The long history of innovation and entrepreneurship in Waterloo: The Marsland Engineering Story

A new book charts how a 19-year-old and his engineering company helped Waterloo and Canada come of age after the Second World War. 

The Marsland Engineering Story, Innovation and Entrepreneurs by Larry Marsland and John Roe highlights the achievements of Stanley Marsland and his company, Marsland Engineering, which at one point employed over 1,000 people in Waterloo. 

Ken McLaughlin, a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, was instrumental in getting the book published. He recently spoke with CBC K-W’s Craig Norris on The Morning Edition about the book, Marsland Engineering and the man behind it all, Stanley Marsland.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Audio of the interview can be found at the bottom of this article.

Craig Norris: You didn’t write the book, but you played a very important part in how it came together. Tell us a bit about that.

Ken McLaughlin: I received a note one day from David Johnson, the former Governor General, who asked me to talk to Larry Marsland about a history project. I knew something about Marsland Engineering, but not much. So I went to talk to Larry, who’s around age 90, and he asked me if I’d help him write the history of Marsland Engineering. He took me around his boardroom office and he had stacks of information of artifacts from Marsland Engineering piled up.

And he told me the story about each of them. And I said, there’s a book right there. That’s the book. And we brought in John Roe, who was the former editor of The [Waterloo] Record, because John, I knew, had an interest in the military side of things and Marsland Engineering was one of the major suppliers of material for the Canadian Defence Department after the war. 

In fact, Stanley Morrison was in Ottawa about two days a week for much of his career. And they were not talking about weapons, they were talking about rangefinders and things for the distant early warning line, the kind of technical things that a company in Waterloo could produce. And I thought, there’s a whole story here about Canada’s coming of age after the war and the role of Marsland Engineering in that story is really remarkable. And yet we knew nothing about it.

Craig Norris: How did this all start? What led Stanley Marsland to do this at the age of 19? 

Ken McLaughlin: I think he was probably younger than that because he was in high school and he was getting bored in school at KCI (Kitchener Collegiate Institute). He raised the window on the first floor and hopped out in the middle of class and never came back. He was 16, and that’s how it started. And he was fascinated with crystal radios and electronics. We didn’t really have radio systems, we didn’t have radios of any major kind to speak of. But he was fascinated by it, studied it himself, learned all about it and got into the radio repair development business. It reminds me of a later age when everyone was getting Heathkits and they were building things. But that’s what he was doing 30 years earlier.

Craig Norris: Ninety-five years after the company started, what do you think is the legacy of its work?

Ken McLaughlin: The legacy of Marsland engineering is complex. In my mind, what it did was to put Waterloo on the map as a city and a community in which really advanced technical material can be designed, built and marketed. Because it’s not just for the navy and for the defence force, it was speaker systems, it was a whole range of very complex electronic devices that they made. And so my sense of the legacy is that it put the city of Waterloo on the map as a company in innovative and electronic areas rather than heavy duty manufacturing as it is in say Hamilton with Stelco.

Craig Norris: I think a lot of people believe that industry started later with BlackBerry, but there is a deep legacy.

Ken McLaughlin: He had 1,000 employees in Waterloo in a new factory that they had built. He sold it when he was 47 or 48-years-old to Leigh Instruments who took it over.  He decided that in his time he was going to leave a legacy, and that legacy was the Marsland Centre, which is the first high rise [in Waterloo]. And from my point of view, that changed the whole dynamic of the city of Waterloo, because it would have been a pretty modest little community and suddenly in the middle of the city was this great 13-story high rise and a classic building, not some sort of box tower. He wanted something that was unique and that would mark the city of Waterloo. And there it is, and it changed the skyline. But it also changed the whole perception of Waterloo, both for better or worse, because it also meant we had to protect heritage and other other parts of Waterloo in the face of this beginning of a modern development.

Listen | Chat with Ken McLaughlin: