Canadian inventions

As a boy in Texas, I learned that Americans invented just about everything worth inventing, from the cotton gin to the steamboat to the electric light bulb to the telephone (more on that later). But, like so many other things I learned in school, it “ain’t necessarily so.”

In honor of National Science and Technology Week (just past), I thought I’d prove that Canadians more than hold their own in invention and discovery.

Did you know, for instance, that kerosene was invented by a Canadian? In the mid-19th century, people began to experiment with what they called “rock oil” and we call “petroleum.” In 1852 a Canadian physician and geologist, Abraham Gessner, obtained a patent for producing from crude oil a relatively clean-burning and affordable lamp oil–kerosene.

The telephone, I learned in Texas, was an American invention, but actually Alexander Graham Bell, born in Scotland, immigrated first to Canada, and then to the U.S., and always maintained a Canadian residence. He conceived of the telephone in Brantford, Ont., in 1874, then built and tested it in Boston the following year. The first long-distance call (eight miles) was made over telegraph wires from a shoe store in Paris, Ont., to a telegraph office in Brantford on August 10, 1876.

That distance wouldn’t ordinarily take you into a different time zone today, but it might have then, because there were no standard time zones. They were suggested by a Canadian engineer, Sir Stanford Fleming, in Toronto in 1879. The 24 equal time zones he recommended remain in effect.

No list of Canadian innovation would be complete without the mention of insulin as a treatment for diabetics, announced by Frederick G. Banting, Charles H. Best, J. B. Collip and J. J. R. Macleod at the University of Toronto on May 3, 1922. Before that diabetes was a sure death sentence; today, millions of diabetics live long and productive lives.

The University of Toronto also gave the world the electron microscope. The first working model, constructed in April, 1938, is now on display in the Ontario Science Centre.

Not far from the U of T is Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where the first baby food was invented. The pre-cooked, vitamin-enriched cereal was marketed in 1930 by Mead Johnson under the name Pablum, from the Greek word for food, “pabulum.”

Canadians seem to be very good at voice transmission over long distances; besides Bell, Canada also gave the world Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, who broadcast the first program of speech and music via radio in 1906 and established the first two-way transatlantic wireless telegraph communication. Fessenden also invented the sonic depth finder, the radio compass, smoke screens for tanks, and more.

Oswald Theodore Avery, a physician and bacteriologist born in Halifax, showed in 1944 that DNA was the material that passed heritable traits from cell to cell. This eventually led to the famous work of James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA and founded the modern science of genetics.

A Canadian also discovered U-235,the isotope of uranium eventually used in the atomic bomb. Canadian-born physicist Arthur Jeffrey Dempster is also known for improving the mass spectrograph, used to analyze the chemical composition of substances. Research into spectroscopy won German-born Canadian physicist Gerhard Herzberg the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1971.

Speaking of Nobel Prizes, Henry Taube, born in Neudorf, Sask., on November 30, 1915, won the 1983 Nobel Prize in chemistry. His work into chemical reactions is the basis for modern inorganic chemistry.

Taube was born a little too soon to experience the joys of snowmobiling in on the prairie, but millions of people have since thanks to the work of Joseph Armand-Bombardier, who invented a troop-carrying snow vehicle in the 1930s with a half-track in the back and steerable skis in the front–the same basic design used on almost every snowmobile since.

Canadian inventions continue to change the world. The IMAX motion picture system, with its crystal-clear image and multi-story screens, was invented by Canadians. Every space shuttle flight proclaims Canadian ingenuity with the use of the Canadian-made robot arm, emblazoned with the maple leaf. And the recently famous V-chip, which allows parents to screen out violent programs on television, was invented by Tim Collings, who works for the engineering science department of Simon Fraser University.

So many things invented by people who aren’t Americans! My old Texas school teacher would be shocked.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1996/11/canadian-inventions/

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