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The Greatest Canadian Inventions

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Contents

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Inventors

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Angus MacDonnel

  • 1791 - First Canadian patent is granted by the Governor General in Council to Angus MacDonnel, a Scottish soldier garrisoned at Quebec City, and to Samuel Hopkins, a Vermonter, for processes to make potash fertilizer and soap from wood ash; potash made from wood ash was a major cash crop for early Canadian pioneers.
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Charles Fenerty

  • 1838 - Charles Fenerty mechanizes a process for making paper from wood pulp; he got the idea from watching wasps build paper-like nests by chewing up wood; launches Canada's pulp and paper industry.
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David Fife

  • 1842 - David Fife develops Red Fife wheat. A farmer on the fourth concession of Otonabee Township near Peterborough, Ontario, he wrote a friend in Glasgow, Scotland, asking him to send some spring wheat. His friend sent him a sample of a new kind of wheat from Poland, and Fife planted the few grains in the spring of 1842. All but five heads rusted badly, but those that remained matured ten days earlier than the other wheat on the farm. Fife discovered the strain of wheat he planted in 1842 was far more immune to rust, smut and frost damage than any other he had seen. Each year as the wheat multiplied, he cared for it, and in 1849 sold 260 bushels his Red Fife wheat to the Otonabee Agricultural Society to distribute among its members. Until the 1950s, most of the wheat grown in western Canada was of the "Red Fife" variety. In 1904 it was crossed with another strain of wheat at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa by Charles Saunders, a native of London, Ontario, to produce the early maturing Marquis wheat which has became the basic grain grown in North America.
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Robert Foulis

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Samuel McKeen

  • 1854 - Samuel McKeen of Nova Scotia designs an early version of the odometer, a mechanism he attached to the side of a carriage to strike off the miles with the turning of the wheels.
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Abraham Gesner

  • June 27, 1854 - New Brunswick chemist Abraham Gesner awarded US patent for distilling kerosene from petroleum; he was the first to refine kerosene oil from coal for lighting in 1846, and built a plant on Long Island near New York. Kerosene quickly replaced whale oil as the standard lighting fuel in North American homes, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry.
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Thomas Hunt

  • Thomas Hunt - Professor Thomas Hunt of McGill University invents the green ink that has been used since 1862 to print U.S. banknotes. He was studying chromium-containing minerals, and developed a green ink that could not be destroyed by acid, base or any other agent. Hunt sold his invention to the US government for much less than it was worth, and his ink led to the nickname "greenbacks" for American currency.
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Frederick Gisbourne

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John Forbes

  • 1868 - John Forbes invents the first practical ice skate. Forbes, foreman of the Starr Manufacturing Company in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and his assistant Thomas Bateman, patented a self-fastening skate that attached tightly to a skaters' boot with a mechanical lever. The Starr "Acme Club" spring skates met with instant approval and became the world's favourite. They revolutionized figure skating and hockey by allowing quicker starts and stops than with the older block skates.
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Henry Woodward

  • 1874 - Henry Woodward, a medical student from Toronto, with friend Matthew Evans, invents the first incandescent lamp with an electric light bulb. Henry patents it in 1875 and sells a share of his patent to Thomas Edison who then came up with a more practical lamp that efficiently transmitted electricity into the light bulb. Edison successfully demonstrated the light bulb in 1879. But the first cheap, practical version was developed by Canadian Reginald Fessenden for George Westinghouse's company. Fessenden's bulb lit the Chicago Worlds Fair.
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Alexander Graham Bell

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Sandford Fleming

  • 1878 - Sandford Fleming invents the system of standard time zones in use today. Until about 100 years ago most towns reckoned local noon when the sun was directly overhead, and a train traveller could leave Montreal at 12:00 noon and get to Kingston at 11:53 am.. In order to clean up railway timetables, on February 8, 1879, Fleming proposed to the Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Scientific Knowledge in Toronto, that the world be divided into 24 equal time zones, with a "Standard Time" in each zone, and with Greenwich, England, as the "prime meridian" (the base for calculations). On November 18, 1883 all the North American railway companies adopted his idea. A year later, at a conference in Washington, D.C., 25 countries adopted the Fleming proposition, and on January 1, 1885 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established as the meridian of his system.
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John Joseph Wright

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Thomas Ahearn

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Frederick Creed

  • 1889 - Frederick Creed invents the teletype, the precurser to all modern data communications. Born in 1871 in Mill Village, Nova Scotia, he learned Morse Code and telegraphy while working for Western Union in Canso, Nova Scotia. He soon came up with an idea to interface a typewriter to a telegraphy system to send Morse code, and then to receive the code using the telegraph system and a typewriter in reverse order. In 1889, he set up a company in Glasgow, Scotland, to start manufacturing his Creed Teleprinters, which came to be called the Teletype. In 1898, he demonstrated transmitting the Glasgow Herald newspaper to London via telegraphy at a rate of 60 words per minute and by 1913, his system was routinely used to transmit London newspapers to other major centres in Great Britain and Europe. Creed Teleprinters were sold around the world, and provided almost instant printed communications between heads of state. In 1923, he showed that his system could also be used for ship to shore distress calls, and it became a valuable life saving system. Frederick Creed died in London in 1957.
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James Naismith

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Carbide Willson

  • 1892 - Thomas L. "Carbide" Willson invents both carbide, used to make tough, long-lasting carbide-tipped blades, and the acetylene torch. At age 19, Wilson, born in Woodstock, Ontario, invented an arc lamp street lighting system, but it didn't sell, so he turned his attention to making synthetic diamonds from an electric-arc furnace. This didn't work. But in 1892, while trying to find a way to make cheap aluminum, he produced a crystalline substance that, when dropped in water, emitted a gas which burned with a dark, smoky flame. The substance was carbide, and he had just come up with an affordable means of production, which he sold to Union Carbide in 1896. The gas was acetylene, and Willson set up a company to produce acetylene street-lights. But again his street light scheme didn't work - electricity became the preferred method of lighting city streets - so Willson looked for another use for his gas, and found it in 1903. His oxyacetylene torch could reach temperatures of 3,300°C - hot enough for welding or to use as a metal-cutting device. The torch was quickly adopted by the automotive and shipbuilding industries, and revolutionized both.
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Reginald Fessenden

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John J. McLaughlin

  • 1907 - John J. McLaughlin develops Canada Dry. The Toronto chemist and pharmacist started to bottle soda water in the early 1900s. Experimenting with different flavours, he came up with a ginger flavoured version he called McLaughlin Belfast Style Ginger Ale. He also produced a Pale Dry Ginger Ale, and gave it a label with a beaver perched atop a map of Canada. In 1907, he trademarked this version as "Canada Dry Ginger Ale," renamed his company with the same name, and soon began bottling "the champagne of ginger ales" at a plant in Toronto. Today, Canada Dry is sold in 90 countries around the world.
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Charles Saunders

  • August 29, 1907 - Charles Saunders' new hybrid Marquis wheat, developed at the Central Experimental Farm, is introduced to Prairie farmers; a hybrid of Red Fife, it is praised for its performance and yield in frost-prone areas, and in a few short years turns the Canadian Prairies into a breadbasket.
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Casey Baldwin

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Peter Robertson

  • 1908 - Peter Robertson patents his square-headed driver and screw system - the Robertson screwdriver, with green, red and black drivers for the smallest to largest square-headed screws. He invented the system after slashing himself badly with a slot-headed screwdriver. The Fisher Body Company (builders of the Ford Model T) soon picked up his invention for their production line. Today, 85% of the screws sold in Canada use the Robertson head, but only 10% of the screws sold in the US are Robertsons.
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Gideon Sundback

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Cluny Macpherson

  • 1915 -Cluny Macpherson invents the gas mask. The Newfoundland physician witnessed the 1915 battle of Ypres, when the German army sent clouds of green chlorine and deadly yellow mustard gas toward the Allied-held front lines. McPherson quickly improvised gas masks made of metal and impregnated cloth to save men from breathing the fumes. He later worked at perfecting this life saver, And eventually McPherson's mask became the standard issued to all Allied soldiers. After the war, McPherson masks were used in Canadian mines and chemical plants, cutting exposure to toxic fumes and coal dust.
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Reginald Fessenden

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Earl Bascom

  • 1920s - Earl W. Bascom co-invented rodeo's side-delivery bucking chute (1916), invented rodeo's reverse-opening side-delivery bucking chute (1919), rodeo's hornless bronc saddle (1922), rodeo's one-hand bareback rigging (1924), rodeo's high-cut chaps (1926), rodeo exercizer (1928).
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Frederick Banting

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Joseph-Armand Bombardier

  • 1922 - Joseph-Armand Bombardier builds his first snowmobile. The Valcourt, Québec mechanic and his brother salvaged the motor from an old Ford, attached it to a propeller, bolted it over four runners from a sleigh, and took the first motorized zip through the town. In 1926, four years after inventing his first motorized snow vehicle, Bombardier opened his own garage and kept tinkering with all kinds of equipment and machinery. In 1935 during a blizzard, his 2 year old child died of appendicitis because snowed in roads kept him from getting the boy to the nearest hospital, 50 km away. Two years later Bombardier had built and patented a tracked van that held 7 people and cost about $7,500. He sold 50 models. In 1958, the inventor found a light weight 2-stroke single cylinder engine called the Rotax, and in 1959, made 250 snowmobiles he called Ski-Dogs - a typographical error in the literature changed the name to Ski-Doo. A decade later, sales rose to almost a quarter million machines a year.
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William Stephenson

  • July 6, 1924 -William Stephenson sends First wire photo across Atlantic by radio, to England from New York; the First of his wirephotos was published by the Daily Mail in December, 1922. A Manitoba native, Stephenson became known as 'Intrepid' in the world of foreign espionage. His wire photo, the ancestor of the fax, allowed pictures to be transmitted over telegraph or phone lines, and later over wireless. Stephenson's first photograph by wire was sent from Washington to Baltimore in a 1923 test. The first transatlantic radiophoto relay came in 1924 when the Radio Corporation of America beamed a picture of Charles Evans Hughes from London to New York. RCA inaugurated regular radiophoto service in 1926.
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Edward S. Rogers

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Alan Brown

  • 1927 - Alan Brown, with the assistance of research doctors Theodore Drake and Fred Tisdall develop the first Pablum baby food in a laboratory at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. The name comes from the Latin pabulum, or "substance that gives nourishment." The doctors wanted to help parents feed their babies a nutritious breakfast, so they concocted the first precooked cereal for babies, a blend of alfalfa, wheat meal, oatmeal, cornmeal, wheat germ, bone meal and dried brewer's yeast.
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Arthur Sicard

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Wallace Turnbull

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Morse Robb

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Donald Munro

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William Chalmers

  • 1931 - William Chalmers, a graduate student at McGill University patents a version of shatterproof acrylic glass. It was similar to Plexiglas (methyl methacrylate patented in 1928 by Rohm and Haas), Perspex or Lucite. Chalmers sold his patent to Imperial Chemical Industries, and in 1936, ICI granted a license to DuPont to produce the material commercially. In 1937 he assigned two other patents to Rohm and Haas in Philadelphia. Today, you'll find plexiglass in car tail-lights, airplane windshields, watch and safety glasses.
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F.C.P. Henroteau

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Charles Noble

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Eli Franklin Burton

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Joseph-Armand Bombardier

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Wilbur Franks

  • 1939 - Wilbur Franks of the University of Toronto perfects the Franks Anti-Gravity G-suit, after a decade of research. The pressurized flight suit or "anti-black-out-suit" counteracted the high centrifugal forces felt by fighter pilots in dog fights, and let them carry out high-speed manoeuvres without blacking out. Used by Allied pilots from 1942 on, it led to the development of the modern space suit worn by astronauts.
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Norman Breakley

  • 1940 - Norman Breakley of Toronto invents the paint roller, bringing in the era of do-it-yourself home decorating. While his idea was great, his patents were not. He lacked the financial backing to defend his invention against slight modifications and minor infringements, and finally gave up fighting. Other Breakley inventions include a device for tapping beer kegs and a supermarket inventory system.
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Donald L. Hings

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Hugh Le Caine

  • 1945 - Hugh Le Caine invents the music synthesizer. The National Research Council scientist, who built his first musical instrument at age four, built the world's first voltage controlled music synthesizer, the Polyphone; it was analogue and polyphonic, and preceded by a decade the Moog and Buchla synthesizers which eventually triumphed in the marketplace. He also composed unique works that helped popularize electronic music. "Dripsody," a composition produced through the electronic manipulation of the sound of a single drop of water, is considered to be a classic of the genre and the most-played example of this type of electronic music.
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James Floyd

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Harry Wasylyk

  • 1950 - Winnipeg inventor Harry Wasylyk invents the green Garbage Bag. The polyethylene garbage bag was perfected by Larry Hanson, and became commercially available in 1969. Produced by Union Carbide, it was promoted by the Man from Glad character.
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John Hopps

  • 1950 - John Hopps invents the first heart pacemaker in a National Research Council lab in Ottawa. The Winnipeg native was using radio-frequency heating to restore body temperature, when he made an unexpected discovery: if a heart stopped beating due to cooling, it could be started again by mechanical or electric stimulation. His first device was too large to be implanted in humans, but the technology was reduced in size, and the first pacemaker was implanted in a human body in 1958. In 1977, Hopps himself was fitted with the device.
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Allan B. Dove

  • 1954 - Stelco patents Allan B. Dove's Ardox nail. Dove, a metallurgist at Stelco in Hamilton, came up with the revolutionary idea of a nail with a helical spiral running from tip to head. It was far easier to drive because the spiral forced wood fibres to the sides of the nail rather than letting them compress under the tip. Once driven, it stayed put, with 85% more holding power than regular nails.
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Jacques Plante

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Olivia Poole

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Edward Asselbergs

  • 1961 - Edward Asselbergs invents instant mashed potatoes. Asselbergs and his team from the Department of Agriculture were trying to produce instant meat, fish or cheese, but accidentally discovered how to make instant mashed potatoes when they found that adding powdered mashed potatoes kept the dried food from lumping together. And they didn't taste too bad themselves, either.
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George Cluthe

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Roman Kroitor

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Walter Chell

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Nestor Burtnyk

  • 1975 - Nestor Burtnyk and Marceli Wein invent key frame animation, the basic algorithm for computer animation. The two retired National Research Council of Canada scientists will win an Academy Award in 1977 for their pioneering work. Computer animation ends the need for an animator to draw each and every frame. The artist simply designates a beginning and end point in movement and computerized logic fills in the intermediate steps. This technology led to the development of a multi-million dollar Canadian animation industry. By the mid-1980s, three of the world's five major computer animation companies were Canadian. Today, the three companies - Alias, SoftImage and Vertigo - although still located in Canada, are American-owned.
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Chris Haney

  • December 5, 1979 - Chris Haney and Scott Abbott conceive the Trivial Pursuit board game in a bar in Montreal. It hit the market in 1982, and by the mid-1990s Trivial Pursuit had sold more than 60 million copies, making it by far the most popular board game in the world. Today, there are over 100 version of the game, and it's sold in more than 30 countries outside North America and in 16 languages.
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National Aeronautical Establishment

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Wilson Markle

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James Gosling

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Rasmus Lerdorf

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The Real McCoy

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Elijah McCoy

  • May 2, 1844 - Elijah McCoy born in Colchester, Ontario, the son of former slaves. This African-Canadian inventor's name came to be synomymous for genuine quality, or the real thing. Educated in Scotland as a mechanical engineer, McCoy returned to Canada and got a job as a locomotive fireman/oilman for the Michigan Central Railroad. McCoy identified new ways to lubricate engines to prevent overheating and developed over 80 patents. Machinists and engineers who wanted genuine McCoy lubricators originated the term, The Real McCoy. McCoy went on to invent and market 57 different kinds of devices and machine parts including an ironing board, rubber show heels and a lawn sprinkler.
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Reginald Fessenden

Who is Canada's greatest inventor? No contest. He's Reginald Fessenden, a physicist and the father of radio and TV broadcasting by airwaves, who registered over 500 patents in his lifetime. Fessenden was born the eldest son of the Reverend Elisha Joseph Fessenden and his wife Clementina in East Bolton, Québec, on October 6, 1866. His boyhood years were spent in Ontario - in Fergus (north of Guelph) and later, in Niagara Falls. As a child, he and his uncle watched the Bell family conduct their telephone experiments, and he wondered why Alexander Graham Bell had to use wires, when all you had to do was send waves through the air. In school Fessenden showed an aptitude in mathematics far beyond his years. His boyhood dream was to transmit the sound of the human voice without wires, which he accomplished at age 33 in Dec 1900, one year before Marconi's efforts at Signal Hill, Newfoundland.

Fessenden started work for Thomas Edison as a machine tester at age 20 and became his chief chemist by age 24. Fessenden improved the insulation of Edison's bulbs so they were far more efficient. But when financial difficulties forced Edison to lay him off, Fessenden found work with George Westinghouse, and his big breakthrough led to developing light bulbs a mass product. Edison's method of using platinum connecting wires for an electric lamp made light bulbs very expensive. Fessenden found a much cheaper way, by fusing wires of iron or nickel alloys to the glass. As a result, Westinghouse was able to win the contract to light the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By 1901, Fessenden held nine major patents for incandescent lamps.

On December 23, 1900 from a site on Cobb Island in the middle of the Potamac River near Washington, Reginald Fessenden made the first practical wireless broadcast, asking his assistant, one mile away, a typical Canadian question: "Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?" This was almost a year before Marconi's transmission in Morse code from England to Signal Hill in Newfoundland, on December 12,1901. If Fessenden invented the radio, just what did Marconi invent?

Guglielmo Marconi has been proclaimed as the "father of wireless", (even though Alexander Popov and Oliver Lodge were first in the field). Marconi and his employees thought that a spark was essential for wireless broadcasting, and actively pursued the spark method from 1895 until about 1912. His transmissions towers were essentially giant spark plugs. But as early as 1898, Reginald Fessenden saw that generating a continuous wave or sustained oscillation should be used for wireless radio. Marconi finally had to admit that Fessenden was right. In 1914 the Marconi Company licensed Fessenden's continuous wave patents from the National Electric Signalling Company (NESCO), which later became the Radio Company of America (RCA). Marconi simply developed and marketed an early form of radio telegraphy.

In 1928, RCA's David Sarnoff kept Reginald Fessenden in court for 15 years before agreeing to pay him $500,000 for patents that allowed RCA to proceed with the development of television.

Essentially, television broadcasting was invented by Reginald Fessenden and sold to RCA. Apart from his wireless wave generation patents, Fessenden took out a patent in 1927 for the first television receiver. This patent was part of a package of patents acquired by RCA from the Canadian inventor in 1928, which allowed RCA to proceed with the development of television. After settling his legal bills, Fessenden only ended up with $300,000 from the $500,000 RCA agreed to pay, but the US government's Radio Trust later paid Fessenden $2.5 million to recognize his broadcasting technology that the military used free of charge during and after World War I.

Fessenden also invented the following: - The radio pager - Sonar (Sound Navigation And Ranging) - The electrolytic detector - The fathometer - The seismograph - The Turbo-Electric Drive - The Gyrocompass - The Loop Antenna - Radio Direction-Finding - The Pheroscope For Submarines - The TV Receiver - Ultrasonic Cleaning - The Electrical Conduit - Carbon Tetrachloride - Tracer Bullets

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Others

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Lewis Urry

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Sam Jacks

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Thomas Carroll

SOURCE: CanQuiz and others

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