The Talented Mr. Marsland: book shines overdue light on electronics entrepreneur
- chunkhow
- 5 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
Stanley Marsland and Mike Lazaridis have much in common. Both quit school before graduating. Both loved tinkering with gadgets and electronic devices. Both were workaholics. Both leveraged new technology to launch their startups. Both harnessed the power of wireless communications to build remarkably successful, international enterprises. Both saw those businesses eventually shrink and in one case cease to exist.
Yet, Lazaridis was profiled in no less than four books and even in a movie telling the story of the BlackBerry smartphone he invented and how it took the world by storm in the early 2000s before succumbing to the onslaught of sleeker more powerful devices. Marsland, for his part, garnered plenty of headlines and accolades during his peak years from the 1930s to the 1960s, but Hollywood didn’t come knocking nor was his story enshrined in a book. As a result, the man who was celebrated by political, military and business leaders and won numerous awards for his work has largely been forgotten.
Until now.
A new book, The Marsland Engineering Story: Innovators and Entrepreneurs (Waterloo: Marsland Centre Limited, 2024), attempts to bring modern readers up to date on the remarkable story of Stanley Marsland and how he built Marsland Engineering into an electronics juggernaut in Canada and the world.
Co-authored by Stanley’s son Larry Marsland and John Roe, an award-winning reporter and editorial writer—now retired— from the Waterloo Region Record, the book is not for the average reader. It’s a weighty coffee-table tome filled with pictures, text and charts depicting Stanley, company employees, business leaders, buildings, factories, machines and products. At times it reads like a corporate catalogue more suited for the Popular Mechanics crowd, featuring picture after picture of microphones, radio tuners, loudspeakers, naval plotters and other products manufactured by the company.
Not only that, readers expecting a warts and all depiction of Stanley and his company will not find it here. But, that’s hardly to be expected of a self-published book written by his son. In truth, the book probably should have been written years ago, before Stanley died in 1988 at the age of 77, or soon after when memories were still fresh, company records more accessible, and public recognition of his accomplishments was at its peak.
But the Marsland family can hardly be blamed if business journalists of that era were snoozing, and Larry, now in his early 90s, admits in the book that he probably should have written something sooner but was angered when his father sold the company in 1969, triggering its eventual downfall.
Despite those quibbles, The Marsland Engineering Story is still for the most part a compelling read and an invaluable resource, offering a fascinating glimpse of one of this area’s unsung high-tech trailblazers.
As a boy, Stanley Marsland loved tinkering with gadgets, pulling them apart, studying their wires and tubes, figuring out how they worked. And nothing fascinated him more than an invention that took the world by storm in the Roaring Twenties. It was the radio. Consumers couldn’t get enough of the miracle box that brought the world to their living rooms. Families would gather around their bulky new devices, often encased in decorative wooden cabinets, like they were some kind of crystal ball. What the TV was to the 1950s, the personal computer to the 1980s, the smartphone to the 2000s, the radio was to the 1920s. Stanley’s interest in electronics came from his father, an engineer who brought his wife and five sons—Stanley was the eldest—from England to Canada in 1920, settling first in Montreal. A job as a stationary engineer at the Dominion Rubber plant on Strange Street brought him to Kitchener in 1924.
Born in 1910, Stanley attended Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate but it wasn’t long before classroom confinement could not compete with his obsession with electronics and the new magical audio device. At 16 Stanley crossed his radio Rubicon when he abruptly and spectacularly quit school climbing out a ground-floor window after an argument with his shop teacher. That window turned out to be one of opportunity: Stanley couldn’t wait to start his own radio-repair company.
His first business was located in the Howard Brothers store on King Street between Water and Francis streets. Work was plentiful. Radios weren’t well made in those days, and dealers couldn’t be bothered fixing or servicing them. Instead they contracted the work out to companies like Marsland Radio Service, as Stanley called his first enterprise. Even after the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, radios kept selling. People couldn’t do without their magic boxes. Business was so brisk and Stanley was so efficient at his job that by 1932, he was doing service work for 34 radio dealers in Kitchener and area, according to a fascinating magazine article on the company re-printed in the book. It’s not clear whether Stanley did all the work himself or if he had employees at this point. From the magazine article it appears he got help from Howard Brothers taking orders and doing other administrative tasks.
Business was picking up but the Depression was still an ever-present threat so Stanley, ever the resourceful entrepreneur, resorted to unorthodox means to keep the lights on. How else to explain his decision to service police radios for bootleggers (Alcohol was illegal in the U.S. from 1920 until 1933) supplying customers in the Detroit area.
That same year he married Florence Bauer and the couple bought a home at 102 West Ave. in Kitchener. Behind the house Stanley erected a small building housing a machine shop in the basement and a radio repair shop on the main floor. This was the new home of Marsland Radio Engineering, as he now called his company.
Stanley now shifted into overdrive. With the new name came new directions. Forging his own mechanical parts in the machine shop, he gradually expanded his product line. Microphones and sound systems for churches and funeral homes, radio links for church broadcasts and shortwave machines so doctors could massage arthritic patients with radio waves all rolled out the doors of 102 West Ave. Irony had place in the shop, he even built the radio system for the Kitchener police department, likely using the skills learned from working with bootleggers.
How was this high-school dropout who never studied engineering in school or apprenticed at any firm able to do all this? According to the book, he taught himself, tinkering endlessly with radios and electronic devices and poring over trade magazines. “He could fix almost anything,” the book relates. [1]
Prematurely bald with a round face and a friendly smile, he was a neat freak, whose shoes were always shined and suits always dark, accented with a vest so he would appear older than he was. For someone who founded a business at 16, it’s not surprising he would be self-conscious about his age. The fastidiousness extended to the workplace. His factories were always spotless, machines painted Marsland grey and new company cars acquired every year. He didn’t smoke, play cards, gamble or invest in the stock market; didn’t enjoy parties and drank moderately. Such abstemiousness might lead one to conclude that Stanley was a dull workaholic, but such was not the case. His love of the outdoors was on a par with that of Ernest Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, and Trudeau senior. Sailing, fly-fishing, travelling and flying planes were among his hobbies. When the company acquired a corporate plane in 1956, he earned his flying license.
Though the book gives the impression that business was booming throughout the 1930s the fact that Marsland Engineering continued to operate out of a backyard garage until the early ‘40s suggests that the Depression was impeding growth. That would change in 1942. Whether Stanley considered enlisting is not mentioned, and one is left to conclude that his business acumen was too important to be sacrificed on the battlefield as by then Marsland had shifted into war-related production, making resistors and other electronic components for military applications. With orders pouring in and the company’s business on more solid footing, it was finally time to vacate the garage on West Avenue and relocate to a two-story factory at 154 Victoria St. S. near Park Street.
Something else happened in 1942, a learning experience that would shape the rest of Marsland's career. He was recruited to manage two large electronics factories in eastern Pennsylvania owned by the Roller-Smith Co., a U.S. manufacturer known for its circuit testers, voltmeters, and railway gauges. It’s still a mystery how he got this job, so mysterious in fact that he never told his son, and Larry is left to speculate that he was recommended by someone on the board of International Nickel. Whatever the reason, it’s safe to say that Stanley’s expertise was attracting notice across borders and in high places.
The job was important because during WWII Roller-Smith was engaged in pivotal military work. It made radar altimeters to improve the accuracy of planes on bombing runs by giving a direct reading of elevation above the earth. It also made rocket fuzes to detonate ammunition on shoulder-held projectile launches, also known as bazookas.
For the next four years, the tireless Stanley commuted to Roller-Smith during the week and worked at Marsland on weekends. He would fly or take the train from Hamilton on Sunday night and return Friday afternoon. During his absence, Marsland operations were run by his brother Eric. For its war-time efforts, Roller-Smith was honoured with a prestigious military award at the end of hostilities, and Stanley was thanked personally by President Harry Truman at a White House ceremony. The high-school dropout from Kitchener had come a long way.
Stanley gained something else from his time at Roller Smith— expertise in managing a large, sophisticated company. Roller-Smith had 500 employees during this time. "What he discovered about technology, managing a large workforce and partnering with governments at this big American company, helped guide him for the rest of his working life,” says Larry in the book.[2]
The post-war era—from 1945 to 1969—were the glory years in Marsland’s history. Canada’s
economy was booming and Marsland took full advantage. In the military space, it made antennas for Canadian fighter jets and sonar subsystems for the Canadian Navy. A plotting system called the NC-2 enabled Canadian destroyer escorts to detect submarines and attacking helicopters. The NC-2 was so accurate that Marsland sold similar plotting systems to navies in the U.S., France, Chile and Holland. In the 1960s, Marsland won a major contract to supply three million mortar fuzes to the U.S. military for use in the Vietnam War. That contract alone required Marsland to build a 65,000 square foot machine shop. Military subcontracts with companies such as Canadian General Electric, Canadian Westinghouse and Litton Systems followed.
In the non-military category, Marsland made plenty of noise—literally. It started making loudspeakers in 1948 and eventually became the largest manufacturer of speakers in Canada. Tooled and produced in all shapes and sizes, they were used in TVs, radios, record players and public-address systems. When TV took off in the 1950s, Marsland licensed technology from an American company to make TV tuners for the Canadian market.
In the late 1950s, it purchased a mining hardware company from Cambridge, ON, and started making valves, hose fittings, joiners, pipe wrenches, vises and the like for the mining and construction industries.
In the 1960s, IBM in Toronto became a particularly good customer, and Marsland made parts for its punch card, card verifier and high-speed printing machines. A clean room employing 100 women was created to make memory core planes, a precursor of silicone memory chips, for IBM computers.
Other domestic products rolling out Marsland doors included record-changers, teleprinters, battery chargers and credit card imprinters. So adept was Marsland at making parts and products that Stanley boasted it had the finest electronics tool room in Canada. Its range of commercial customers read like a who’s who of business—Westinghouse, Canadian General Electric, RCA Victor, Admiral, Otis Elevator, Atomic Energy of Canada, Dominion Electrohome and so on.
As the book notes, Marsland “prospered by constantly growing the list of products it manufactured.”[3] One of its secret weapons was buying and refurbishing used machines and equipment from the U.S. rather than purchasing them brand new. Or it would purchase a company and use its machines to make a different product. An example was Harley-Kay of Georgetown, which made textile and knitting machinery. Marsland bought Harley-Kay in 1945 and used its machines to make parts for the Canadian Navy.
As if Stanley wasn’t busy enough, he was also tapped to become an unpaid technical adviser to C.D. Howe, the federal minister of trade and commerce. For several days a week from 1951-57, he would travel to Ottawa to share advice with Howe, known as Canada’s “minister of everything” for his role in guiding the economy in the 1950s. He must have been a good delegator because Marsland Engineering doesn’t appear to have suffered from his absences.
An increasing pace needs a bigger space and so in 1962 Marsland Engineering slipped the surly bonds of 154 Victoria St. by building a much larger facility in Waterloo at 350 Weber St. N. at Columbia St. and moving operations there. A fascinating photo shows Stanley and Larry standing at the front door shortly after the opening with officials from the federal Defence Research Board and Northern Electric. Dressed in trench coats and fedoras, they look like gumshoes from the 1960s TV crime series Naked City.
By the late 1960s, Marsland’s workforce had grown to 950 employees and would surpass 1,450 by the early 1970s. As such, it was the largest industrial employer in the city of Waterloo.
With all the company’s success, it’s not surprising that Marsland was targeted by unions. Beginning in 1955, the company fought off efforts by the United Electrical Workers to unionize its workforce. Tactics got ugly with the union even resorting to supporters posing as job applicants, then working inside the company to promote the union once they were hired. Student activists from the University of Waterloo were also used to recruit Marsland employees. The company successfully blocked the drives, arguing that compensation and working conditions were good.
Matters finally came to a head in 1969 when the union was certified to bargain on behalf of employees. A contract was negotiated but Larry Marsland, leading negotiations on behalf of management, pulled a fast one. He implemented its key measures, then refused to sign the contract. He was later convicted and fined for bargaining in bad faith, but notes in the book that workers never complained. Nor does he voice any guilt over his actions. Even so, the company was eventually unionized later in the 1970s after he left Marsland.
The year 1969 was a tumultuous one in Marsland’s history. Not only did it battle a union drive,
but Stanley made the stunning decision to sell the company to Leigh Instruments, an electronics and aerospace company based in Carleton Place near Ottawa. The trigger was the federal government’s idea to bring in full taxation of capital gains in response to the Carter Commission report on tax reform released in 1967. Stanley was “apoplectic” over the proposed changes, which would have taken away an enormous chunk of his wealth in creating Marsland Engineering, Larry notes in the book.
“Here was an entrepreneur who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps, worked untold hours throughout more than four decades of his lifetime, taken uncounted calculated risks, employed hundreds of people, manufactured important products and contributed to the nation’s economy, and yet here an accountant from Toronto (Kenneth Carter) thought that it—or a huge part of it—could be taken away from him,” the book notes.[4]
The media reaction to the sale, not cited in the book, was curiously low-key. Despite Marsland being Waterloo’s largest employer, the shift to out-of-town ownership didn’t generate much outrage or concern. The Globe and Mail ignored the story entirely while the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the largest newspaper in the area, published the story on Jan. 27, 1969—not on the front page, but on page 3.
The sale would enable “the company to participate in domestic and world markets on a broader base and will also enable our employees to participate in a stock purchase plan,” Stanley said in the story. Reasons for the sale included the imminent tax changes being proposed by the federal government. “Mr. Marsland was concerned about the company’s continuity,” said G.M. Cox, Marsland’s vice-president and general manager. Record columnist Sandy Baird weighed in a few days later, noting that Canadians were genuinely worried about the proposed tax changes. “Never, but never has there been so much Canadian static about taxes as you hear right now.”
At least Marsland had not been sold to an American firm, he wrote, but he voiced no concern about Stanley’s decision to sell and pointed the finger of blame at the federal government. “Have you ever noticed that most of the loudest exponents of a capital gains tax are the kind of guys who’ve never ventured anything more than $3.50 for a sweepstakes ticket?” he snorted.[5]
Sadly, the sale set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the demise of Marsland Engineering. Leigh, which had recently gone public, went on an acquisition spree using its overpriced shares as collateral, purchasing firms that weren’t related to its main business. Worse, it overstated the value of inventories to prop up its share price. This boosted its tax liability and undermined its cash position. The house of cards finally collapsed in 1983, forcing Leigh to close Marsland. Leigh itself declared bankruptcy in 1990, blaming cost overruns on federal government defence contracts. [6] Larry didn’t stick around to witness the debacle. Worn out by constant travel and the trade union fights, he left Leigh Instruments in 1972.
While he opposed the tax reforms, Larry admits at the end of the book that he thought his father’s decision to sell the company was a mistake. Too much was lost as a result. Waterloo Region and Canada lost one of its most iconic and innovative companies, and Marsland would join a sad list of flagship failures that includes the Avro Arrow, Research In Motion, Nortel and others. Worse, mismanagement rather than a lack of innovation sealed Marsland’s fate.
Did Stanley act too hastily in selling his company? A case could be made that he did. The book fails to point out that many of the changes proposed by the Carter Commission were eventually watered down due to public outcry after he sold the company.[7] Moreover, figures on his potential tax liability are not revealed in the book or how much he would have lost if he tried to bite the bullet and carry on as owner. Perhaps Stanley was worn out after 43 onerous years of running the company. Still, he deprived future generations including son, Larry, of a chance to take the reins.
One gets the sense from the book that it was a bitter pill for Larry. He shares fond memories of working under his father, starting after school when he was just 14. Rising through the ranks, he was put in charge of the IBM account and was always careful to follow the dress code of business suit, shirt and tie while visiting IBM offices in Don Mills, ON.
More was lost than just Marsland Engineering. With the sale, all of the company’s assets and records were acquired by Leigh and were lost or unavailable for the writing of the Marsland book, Larry notes, forcing him to rely on memories and some archival materials he had kept in the family.
Following the sale of the company, Stanley pivoted into commercial land development. He purchased a site on Erb Street where the old Waterloo city hall was located and erected the Marsland Centre, a 13-story office building, which opened in 1971. But commercial real estate didn’t grab him with the same gusto as electronic engineering. After he sold Marsland Engineering, Stanley “was never as happy—and never as important in his own mind,” the book notes.[8] He retired and moved with his wife, Florence, to Bermuda. As his health began to decline he moved back to Canada and died in 1988 at the age of 77. An obituary in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record noted that he died after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Before retiring, Stanley passed the reins of the company to Larry who continued to work in the property development field, erecting a number of buildings over the next few decades. The last 20 pages or so of the 233-page book are devoted to Marsland Centre Ltd., the company’s real estate enterprise. At present it has 15 buildings in its portfolio including a number of sleek, curved-glass office structures in north Waterloo. It’s also into the fourth generation of Marslands at the helm.
While deserving of applause, commercial real estate doesn’t quite have the same sizzle as naval plotting systems, police radios and audiences with American presidents. It’s more of a local play than a national or international endeavor and the book loses some of its momentum near the end. All the same, The Marsland Engineering Story is still very much a worthwhile book that sheds long overdue light on one of this area’s high-tech pioneers.
The Marsland Engineering Story is available at Words Worth Books in Waterloo at a cost of $75.
[1] Larry Marsland and John Roe, The Marsland Engineering Story: Innovators and Entrepreneurs (Waterloo: Marsland Centre Limited, 2024), p. 42.
[2] Marsland, p. 71.
[3] Marsland, p. 131.
[4] Marsland, p. 204.
[5] Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Jan. 28, 1969.
[6] Globe and Mail, April 13, 1990, p. B1
[7] Royal Commission on Taxation, Canadian Encyclopedia, Feb. 7, 2006.
[8] Marsland, p. 47.