A CANADIAN MILLIONAIRE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1610, 7 January 1903, Page 72 (Supplement)

A CANADIAN MILLIONAIRE.

Mr Francis H. Clergue, the “King of New Ontario,” is an American who during the last five years has done more toward the development of Canada than any other ten men. From the raw material of a huge, unbroken wilderness he has built up companies that are capitalised at £23,400,000. He is the leader of the American invasion of Canada, and ranks in individual importance perhaps only second to the Premier himself.

Mr Clergue was born in Bangor, Maine, forty-three years ago. As a young man She taught school and imbibed law m the evenings. Grown older, he still followed the average American way and went into business. And sinoe, in the meantime, he had absorbed a good deal of commercial law and political economy, be drifted into banking. At thirtyfive he could count himself moderately wealthy. So far the old story.

He was at that time associated with a number of men of considerable pi cans, and they were casting about for methods to make more. But, with Mr Olergue’s advice, they did not consider the comparative advantages of New [York and Chicago and Philadelphia, or of cotton or shoes or railways- They went back to first principles, to the prime root and source of wealth. In the year 1895 Mr Clergue started on a prospecting tour from Cape Breton to Port Arthur —two thousand miles or more —in search of “power”—water power—some big, well-placed falls or rapids, which if once penstocked and turbined would draw manufacturers

from everywhere into its plunging whirl. At Holyoke, in an industrial population of 10,000 had grown tap about such “power.” At Sault Ste. Marie he found it—horsepower enough to grind the grist of half a continent. And as he expressed himself with Homeric simplicity, “there was Bake Superior for a mill-pond.” But already there was a 5000 horse-power canal on the Canadian side, a municipal enterprise, and a woeful failure. Clergue took it over, deepened and widened it so that it ran 15,000 more, used the stone blasted from it to build his powerhouse, leased a few turbines to the town to furnish it with light and power and water, and awaited the manufacturers. They did not come. Then he sat s'till for a time atnd indulged in some theorising. B?ut it was basic theorising, such as all political economy had proved sound. He had a cheap power, and the Great Lakes offered amazingly cheap transportation. If, then, there was available some raw material equally cheap, “until the world should be surfeited with the product of that power there would be no limit to the amount of capital which could be invested in that raw material and that power.” He aimed to be his own manufacturer. Above him stretched New Ontario 15,000 square miles of wilderness, practically unexplored. He went into the hush, and in a region where of ten prospecting parties eight men died, he spent months and tramped thousands of miles. But he found his raw material. While in Europe and the United States “pulp” wood was constantly becoming scarcer, here were forests of spruce that he could not hope to exhaust in a thousand years, and which renewed themselves in thirty. There were no logging rivers, but a few score miles of railway would serve his purpose no less handily for “shutes” and “skidways.” So beside his powerhouse he built a pulp mill, big as an armoury—and of much more beautiful architecture than most of them—and proceeded to make pulp.

In these United States there was a hard and fast combination of papermillers who decided that it would be a wise thing to abstain from buying Canadian pulp until they could get, it at their own price. In Canada there was practically no market. And since this “mechanical” pulp, as it was then shipped from the mill, was half water, the doubled weight made freighting it to Europe not to be thought of. it looked very much like an “impasse.” Mr Olergue decided that' there was nothing for it but to make his pulp dry. This was an inspiration which aroused great hilarity among the paper machine men. If it had been mechanically possible the invention would have been patented a hundred years before. And when he submitted his ideas to them they only softened their hilarity to condescension, and showed him how impracticable they were. Then he decided that he would have to make that dry-pulp machine himself. He knew something about mechanics, and there were men obtainable who knew a great deal more. But their undertaking proved to be a tremendous one. It called first for a foundry, and then for a machine shop, and between them they cost £25.000 After that, too, there were months of daily disappointments. But that machine was built and. perfected. And not only did it replace the wet-pulp rollers in the first mill, but a second, no less huge, was imme-

diately added to it; and together their daily output is now the greatest in the world. * No big paper contract, even in Japan, is made without finding how prices still pun at the “Soo.” But, you will say, that could not have been done without capital. True enough. Mr Clergue had behind him a company of wealthy, level-headed Philadelphians, who no doubt have counted for much more than- the outside world can know or give them credit for. But it was Mr Olergue’s own personality which inspired the confidence. As one of his friends put it, money comes to opportunity like flies to honey. He has capital to draw upon, but every man has, and each in exact ratio to his own individual capacity. Mr Clergue was already drawing the attention of his capital to the money possibilities in “chemical” pulp—the raw material as refined by treatment with sulphite of lime. In it much greater profits lay. But to make it they must have sulphur, which meant seeking prices of another combine, and that in Sicily. “Now.” quoth Mr Clergue of New Ontario, “we are very distant from the coast, and to bring sulphur from Sicily all the way to Sault Ste. Marie

seemed unreasonable; . . . in fact, it seemed unnecessary.” So he began to look about nearer home for the yellow element. At the Sudbury nickel mines he found that “sulphurous acid gas was being raced off into the air to the value of about £4OO a day, and blighting everything for acres around it. The sulphur was there, out it was in combination with the pyrrhotite ore, and the nickel men informed him that there was no way of separating them that would save it. He acknowledged that that was true—by any methods then in use.

Then he went to work, built a model laboratory, “assembled about him practical and scientific men from all parts of the world,” and their work was entirely successful. A nickel mine was purchased at Sudbury, a sulphite mill like a baronial donjon -was put up at the “Soo,” another 150 cords of spruce were used per day, and doubled profits did accrue. But in the meantime, m the laboratory, the question was coming up whether the residue which was left when the sulphur was extracted could not be put to some use. The answer was breath-taking. When by means of an electrical treatment entirely original with Mr Clergue the nickel and iron were fused into a metal, they gave a nickel-steel alloy of the highest grade. Shown to the Krupps, they at once contracted for all that could he produced in the next five years! Then were swiftly erected a reduction works and a ferro-nickel plant. And both of them were no less huge and shapely than the great sandstone piles already flanking the pawer-house|-—Arthur 111. MdFarlane, in the “Philadelphia Post.