Thomas Ahearn

Thomas Ahearn, PC (June 24, 1855 – June 28, 1938) was a Canadian inventor and businessman. Ahearn, a native of Ottawa, was instrumental in the success of a vast streetcar system that was once in Ottawa, the Ottawa Electric Railway, and was the first chairman of Canada's Federal District Commission in 1927. He held several patents related to electrical items and headed companies which competed for decades with Ottawa Hydro as providers for electricity in Ottawa. Ahearn co-founded the Ottawa Car Company, a manufacturer of streetcars for Canadian markets.

He was born in the Lebreton Flats area of Ottawa in 1855. He started as a messenger in the Chaudière office of the Montreal Telegraph Company (located in J. R. Booth's office). Within the year he was promoted to the company's Sparks Street office. At 19, he went to New York City and worked for two years at Western Union Telegraph Company. He returned to Ottawa and became chief operator for Montreal Telegraph Company. He became a manager of the Bell Telephone Company office in Ottawa in 1880.

In 1881, he founded the firm of Ahearn & Soper, electrical contractors, with Warren Soper, former manager of Dominion Telegraph Company's local office. He formed Chaudière Electric Light and Power Company in 1887 and he later merged it with other companies which created the Ottawa Electric Company in 1894.

In 1892, he filed patents for both an "electric oven" and a "system of warming cars by means of electrically heated water". The use of this invention that year to prepare a meal which he delivered by streetcar to the Windsor Hotel caused the Ottawa Journal to say "...everything had been cooked by electricity, the first instance on record..." Thomas Ahearn filed eleven Canadian patents in all.

He was founder and president of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, which provided electric streetcar service in the city and had the first streetcars with electric heaters (a device he patented). After running as a vast and very successful private operation for over half a century, it was later taken over by the Ottawa Transportation Commission. He, with Ahearn and William Wylie in September 1893, founded the Ottawa Car Manufacturing Company which manufactured streetcars.

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