Shawinigan Water and Power.

Shawinigan has spawned more than "little guy" Jean Chrétien. The town is the cradle of Quebec's industrial might. In the first decades of the 20th century, Shawinigan Water and Power (SWP), the province's largest-and last-private hydro-electric company, exploited the Saint-Maurice River system's raging waterfalls to lure electricity-hungry industries like aluminum and pulp and paper to the region. SWP's other major contribution to Quebec's economy was in chemicals, producing acetone (used in British bombs during the First World War) and acetylene, a fuel for Montreal's street lamps, later used to make solder. In fact, SWP was a highly diverse company that influenced many sectors of Quebec's economy, says Claude Bellavance, director of the Centre d'études québécoises at the Université du Québec in Trois-Rivières, and author of a 1994 book on the company.