According to Eugene Philip’s memoir, Mohr was attacked later that night; while being congratulated by many, a drunken sailor accused him of performing the Devil’s work and took a swing at Mohr, who was ushered away by many, the sailor taken in the opposite direction. No trouble, Mohr said. No trouble. The sailor shouted, Sacrilège!
Mohr’s Jewishness made some skeptical of him and some outright violent, though it didn’t help that his wife and daughters sold fancy lingerie in a store at 105, rue Saint-Jean, beside their home at 103, rue Saint-Jean. The Mohr family were outsiders par excellence, bringing modernity to the fortified city where the St. Lawrence River narrows.
Many who socialized with Mohr saw him as a maunderer, aimless and fanciful, even incoherent. But after his light exhibition, even they started to see Mohr differently. Eugene Philip writes, Some old friends were hostile toward Papa but he was possessed with his work; most of his friends were in awe of him. Mohr was befriended by Cyrille Duquet, a local jeweller, who also invented the double-ended telephone handset. The two would occasionally dine together and Duquet would take Mohr out on his sailboat and they’d visit his power station by the falls from time to time.
Your electricity will soon power everything, said Duquet.
That is my hope, Mohr said. And it will be inexpensive, for everyone.
Mohr writes in his journal, All things celestial and terrestrial fascinate me. The constant motion. Nonetheless,Mysterium Tremendum — the cosmos scares the living daylights out of me, too. Absque hoc nihil est — apart from this there is nothing.
Mohr read voraciously, according to Eugene Philip. He wrote in his journals, too, almost every night at a small writing desk with a tallow candle and an inkstand, and later in life the soft candlelight was replaced by dim lamplight, and he’d look out his window from his writing desk at the lampposts in the street with great satisfaction, though he didn’t live to publish a book about his work and discoveries. For all intents and purposes, Mohr has been lost to history — that is to say, he’s not a celebrated figure in Quebec history, or the larger story of Canadian history, either, or the still larger history of electricity, too. His name is almost as anonymous, now, as the names of the labourers who helped his vision come to pass. Although Mohr did much of the work himself, he needed a large crew to clear an area, deracinate the trees, and help expand and build his new plant at the base of the waterfalls, replacing the old Patterson-Hall factory he’d been using, a factory that once produced broomsticks. He would spend more and more time at the plant site than at home. Nonetheless, he loved his family dearly; they’re mentioned on almost every page of his extant journals.
Mohr didn’t live to see the inauguration of his new power station at the base of Montmorency, in 1894. Regardless, his last years were filled with success. There were always those, however, who were suspicious and perhaps resentful of Mohr’s achievements, like Charles Baillairgé, who initiated an inquiry into Mohr’s company in 1891, believing that he was overcharging the City of Quebec for its lamps. Mohr is a menace, Baillairgé told a reporter for Le Canadien, who is exploiting our city and profiting for himself. The results of the inquiry, to Baillairgé’s chagrin, were in favour of the Q&LELCo.: Mohr was producing less costly and more efficient energy than all of his competitors in the city, it was determined, and perhaps on the entire continent. This made him an enemy of the Quebec Gas Company, who had been losing their hold on the city’s energy contracts to the Q&LELCo. for years.
Mohr followed the work of Nikola Tesla closely, and only one year after Tesla and George Westinghouse had patented his alternating current (AC) generator, the Q&LELCo. was also producing ac, switching early on from direct current (DC) to AC, siding with Tesla/Westinghouse, over Thomas Alva Edison and dc, for which Edison held all the patents, during the so-called War of the Currents. I admire Tesla greatly, Mohr writes, and believe alternating current will eventually bring electricity to every household. ac could travel farther distances, was more efficient, and ended up being invaluable in creating Quebec City’s urban electrical grid. Mohr, moreover, would improve upon Tesla’s generator and by 1892, when commencing construction of the new and expanded plant at Montmorency, his three 600-kw ac generators were purported to be the first of their kind.
These generators will soon be used everywhere, he told his son.
Eugene Philip writes, Ora et labora was my father’s motto but he neglected the ora. Mohr’s apostasy was noted by his wife, Levi, who was active with Beth Israel, the small Jewish community formally established in the 1850s. Jews had been in Quebec since the mid-18th century; prior to 1759, however, Jews weren’t welcome in New France, as it was for Catholics only, but Jews arrived with the British. Mohr wasn’t particularly interested in matters of Judaism, though he felt some vestigial attachment to the community, for many of its members were from Breslau like him.
Electricity, energy, of course, had become his muse — inexpensive clean energy, which he knew how to provide — and his vision became more refined as time went on. But then time ran out — that is, when Mohr had really hit his stride and established himself as the father of electricity in Quebec and, therefore, in the rest of Canada, he soon gave up the ghost.
Cyrille Duquet describes Mohr in his memoir, Remarques envers l’alchimie, as a sort of modest soothsayer or prophet, the alchemic master Duquet longed to be, though Mohr wasn’t transmuting lead into gold but rather water into light. Everything’s energy, Mohr remarked to Duquet, but of course you know that. Although Duquet writes very warmly about Mohr, he emphasizes that he was opaque to both kith and kin; Duquet writes about commenting on a painting in Mohr’s house, a painting of pinkish chrysanthemums, which was a gift from Mohr’s former colleague, Charles Lemont, to Mohr’s wife, Levi — a species of flower she’d never seen. Mohr went silent when Duquet said how lovely he thought the painting was and, Duquet writes, he remained silent for the remainder of the luncheon.
The night Mohr caught pneumonia, two weeks before he died, he was walking through the snow on his way home to 103, rue Saint-Jean, and he saw a series of his lamps go out. Immediately, he knew a line was down and had a sense of where the problem was. There was a line by the plant, by the falls, that swayed wildly in the wind, and the wind was picking up in the snowstorm. When he arrived home he saddled his horse and left for the falls without telling anyone. The horse’s hooves clopped on the cobblestones and splashed through the puddles. It hadn’t snowed in days and now it was coming down strong. Mohr winced in the snow and picked up speed when he was out of the port district on horseback.
When he arrived at the falls, the line was in the water. He needed to reconnect it to the plant, but it meant going into the water and taking it out of the water first with a long wooden pole, then dragging it to shore. The horse was half-submerged in the water and its body looked oily, as if the horse were wading through tar, not water. The snow made the moon invisible. He got the line and dragged it out, then climbed the steps on the side of the plant while holding it, since it was inactive and all the generators were down, and he reconnected it to the side of the building. It didn’t take him that long, he later told Eugene Philip. But the cold and the snow made him sick. His boots and legs were wet from the river and when he returned to 103, rue Saint-Jean, his daughters and wife were worried and shocked by his appearance.