15 CANADIAN ACHIEVEMENTS YOU’RE WELCOME, WORLD
The world would be missing a lot without Canada, writes Tom Spears — a broad and quirky assortment of inventions and discoveries that help us live longer, set our clocks, explore space, paddle rivers and oceans, and never, ever eat a Krispy Kreme.
STANDARD TIME
Sir Sandford Fleming was an engineer from the Peterborough area.
Trained as a surveyor, he used that skill as an engineer designing the course that railways would take. He used snowshoes and dogsleds to survey and plan the Intercolonial Railway, from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to Upper and Lower Canada. Later he planned the Canadian Pacific Railway to the Pacific.
As he wrestled with railway timetables across the continent, he began to work out a plan to standardize timekeeping, which in the late 1800s still had local hiccups. Fleming reasoned that if there were 24 hours in a day, it made sense to have 24 time zones paralleling the progress of the sun across the sky. (Canada has six of them.)
Fleming served as chancellor of Queen’s University for 35 years and Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887, two years after they drove the last spike into the CPR track.
PABLUM
Big deal, you say. Mush for babies. But this is life-saving mush. Alan Brown, Theodore Drake and Frederick Tisdall were pediatricians at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in 1930, when malnutrition was a major threat to infants.
Young children — especially in poor families — lacked vitamins of all kinds in their diet, so these doctors and nutrition lab technician Ruth Herbert worked out a way to package everything that infants were missing in a cereal.
The mix of wheat, corn meal, bone meal, oatmeal, brewer’s yeast and alfalfa leaf didn’t need refrigerating and contained no eggs or lactose, in order to avoid allergic reactions. It was easy for young children to digest. The group also developed a biscuit version for older children.
Pablum contains vitamins A through E, some iron and other minerals. In effect it was carbohydrates, some protein, calcium and a multivitamin all in one cheap package — just in time for the Great Depression.
PYKRETE
Geoffrey Pyke was a freethinking, authority-hating British inventor who came to Canada in the Second World War with an idea: using a massive block of ice as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
There were two problems with ice as a building material: 1. It melts. 2. It shatters.
Pyke and others resolved both problems by mixing water with Canadian spruce sawdust before freezing it. The resulting stuff resists melting and is stronger than ice. It behaves, in fact, like floating concrete — hence the name Pykrete.
Pyke impressed people so much that Lord Mountbatten ordered a sample of Pykrete to be made in Canada and delivered to the Quebec Conference in 1943, where Mountbatten fired his revolver first at some ice (which shattered), then at the new material. Sure enough, it resisted shattering, though the ricocheting bullet nicked an officer’s pantleg. History records that the sound of gunfire during sensitive negotiations scared the hell out of aides outside the room.
History moved on without a Pykrete ship. The recipe is still around, though: 86 per cent water, 14 per cent sawdust, by volume.
INSULIN
We are all taught that Frederick Banting and Charles Best of the University of Toronto figured out how to prepare an extract from animal pancreases that controls diabetes. The technique was refined enough to be practical by 1922.
But the team was larger. Central to the work were James Collip, a biochemist who improved Banting’s and Best’s extraction process, and J.J.R. Macleod, who supervised Banting and Best. Today, the Canadian Encyclopedia argues that “years of propaganda, involving extensive distortion of history, established in the popular mind, especially in Canada, the view that insulin had been discovered by Banting and Best. Macleod and Collip became forgotten men.”
Banting and Macleod shared the 1923 Nobel Prize. Macleod split his money with Collip. Banting shared his with Best.
RED RIVER CARTS
In the days before roads or pickup trucks, this two-wheeled cart ruled the Prairies — all for reasons that car buyers today can scarcely comprehend.
The task: Get a farm family or a cartload of goods for sale through a long Prairie trip — without using any metal parts. No nails, bolts, anything of metal. Wooden pieces were tied together with leather. Either an ox or a horse could pull it.
As such, it was an engineering marvel.
Wooden axles fit into wooden wheels, with a dollop of grease to reduce the friction and the screeching noise — until the owner ran out of grease. Then the true noise began. It was said you could hear a cart for miles.
The large wheels took bumps and ruts in stride. In the 1850s, there was regular traffic from Fort Garry (today’s Winnipeg) to Minnesota as well as east-west.
Eventually the railroad took up the stream of goods and people.
THE CANADIAN STROKE
This is a favourite of Becky Mason, who teaches canoeing. She says it’s her main stroke for travelling in a straight line, less tiring than the J-stroke.
“You do a power stroke and then you turn the blade ever so slightly and then you scoop it out of the water so it comes out of the water in a beautiful flick. And that’s what a Canadian is all about. It’s a steerage stroke and then you turn the blade so it pops out of the water.”
As a beginner, she says, “you start out with a J. That’s what you learn because it’s a very powerful, very good stroke.” After that “you always, inevitably slip into the Canadian. You tend to be taught it.
“It’s something that is very Canadian because you just go with the flow. You go miles and miles without much effort in steering.”
THE CONCEPT OF ROCKETS FOR SPACE FLIGHT
Move over, Werner von Braun.
William Leitch, a Presbyterian clergyman and principal of Queen’s University, accurately described the concept of space flight using rockets in 1861.
That’s before even Jules Verne got into the picture.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Leitch deserves a place of honour in the history of space flight,” historian Robert Godwin told the National Post in 2015.
“The fact that he was a scientist is the key to this story. He wasn’t just making a wild guess.
“Not only did he understand Newton’s law of action and reaction, he almost dismissively understood that a rocket would work more efficiently in the vacuum of space; a fact that still caused (American Robert) Goddard and others to be subjected to ridicule almost six decades later.”
Sadly, Leitch died and his publisher went bust, so his memory faded away.
CORN AND SOYBEAN HEAT UNITS
These are the gift of Murray Brown, University of Guelph scientist who in 1964 produced the first detailed map of exactly how much heat the sun delivers to each farming area in Ontario.
His map shows farmers which of the many hybrids of corn and soybeans they should plant in a given location. For instance, the number of heat units (a formula combining temperature and length of growing season) is lower in Eastern Ontario than near London or Windsor. Everyone knew that in general — but Brown calculated the precise factor for each farming area in Ontario, taking away a lot of guesswork from two crops that are each worth more than $1 billion a year in Ontario today.
For instance, a farm near Ottawa is rated at 3,099 heat units, while Belleville is at 3,369. Seed for corn varieties is labelled with heat units as well.
Farmers “caught on right away,” Brown told the Citizen in 2014.
THE KAYAK
This engineering marvel was invented by people who, like the Red River cart builders, had no access to metal. The Inuit used thin pieces of wood for a frame, tying them together and covering them with sealskin.
“You build them custom to your own body, so it reflects a design that is built for you,” kayak builder Eric McNair-Landry of Iqaluit told the Citizen as he demonstrated the traditional skill a few months ago at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Built low to the water, they resist being blown off course by High Arctic winds.
THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL
Canada hosted the conference that developed this protocol in 1987. It was a promise signed by most of the world’s countries to stop using chlorofluorocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer.
This summer, ozone science Susan Solomon reported there’s finally strong evidence that the ozone layer is “healing.”
THE TIMBIT
We asked Tim Hortons for the delicacy’s history, and the recipe, but they wouldn’t talk to us. Ah well, still a Canadian achievement. Without the Timbit, we might have to eat Krispy Kremes.
MAPPING THE BRAIN
Born an American, Dr. Wilder Penfield came to the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1934 and, through his research and surgery, literally developed a map of the brain and its functions.
Penfield, who became Canadian, treated patients with severe epilepsy by killing brain cells in areas that were causing seizures. But since he performed surgery while his patients remained awake, he was able to stimulate different parts of the brain with electricity and ask them questions or watch their physical responses.
The response was the first comprehensive understanding of which brain cells performed which functions. Readers may remember the Heritage Minute segment in which a patient has the sensation of smelling burned toast when one brain area is stimulated.
THE MACINTOSH APPLE AND DURUM WHEAT
In 1811, farmer John McIntosh of Dundela (near Morrisburg ) found about 20 apple trees growing wild in the woods.
Only one was a vigorous tree, and he dug it up and brought it back to his farm.
From that original tree, his son Alan propagated many new trees, all genetically identical to the parent tree, and Canada’s favourite apple took off. Later breeding has made it redder and less able to keep for months in a cool cellar.
Durum (Latin for “hard”) wheat was another 19th-century stroke of luck. David Fife, a farmer east of Peterborough, bought some wheat seed sent from Scotland that failed to grow — except for one grain.
Farmers in the 1840s had trouble adapting European wheat to harsh Canadian conditions but the spring wheat that Fife had stumbled upon multiplied vigorously. Red Fife wheat was hard, resisted rust, and grew well across the southern Prairies, where it took over as the main variety.
SUDBURY NEUTRINO OBSERVATORY
Art McDonald of Queen’s University won last year’s Nobel Prize for Physics through work here that finally proved neutrinos — tiny particles from the sun and other stars — do have mass. Since neutrinos are the most common particle in the universe, knowing this affects physics on an important scale.
McDonald headed the observatory two kilometres deep in an active nickel mine near Sudbury. The deep rock filters out most high-energy particles but not neutrinos, letting the detector — a sphere filled with heavy water — record each time a neutron hits a heavy water molecule.
McDonald also did a skit about his work for This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
FINALLY, THE CANADARM
Oh sure, an obvious choice. But this invention goes beyond the space images we have all seen.
NASA and the National Research Council agreed in 1975 that Canada would develop a robotic arm. The work went to Spar Aerospace, and Canadarm eventually flew on 90 shuttle missions, not counting the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, and other space robotics.
But Canadarm technology has also developed on Earth — most notably in robotic surgery. This precision work of robotic instruments is what allows a surgeon to work with much smaller incisions than they need for hand-held instruments, using instruments such as laser scalpels to boldly go into small spaces.
They can even be used for tele-surgery, where a surgeon in one hospital operates robotic instruments in another city.