lumber factories, thus increasing workdays and profitability. The pair lit up streets and buildings in anticipation of royal visits, soldiers’ homecomings and prominent anniversaries.
For Ottawa citizens, the shows were awe-inspiring. In describing the four-day illumination of Parliament Hill, Major’s Hill Park and the Alexandra Bridge in 1901 for the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary), one trade publication drew a favourable comparison to the great fire that a year earlier had razed the Centre Block. “The electrical decorations have never before been equaled in Canada, and for chasteness and originality have never been surpassed in the world.”
Hyperbole, perhaps, but consider that Ottawa, sometimes referred to in the trades as “Electrical Ottawa” for its seemingly endless supply of hydroelectricity, openly embraced such technological developments. In 1885, it became the first city in Canada to have all its streets lit by electricity, while its electric railway, for example, came before either Montreal’s or Toronto’s, with Ahearn and Soper overcoming inhospitable winters before other cities would consider it. By 1900, it was reported there were 100,000 incandescent light bulbs burning in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the world.
“Between electric railway, electric light, electric ovens, electrical heaters, electric elevators, electric fans, motors and what not,” wrote the Montreal Daily Witness in 1892, “Ottawa feels quite rid of the old reproach of being a backwoods village.”
In 2011, Canada Post issued a series of four Innovations stamps, including this one bearing an illustration of Thomas Ahearn’s 1892 electric oven.
In 2011, Canada Post issued a series of four Innovations stamps, including this one bearing an illustration of Thomas Ahearn’s 1892 electric oven.The latter plaudit came two months after Ahearn prepared the world’s first meal cooked entirely in an electrical oven: a feast that included trout, ham, beef, lamb, sweetbreads, pies, tarts and cakes, which he had cooked off-site and delivered, via streetcar, of course, to invited guests at the Windsor Hotel. Ahearn’s patented electric oven, along with other electric cooking and heating instruments, won him a gold medal at the Central Canada Exhibition that year, with the oven introduced to a wider audience at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Through their Ottawa Car Manufacturing Company, the pair manufactured not just streetcars, but, during the Boer and First World Wars, numerous military vehicles and weapons, including ambulances, water and transport wagons, and Howitzer guns.
In total, Ahearn held 15 Canadian and a dozen U.S. patents, including the electric oven, warming bottle and flat iron. A perpetual tinkerer, he developed many other inventions and improvements that he didn’t patent, including a phonograph repeater that allowed recordings to play continuously.
Ahearn and Soper possessed an abundance of both civic-mindedness and sharp business acumen. That rare combination usually kept them in good standing in Ottawa; who doesn’t love the local-boys-make-good narrative, especially when they actually get things done?
Some, however, begrudged their methods, and the utility monopolies they fought so hard to maintain. Soper was briefly and secretly the owner of the Ottawa Free Press newspaper, while Ahearn’s close relationship with prime ministers Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the former known to act on Ahearn’s suggestions, galled many.
Ahearn, with some other supporters, helped Laurier purchase what is now Laurier House. King, meanwhile, was delighted when Ahearn wired his cottage at Kingsmere and furnished it with a fridge and stove, and heaters and lighting fixtures, describing Ahearn in his diary as “like a second fairy godfather.” At a 1927 banquet honouring Ahearn, King likened his friend to Roman emperor Augustus, noting that Ahearn had turned Ottawa, a place “without distinction,” into a “city of light and beauty.”
In 1924, King had appointed Ahearn to the nine-member National Advisory Committee on the St. Lawrence Waterway Project. In 1927, Ahearn was selected by King to chair the newly founded Federal District Commission — forerunner to the NCC — while in 1928, King appointed Ahearn to the Privy Council. In Ahearn’s term with the FDC, Ahearn championed such projects as Queen Elizabeth Driveway (originally Government Driveway and later Rideau Canal Driveway) and the Champlain Bridge. He took out a personal loan to get the bridge finished.
Ahearn & Soper’s Ottawa Electric Railway continued until Aug. 13, 1948, when the city bought the company for $6.3 million and renamed it the Ottawa Transportation Commission. The city’s last streetcar made its final run on the Britannia line on May 1, 1959.
Thomas Ahearn, Mayor Thomas Birkett, city council members and other guests take the first street car to Ottawa’s Exhibition Grounds, 1891.
Today, Ahearn and Soper each have street names: Ahearn Avenue in Britannia and Soper Place in Rockcliffe Park. In 2011, Canada Post issued a four-stamp set featuring Canadian innovation, including one depicting Ahearn’s electric oven. A (non-working) drinking fountain dedicated to Ahearn is displayed at Lansdowne Park. The firm Ahearn & Soper, meanwhile, though no longer connected to either family, continues.
Residence of Thomas Ahearn, 584 Maria Street [now Laurier Ave] Ottawa, Ontario.
The two, adds Ott, remain “among the most unrecognized people for the type of impact they had on the city. Everything from turning on the lights in your house, to going to work — perhaps on the streetcar — to heading out for entertainments, and eventually other electrical devices you might have had, all those daily things were touched by their companies, which fed off of each other.
“Ahearn was always a shrewd businessman and knew how to work his contacts … yet from everything I’ve read, there was a genuine love for Ottawa and a desire to see Ottawa grow and be improved upon.”
Frank Ahearn, one of the early owners of the Senators and an MP, built a little monument to his father Thomas on the grounds of Lansdowne Park, with the co-operation and agreement of city council in the 1940s.
•••
L- Thomas Ahearn Credit: William James Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-012222
R- Warren Soper Credit: William J. Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-176973
A Soper and Ahearn timeline
1854: Warren Young Soper is born March 9 in Oldtown, Maine. When he is two, his family moves to Ottawa and LeBreton Flats.
1855: Thomas Franklin Ahearn is born June 24 in LeBreton Flats.
1878: Ahearn makes the first long-distance phone call in Ottawa.
1881: Ahearn and Soper go into business together.
1881: Soper marries Annie Newsom of Franktown. The couple have four children: Elbert N., Walter E., Harold W. and Eleanor A. Soper.
1882: Ahearn installs a Bell switchboard in the Parliament Buildings.
1884: Ahearn marries Lilias Mackay Fleck.
1886: Ahearn’s son, Thomas Franklin Ahearn, is born. Frank later becomes an MP and owner of the Ottawa Senators hockey club.
1887: Ahearn and Soper form Chaudière Electric Light and Power Company.
1888: Ahearn’s daughter, Lilias, is born. Mother Lilias dies in childbirth. Young Lilias, known as Ethel, later marries Harry Southam.
1889: Anearn & Soper become the Canadian agents for the Westinghouse Company.
1891: The electric streetcar is inaugurated in Ottawa on June 29. Ahearn and Soper found the Ottawa Electric Railway Company. A subsidiary, Ottawa Car Company, is also formed.
1892: Ahearn re-marries, to another Fleck daughter, Margaret Howitt.
1892: The first dinner cooked entirely by electricity is cooked on Aug. 29, and served at the Windsor Hotel. This year, too, Ahearn files a patent for a system used to heat streetcars.
1894: A&S’s Chaudière Electric Light and Power Company merges with two other companies to form the Ottawa Electric Company.
1898: A&S are given the contract for the fire protection and electric lighting of all parts of the Parliament Buildings.
1906: Ahearn is appointed director and elected president of Ottawa Gas Company.
1924: Warren Soper dies on May 13 in Ottawa.
1924: Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King appoints Ahearn to the nine-member National Advisory Committee on the St. Lawrence Waterway Project.
1927: King appoints Ahearn first chair of the Federal District Commission, forerunner of the National Capital Commission.
1928: King appoints Ahearn to the Privy Council.
1931: Soper’s wife, Annie (Newsom) dies, July 7 in Ottawa.
1938: Thomas Ahearn dies on June 28 in Ottawa.
1948: On Aug. 13, the city of Ottawa buys the Ottawa Electric Railway for $6.3 million and renames it the Ottawa Transportation Commission.
1959: On May 1, the last electric streetcar is taken out of service.
•••
What they said about Ahearn and Soper:
“There is something of romantic charm in the story of (Warren) Soper and his partner (Thomas Ahearn), who trod together the pathway of success. They were boys in knee breeches at school together; they were telegraph operators together; they were electrical contractors together; and were millionaires together, and enjoyed together the esteem and friendship of their townsmen who rejoiced at their merited success.”
— The Ottawa Citizen, May 14, 1924, following the death of Warren Soper.
“But it is through electrical development that the falls have contributed most to Ottawa’s fame. Through the splendid supply of cheap power afforded by the falls, combined with the business foresight and ability of two of its citizens, Ottawa has led the van, not only for the Dominion but also in many respects for the continent, in the way of the development of practical electricity.
“The reputation that Ottawa has secured electrically is very largely due to the efforts of Messrs. Ahearn and Soper. Mr. Ahearn’s wonderful grasp of everything practical with respect to electricity and Mr. Soper’s thorough knowledge of the business side of life, made a happy combination that has not only brought wealth to themselves but has made an enviable reputation for their native city.”
— Buffalo Express, 1896.
“To this (street) car system, the Capital owes much of its beauty, where at its inception were fields, are now seen fine avenues, lined by pretty homes, brought nearer to the heart of the city by reason of it. And not only have new avenues been made possible and accessible, but many of the other part of Ottawa have been greatly improved by it.”
— Anson A. Gard, The Hub and the Spokes, 1904.
“Outside of the fact that the seat of government is here, no element in Ottawa’s growth has counted for more to its citizens than the presence of Thomas Ahearn and his undertakings, of which he was the guiding spirit.”
— The Ottawa Citizen, June 29, 1938, following Thomas Ahearn’s death.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
Gas lights had only just been introduced to Ottawa’s business area, while whale oil lamps were used elsewhere in town. Citizens still had their water delivered by cart or drew it themselves from wells. The first paid police force was still eight years down the road (and the first paved road a further three decades away).
Thomas Ahearn
Into this was born, also in 1855, on Duke Street in LeBreton Flats, Thomas Franklin Ahearn, the son of Irish immigrants Norah and John Ahearn, the latter a blacksmith.
Tom, as he was known his entire life, grew up in lockstep with the new city, and it’s impossible to imagine what Ottawa might look like today without his influence. Along with his business partner, Warren Young Soper, Ahearn touched the lives of everyone in Ottawa, through transportation, electricity, beautification and leisure and entertainment. The pair’s interconnected business enterprises very much shaped how and where the city grew, as its population soared from just over 10,000 when Ahearn took in his first breath, to about 150,000 when he exhaled his last.
“Even (Ahearn’s) contemporaries would speak about his importance to the development of the city,” says Laura Ott, who is writing the first extensive biography of Ahearn and Soper. “The streetcar, especially, was spoken of as bringing the city into the modern era; a step out of the sawdust city and into a modern city that the country could be proud of as a capital.”
Indeed, Ahearn & Soper’s Ottawa Electric Railway, which began operations in June 1891, was instrumental in guiding the city’s expansion, especially to the west, as “streetcar suburbs” sprang up near the tracks. The Bank Street line out to Lansdowne Park, for example, led Alexander Mutchmor to subdivide his family farm, creating the Glebe.
Old Ottawa South. The extension of the streetcar service to Ottawa South was a major issue in the annexation debate.
To encourage the use of their streetcars on weekends and evenings, Ahearn and Soper opened amusement parks outside the city: one in Rockcliffe; a second, West End Park (later renamed Victoria Park) just south of the present-day Queensway opposite Fisher Park Community Centre; and a third at Britannia. Along with other speculators, they also formed the Ottawa Land Association, which bought hundreds of acres of land along those streetcar routes, then subdivided and sold the lots to the city’s new suburbanites.
“So you had communities developing all along there and allowing for that commute to be made much more easily,” says Ott.
The mid- to late 19th-century was an exciting time in electricity. Telegraphy and the Morse code were invented in 1844, telephony was proposed in 1856, and the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866. The telephone, arc lamp, phonograph, loudspeaker and incandescent light bulb were all products of the 1870s.
Ahearn, like most electrical enthusiasts at the time, was self-taught, his career beginning at age 14 when he offered to work for free as a messenger with the Montreal Telegraph Company at its Chaudière office so he could learn to operate a telegraph key. Within a year, he was promoted to the company’s Sparks Street office.
At 19, he moved to New York and was hired by Western Union. Two years later, he returned to Ottawa as chief operator for the Montreal Telegraph Company, and when Bell Telephone was incorporated in 1880, he was, at just 25, hired to manage its Ottawa operation. This latter development was not without some irony: In 1878, Ahearn, perhaps unaware of the misdeed he was committing, infringed on Alexander Graham Bell’s patent when, after reading an article in Scientific American, made the first successful long-distance telephone call from Ottawa using handmade sets he’d built from cigar boxes to place a call to Pembroke. Ahearn later sold the boxes for $16 to settle an outstanding hotel bill.
Telegraph operators key. Thomas Ahearn, who brought electricity and phone service to Ottawa and also created the streetcar system (or “electric railway”) all starting in the late 1800s.
Two years after being hired by Bell, Ahearn formed a partnership with Soper, his close childhood friend from the Flats and a like-minded electrical enthusiast. According to Ahearn, the partnership came about after Soper encouraged Ahearn to double the price of an invoice he was sending rich industrialist E.B. Eddy for installing bells in his home. When Eddy paid the bill, he included a note indicating the fee was less than he expected. “When I got that cheque,” Ahearn recalled in a Montreal Gazette story, “it set me thinking. I knew the practical end of the electrical business; but I needed someone to look after the financial end.” Before long, Ahearn and Soper were dubbed “the Edisons of Canada.”
A sign advertising Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper’s electrical contracting business.
The list of firsts and feats by A&S is impressive. They installed a telephone switchboard in the Parliament Buildings in 1882, and interior lights in lumber factories, thus increasing workdays and profitability. The pair lit up streets and buildings in anticipation of royal visits, soldiers’ homecomings and prominent anniversaries.
For Ottawa citizens, the shows were awe-inspiring. In describing the four-day illumination of Parliament Hill, Major’s Hill Park and the Alexandra Bridge in 1901 for the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary), one trade publication drew a favourable comparison to the great fire that a year earlier had razed the Centre Block. “The electrical decorations have never before been equaled in Canada, and for chasteness and originality have never been surpassed in the world.”
Hyperbole, perhaps, but consider that Ottawa, sometimes referred to in the trades as “Electrical Ottawa” for its seemingly endless supply of hydroelectricity, openly embraced such technological developments. In 1885, it became the first city in Canada to have all its streets lit by electricity, while its electric railway, for example, came before either Montreal’s or Toronto’s, with Ahearn and Soper overcoming inhospitable winters before other cities would consider it. By 1900, it was reported there were 100,000 incandescent light bulbs burning in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the world.
“Between electric railway, electric light, electric ovens, electrical heaters, electric elevators, electric fans, motors and what not,” wrote the Montreal Daily Witness in 1892, “Ottawa feels quite rid of the old reproach of being a backwoods village.”
In 2011, Canada Post issued a series of four Innovations stamps, including this one bearing an illustration of Thomas Ahearn’s 1892 electric oven.
In 2011, Canada Post issued a series of four Innovations stamps, including this one bearing an illustration of Thomas Ahearn’s 1892 electric oven.The latter plaudit came two months after Ahearn prepared the world’s first meal cooked entirely in an electrical oven: a feast that included trout, ham, beef, lamb, sweetbreads, pies, tarts and cakes, which he had cooked off-site and delivered, via streetcar, of course, to invited guests at the Windsor Hotel. Ahearn’s patented electric oven, along with other electric cooking and heating instruments, won him a gold medal at the Central Canada Exhibition that year, with the oven introduced to a wider audience at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Through their Ottawa Car Manufacturing Company, the pair manufactured not just streetcars, but, during the Boer and First World Wars, numerous military vehicles and weapons, including ambulances, water and transport wagons, and Howitzer guns.
In total, Ahearn held 15 Canadian and a dozen U.S. patents, including the electric oven, warming bottle and flat iron. A perpetual tinkerer, he developed many other inventions and improvements that he didn’t patent, including a phonograph repeater that allowed recordings to play continuously.
Ahearn and Soper possessed an abundance of both civic-mindedness and sharp business acumen. That rare combination usually kept them in good standing in Ottawa; who doesn’t love the local-boys-make-good narrative, especially when they actually get things done?
Some, however, begrudged their methods, and the utility monopolies they fought so hard to maintain. Soper was briefly and secretly the owner of the Ottawa Free Press newspaper, while Ahearn’s close relationship with prime ministers Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the former known to act on Ahearn’s suggestions, galled many.
Ahearn, with some other supporters, helped Laurier purchase what is now Laurier House. King, meanwhile, was delighted when Ahearn wired his cottage at Kingsmere and furnished it with a fridge and stove, and heaters and lighting fixtures, describing Ahearn in his diary as “like a second fairy godfather.” At a 1927 banquet honouring Ahearn, King likened his friend to Roman emperor Augustus, noting that Ahearn had turned Ottawa, a place “without distinction,” into a “city of light and beauty.”
In 1924, King had appointed Ahearn to the nine-member National Advisory Committee on the St. Lawrence Waterway Project. In 1927, Ahearn was selected by King to chair the newly founded Federal District Commission — forerunner to the NCC — while in 1928, King appointed Ahearn to the Privy Council. In Ahearn’s term with the FDC, Ahearn championed such projects as Queen Elizabeth Driveway (originally Government Driveway and later Rideau Canal Driveway) and the Champlain Bridge. He took out a personal loan to get the bridge finished.
Ahearn & Soper’s Ottawa Electric Railway continued until Aug. 13, 1948, when the city bought the company for $6.3 million and renamed it the Ottawa Transportation Commission. The city’s last streetcar made its final run on the Britannia line on May 1, 1959.
Thomas Ahearn, Mayor Thomas Birkett, city council members and other guests take the first street car to Ottawa’s Exhibition Grounds, 1891.
Today, Ahearn and Soper each have street names: Ahearn Avenue in Britannia and Soper Place in Rockcliffe Park. In 2011, Canada Post issued a four-stamp set featuring Canadian innovation, including one depicting Ahearn’s electric oven. A (non-working) drinking fountain dedicated to Ahearn is displayed at Lansdowne Park. The firm Ahearn & Soper, meanwhile, though no longer connected to either family, continues.
Residence of Thomas Ahearn, 584 Maria Street [now Laurier Ave] Ottawa, Ontario.
The two, adds Ott, remain “among the most unrecognized people for the type of impact they had on the city. Everything from turning on the lights in your house, to going to work — perhaps on the streetcar — to heading out for entertainments, and eventually other electrical devices you might have had, all those daily things were touched by their companies, which fed off of each other.
“Ahearn was always a shrewd businessman and knew how to work his contacts … yet from everything I’ve read, there was a genuine love for Ottawa and a desire to see Ottawa grow and be improved upon.”
Frank Ahearn, one of the early owners of the Senators and an MP, built a little monument to his father Thomas on the grounds of Lansdowne Park, with the co-operation and agreement of city council in the 1940s.
•••
L- Thomas Ahearn Credit: William James Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-012222
R- Warren Soper Credit: William J. Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-176973
A Soper and Ahearn timeline
1854: Warren Young Soper is born March 9 in Oldtown, Maine. When he is two, his family moves to Ottawa and LeBreton Flats.
1855: Thomas Franklin Ahearn is born June 24 in LeBreton Flats.
1878: Ahearn makes the first long-distance phone call in Ottawa.
1881: Ahearn and Soper go into business together.
1881: Soper marries Annie Newsom of Franktown. The couple have four children: Elbert N., Walter E., Harold W. and Eleanor A. Soper.
1882: Ahearn installs a Bell switchboard in the Parliament Buildings.
1884: Ahearn marries Lilias Mackay Fleck.
1886: Ahearn’s son, Thomas Franklin Ahearn, is born. Frank later becomes an MP and owner of the Ottawa Senators hockey club.
1887: Ahearn and Soper form Chaudière Electric Light and Power Company.
1888: Ahearn’s daughter, Lilias, is born. Mother Lilias dies in childbirth. Young Lilias, known as Ethel, later marries Harry Southam.
1889: Anearn & Soper become the Canadian agents for the Westinghouse Company.
1891: The electric streetcar is inaugurated in Ottawa on June 29. Ahearn and Soper found the Ottawa Electric Railway Company. A subsidiary, Ottawa Car Company, is also formed.
1892: Ahearn re-marries, to another Fleck daughter, Margaret Howitt.
1892: The first dinner cooked entirely by electricity is cooked on Aug. 29, and served at the Windsor Hotel. This year, too, Ahearn files a patent for a system used to heat streetcars.
1894: A&S’s Chaudière Electric Light and Power Company merges with two other companies to form the Ottawa Electric Company.
1898: A&S are given the contract for the fire protection and electric lighting of all parts of the Parliament Buildings.
1906: Ahearn is appointed director and elected president of Ottawa Gas Company.
1924: Warren Soper dies on May 13 in Ottawa.
1924: Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King appoints Ahearn to the nine-member National Advisory Committee on the St. Lawrence Waterway Project.
1927: King appoints Ahearn first chair of the Federal District Commission, forerunner of the National Capital Commission.
1928: King appoints Ahearn to the Privy Council.
1931: Soper’s wife, Annie (Newsom) dies, July 7 in Ottawa.
1938: Thomas Ahearn dies on June 28 in Ottawa.
1948: On Aug. 13, the city of Ottawa buys the Ottawa Electric Railway for $6.3 million and renames it the Ottawa Transportation Commission.
1959: On May 1, the last electric streetcar is taken out of service.
•••
What they said about Ahearn and Soper:
“There is something of romantic charm in the story of (Warren) Soper and his partner (Thomas Ahearn), who trod together the pathway of success. They were boys in knee breeches at school together; they were telegraph operators together; they were electrical contractors together; and were millionaires together, and enjoyed together the esteem and friendship of their townsmen who rejoiced at their merited success.”
— The Ottawa Citizen, May 14, 1924, following the death of Warren Soper.
“But it is through electrical development that the falls have contributed most to Ottawa’s fame. Through the splendid supply of cheap power afforded by the falls, combined with the business foresight and ability of two of its citizens, Ottawa has led the van, not only for the Dominion but also in many respects for the continent, in the way of the development of practical electricity.
“The reputation that Ottawa has secured electrically is very largely due to the efforts of Messrs. Ahearn and Soper. Mr. Ahearn’s wonderful grasp of everything practical with respect to electricity and Mr. Soper’s thorough knowledge of the business side of life, made a happy combination that has not only brought wealth to themselves but has made an enviable reputation for their native city.”
— Buffalo Express, 1896.
“To this (street) car system, the Capital owes much of its beauty, where at its inception were fields, are now seen fine avenues, lined by pretty homes, brought nearer to the heart of the city by reason of it. And not only have new avenues been made possible and accessible, but many of the other part of Ottawa have been greatly improved by it.”
— Anson A. Gard, The Hub and the Spokes, 1904.
“Outside of the fact that the seat of government is here, no element in Ottawa’s growth has counted for more to its citizens than the presence of Thomas Ahearn and his undertakings, of which he was the guiding spirit.”
— The Ottawa Citizen, June 29, 1938, following Thomas Ahearn’s death.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
