Some people invent.

Others dream.

Thomas Leopold Willson did both.

He was imbued with a relentless drive and curiosity that led him to file scores of patents in the U.S. and Canada.

If a mechanical or chemical puzzle needed cracking, this Canadian-born serial inventor took it on.

In the process, Willson (1860-1915) provided the small firm later known as Union Carbide with an invention that transformed it into a world-class company.

It was a process for producing bulk calcium carbide and acetylene gas in 1892 that became a cornerstone of the electrochemical industry.

Thanks to Willson, companies could make large quantities of acetylene gas cheaply by mixing a calcium carbide compound that he had discovered with water. When mixed with air or oxygen, bright-burning acetylene gas could be used for welding and cutting metal or lighting streets and homes.

Welding was the big industrial spark. Historian Jeffrey Rodengen lauds Willson for making the acetylene gas available for the process.

"After Willson, there was a lot less bolting because you could weld things together," he told IBD. "Machinery got lighter because welding required less metal to put machinery together. You could make things faster, cheaper and lighter."

Union Carbide rose to become an industrial giant after World War I. Its share price soared 440% in 201 weeks in the late 1920s.

The company today is the world's largest maker of ethylene glycol, commonly used as antifreeze.

It's also a top producer of polyethylene, the world's most widely used plastic. It rebounded from a disaster at its Bhopal, India, pesticide plant in 1984 and continues to do business as a unit of Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW - News), generating $7.33 billion in sales last year.

Canadian Rise

Willson was born on a small farm in Princeton, Ontario. He was the scion of an educated family, with a grandfather who served as speaker of the parliamentary United Canadian Assembly.

Thomas attended Hamilton Collegiate Institute, where he showed unusual aptitude in chemistry and the engineering sciences.

Necessity became Willson's mother of invention after his father died. The pressure of losing the family provider spurred the youngster to leave school and strike out on his own as an inventor.

He was fascinated with electricity, making his first innovation an arc-lighting system in 1881.

"He built the first (electric) lights in Ontario," said Rodengen, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based author who's written 134 books on U.S. industry and technology.

Willson had trouble commercializing the product. At 22 he moved to America and found work as an inspector of electrical systems.

Five years later he stopped in Brooklyn, N.Y., where his idea light really flashed. He was figuring out the use of the electric-arc furnace in ore smelting, leading to six patents.

Crucial to those efforts was Willson's focus on producing aluminum fast. The light metal was in huge demand by the late 19th century, but was hard to smelt from ore.

The quest led Willson in 1888 to experiment with reducing metallic oxides in electric furnaces.

In 1891, he formed Willson Aluminum Co. to make its namesake product by burning aluminum chloride in an electric furnace.

The company was backed by James Moorhead, a Confederate army veteran, businessman and former state senator. Moorhead handled the business aspects of the firm while Willson stuck to inventing.

Under the deal, Willson moved to Spray, N.C., and built a plant on land owned by Moorhead.

Willson was able to produce only small amounts of aluminum via aluminum chloride. He needed a chemical reaction with more kick.

He hit on going with a more chemically active metal like calcium to reduce the alumina ore he was using.

In one of the luckiest moves in industrial history, Willson one day poured lime (calcium oxide) and coal tar (carbon) into his arc furnace. The brittle mass that came out was calcium carbide.

When immersed in water, it produced large quantities of acetylene gas -- the welding magic potion.

Neither Willson nor Moorhead was sure how the substance could be commercialized.

But Willson, with his knack for seeing the potential of his discoveries, had a hunch. He filed a patent for the process in August 1892.

Willson and Moorhead later found that acetylene gas had a flame that was 10 to 12 times brighter than the commonly used coal gas of the day.

And soon they were selling tons of calcium carbide to chemical and lighting companies.

In August 1894, Willson sold his patents for using calcium carbide-based acetylene lighting to a new firm called the Electrogas Co.

Willson and Moorhead retained various chemical and manufacturing rights to the process. Electrogas, in turn, sold rights for its acetylene lighting system, which could brighten buildings and city streets.

In 1898, a group of investors formed Union Carbide to absorb Electrogas. The investors had been impressed by the commercial uses of acetylene for lighting and wanted to expand the business.

Willson had left Electrogas in 1894 and returned to Canada, taking various rights tied to his calcium carbide discovery with him.

Moorhead continued to make calcium carbide for Union Carbide after the company was formed. He sold his interest a year later, in 1899, paid off his debts and at his death in 1908 left an estate valued at $200,000, worth $4.8 million today.

Rodengen says use of acetylene gas for welding also burgeoned as a result of Willson's calcium carbide process. The gas had been hard to obtain. Only the biggest industrial facilities could afford to make acetylene until Willson's invention led to its bulk production.

Wide use of acetylene welding meant that metal sheets and parts didn't need bolts. This revolutionized industries like shipbuilding and machinery construction.

Willson built more carbide plants after returning to Canada.

And he used his wealth to ballyhoo the hottest in tech. Soon enough he was the first person to own and drive a car in Ottawa.

He always had a liking for grand schemes.

Unfortunately, he sometimes lacked the financial acumen needed to underwrite these efforts.

Digging Deep

In 1911 Willson hit on the idea of using phosphoric acid to mass-produce a widely used fertilizer of the day. He was sure the process would revolutionize world agriculture.

But he overextended himself, missed an interest payment on borrowed funds and lost almost all of his fortune to his creditor, U.S. tobacco tycoon J.B. Duke.

Even then he kept dreaming. In 1915 he drafted plans to build a hydroelectric project in Labrador.

With his engineer's eye, Willson saw that the waterfalls and river in this remote area of Canada's northeast could support such a plant.

He went all-out, but died of a heart attack in New York City while searching for investors.

Willson's wide vision was vindicated in 1974 when another group completed the scheme.

Called the Churchill Falls project, it boasts one of the largest underground power stations in the world.