ARNOLD ROOS
Bridgehead, Old Ottawa South, Nov. 2, 2016.
“I’m a rock hound. I picked it up after I retired. I’d always been fascinated with it, but I never had time. But after my wife, Barb, died, I met someone who said there’s a lapidary club in Ottawa, which I never knew existed. And I’ve always been fascinated by nature. There’s a tremendous beauty in nature.
“My original degree was in biochemistry. I worked for American Can Company in the mid-’60s. They went belly-up in the ’80s. The lab I worked in was in a canning factory in Hamilton and had very poor ventilation. They had a fantastic pension plan, but I figured if I stayed there I’d never collect it because I was working with carcinogens and would have died of cancer a long time ago.
“So I decided to change careers. I went back to school and got a history degree and did graduate work in the history and philosophy of science and technology. I worked in the government, with National Historic Sites from ’75 till 2009. That’s when I retired — that’s when my wife got cancer. She died two years later. But in the process we set up a society for the history of Canadian science, called the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, and we also set up a journal that’s still going, called Scientia Canadensis.
“My first job was working on Alexander Graham Bell, working with marine engineers on the
reconstruction of his hydrofoil boat, the HD-4, which broke the world’s speed record in 1919. It’s now in Baddeck, N.S. Subsequent to that, I worked on Yukon riverboats and their restoration, up in Dawson and Whitehorse. I’ve also worked on the history of hydroelectric development in Canada. Basically, we developed scientific and technological historic sites across Canada, promoting Canada’s technological history.
“It’s unfortunate that sometimes you see things that were given that aren’t commemorated that much. People would rather look at nice houses, or whatever, than technological historic sites. A lot of them are starved for money to develop.
“The government gets all these edifices after the Second World War, and there’s only so much money to put into these damn things, so you have a few that are chosen and the rest more or less disintegrate over time.
“We preserve very little of our technological heritage, because a lot of people think it isn’t pretty. But I can look at a steam valve and say, ‘That is fascinating and has beauty in its own way.’ And Canada had made important advances in technology and science — take a look at NRC — but do we commemorate that? No, we don’t.”