Frederick Stark Pearson first came to Barcelona in June 1911, when the city was in a complete process of urban transformation and industrial growth.

Pearson was born in 1861 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he studied electrical engineering. Throughout his life he was intensely active in entrepreneurial activities in different countries of America and Europe. He started in Boston, then New York and other American cities, then Canada, Mexico and Brazil. In all of those countries he developed innovative projects around the generation and transport of electrical energy, and created tram and train networks moved by this new power supply.

In Canada, Pearson came into contact with the financial world which helped him to build an industrial empire wherever he worked. He was an engineer, a financier and an entrepreneur, and he had a global vision of the economy.

This man, advanced for the time in which he lived, decided to reside in London, the world's financial centre. There he met the Catalan engineer Carlos Montañés, to whom he presented his project for electrifying Catalonia.

The records show, as described in a book about Dr. Pearson written by Xavier Moret, that he then went to stay in the Gran Hotel Colon, a modernist jewel situated on the corner of Plaça Catalunya with Paseo de Gracia. In the rooms of the hotel the two engineers had a long session of work, at the end of which Dr. Pearson expressed his wish to see the city from the nearby Tibidabo mountain.

The next day, very early in the morning and right at the top of the mountain, Dr. Pearson saw the smoking chimneys of Barcelona, a big industrial city that was growing at vertiginous speed and already had more than six hundred thousand inhabitants. Looking in the opposite direction he saw the chimneys of the factories of Sabadell and Terrassa too. And beyond, far to the North, he glimpsed the Pyrenees mountains, from where he could generate the new electrical energy.

Moret explains that, standing in front of that spectacular view, Dr. Pearson declared: "I accept the project, Montañes, because one no longer finds pearls such as this in the world."

Dr. Pearson clearly foresaw that Barcelona was an ideal place to develop the new technology that was transforming the world: electricity. Indeed Catalonia had a growing industry that burned coal, a population in clear expansion and mountainous rivers which could generate the hydraulic electricity needed for factories and for domestic consumption.

From that moment, Dr. Pearson put into motion all his machinery, and with the support of his partner Montañés, in just a few years laid the foundations for a new transformation of the country: its electrification.

He created the company Barcelona Traction, also known as "la Canadiense", that built the tunnels of Vallvidrera to connect Barcelona and el Vallès; he designed and began to build the colony of La Floresta, close to Sant Cugat; he bought the companies "Tramvies de Barcelona I Ferrocarrils de Sarrià" in order to control the consumption of electricity and to begin the extension of the railway network from Vallès to Terrassa, where it would finally arrive in 1919. Finally, he built his masterpiece of engineering: a hydroelectric center in the Pyrenees near the municipality of Tremp -- the reservoir of Sant Antoni in the Noguera Pallaresa river, built by Barcelona Traction between 1912 and 1916.

Dr. Pearson died in May 1915 on board the transatlantic ship 'Lusitània', coming back to London.

One hundred years after his arrival in Barcelona, one wonders why such an important occasion has passed by almost unnoticed. Why has the centenary of the arrival of Dr. Pearson in Barcelona not been celebrated?

Many lessons can be learned from this fundamental historic act. First of all, that Montañés went out of the country to find both the technology and the investment. Second, that this big project allowed the modernization of the Catalan economy. Finally, that the attraction of the talent and the entrepreneurial capacity that Dr. Pearson represented would be fundamental for this transformation.

The attraction of talent and its implications for the great challenges of this country can transform our economy again. 'Tractor projects' -- which drag innovation and growth -- and the capacity to see them through, this is the lesson that Dr. Pearson and his friend Montañés has left us.

Miquel Barceló Roca

President, BcnIn

La Vanguardia, 4/12/11