People
Whether it was bringing portable power to the masses, reinventing the future of skiing or pioneering global standard time, Canadians have played important roles in innovation. Here's a look at notable individuals who changed the course of history through their innovative thinking.
Lewis Urry
A growing list of products – ranging from toys to household appliances – run on battery technology inspired by Lewis
Urry's innovation. The Canadian inventor's alkaline cell he created in 1957 powered the consumer electronics revolution, and helped build a global market for household batteries that's worth about $4.5-billion (U.S.) a year.
JP Auclair, JF Cusson and Vincent Dorion
By 1997, skiing had started to fade in popularity thanks to the rise of snowboarding. But a group of skiers in Whistler, B.C. – Quebeckers JP Auclair, JF Cusson and Vincent Dorion – began emulating snowboarders with the creation of twin-tip skis, and the sport was reinvented for a new era. The Canadian skiers created skis which curl up at the front and back, just like snowboards, allowing skiers to try cool tricks and ski in the halfpipe.
The Horstman Glacier on Blackcomb Mountain was a nexus. It was also open for skiing in the summer, with an array of jumps attracting pros and film crews. The pioneering skiers – Auclair, Cusson and others – were dubbed the New Canadian Air Force.
They 'changed everything about the way people skied or even thought about skiing,' wrote Leslie Anthony in his 2010 book White Planet, a chronicle of skiing. 'It was skiing's greatest-ever revolution.'
Sandford Fleming
Travelling around the world is a lot easier today thanks to Sandford Fleming. The Scottish-born engineer, an avid traveller and railway engineer, helped institute a global 24-hour clock after a train schedule mishap. But Fleming's proposal for 24 time zones, each representing 15 degrees of longitude and an hour of solar time, would become his most lasting legacy.
When Fleming read [the 1876 treatise] 'Terrestrial Time' to the Royal Canadian Institute in Toronto, the paper’s significance was recognized right away. According to Time Lord, the book by [Clark] Blaise, Canada’s Governor-General had the text translated in London and sent to the world’s top astronomers. From that point on, Fleming would be the global face of standard time, addressing the subject at conferences from Montreal to Venice.
Richard K. Downey
Before there was canola, there was rapeseed – canola's smelly, bad-for-you cousin – which was crushed for its oil and, for centuries, used for everything from cooking and lamp oil to lubricants in the steam engines and ships that powered the war effort. It wasn't until the 1960s, when Richard K. Downey, a plant breeder and federal government scientist from Saskatoon, transformed rapeseed into a healthful, edible crop by breeding out the nasty traits – the erucic acid (bad for the heart and other organs) and the glucosinolates (bad for the livestock that ate the crushed byproduct known as meal), to create a variation of what would eventually become canola. Today, canola is grown on 8.2-million hectares of Canadian farmland and found in doughnut deep-fryers, chicken feed and fine kitchens.
James Gosling
Most Canadians have never heard of James Gosling. But the Alberta-born principal creator of Java – one of the most widely used and longest-lived programming languages in modern computing – is a hero in Silicon Valley. In places like India and China, it can be difficult for Gosling to get around without being mobbed by people excited to meet him.
Java is the foundational software behind Android, the operating system found on most mobile devices. By some measures, Java can be found on 97 per cent of enterprise computer systems, and the virtual-machine systems Gosling designed for Java are critical to cloud computing. For those who remember the Y2K computing crisis, Java was the main tool used to repair and replace the broken systems.
The goal was never just to, like, go off and build a programming language because it’s fun. I didn’t do programming language stuff in college at all. It was: ‘Here’s a set of problems. How can I fix them?’ It was a situation where the right answer was a programming language so that’s what I did.
The creators of Trivial Pursuit, Cirque du Soleil and five-pin bowling
Thanks to a bunch of Canadians, Trivial Pursuit, Cirque du Soleil and five-pin bowling made the world a more fun and leisurely place.
Montreal Gazette photographer Chris Haney and his friend Scott Abbott, a Canadian Press sports reporter, created Trivial Pursuit – the bestselling Canadian board game in history – when they went to play a game of Scrabble and discovered six tiles were missing.
Before the opulent multimillion-dollar touring productions, or the permanent productions in Las Vegas, Cirque du Soleil was just a handful of misfits in the Quebec town of Baie-Saint-Paul, on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River. They were known as Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul, a band of musicians, jugglers and stilt-walkers founded by Gilles Ste-Croix. In 1984, Cirque du Soleil was born after Guy Laliberté – who had joined the group as a stilt-walking, fire-breathing accordionist in 1980 – saw an opportunity to take the production on tour around Quebec.
Five-pin bowling came to fruition when Thomas F. Ryan adapted the game for members at his bowling alley – the first in Canada – who complained that the 16-pound bowling balls with a 27-inch circumference were too cumbersome to hold, and unwieldy to throw. Ryan, who opened Canada's first ten-pin bowling lanes in 1905 in a Toronto club above a downtown jewellery store, believed a few modifications were needed in order to make the game popular in Canada.
Products
From the pacemaker to the maple syrup can to the Wonderbra, these are Canadian products that have changed the way people around the world live.
Northern telecom innovations
Over the past 150 years, developments in the telecommunications industry have been remarkable and relatively numerous. Many names dot Canada's history of innovation in telecom: Bell and the telephone, Rogers and the battery-less radio, the Canadian Marconi Company and advancements in radar, Nortel and digital switching equipment and, of course, Research In Motion and the BlackBerry.
BELL CANADA ARCHIVES
Wonderbra and jockstraps
Of all Canadian inventions and innovations, there are
two that changed the foundations of this country in the most intimate ways. To this day, whether buried in a lingerie drawer or shoved into a hockey bag, one thing is nakedly apparent: The world would not be the same without the Wonderbra and the hard-shell jockstrap.
It showed that Canada can be as important as other countries in innovation and fashion and making a superior product.
It is Canada's cocktail, a drink that has been described as both "a national treasure" and "a fixture of Canadian life," and it stands atop the bar as red and bold as the maple leaf itself. The Bloody Caesar is Canada's most enduringly patriotic cocktail, its creation in Calgary part of our national story.
Discoveries
From the Canadarm to the world's first exchange-traded fund to the discovery of stem cells, these are just some of the discoveries that have made Canada a leader in innovation.
Canadarm
More than 20 years ago, when engineers were dreaming up how a robotic system to service the International Space Station would work, no one yet foresaw just how much work there would be for it to do. "As with the first generation of Canadarms that flew on the space shuttle, the key to the system's success would prove to be its ability to take on new roles as the needs and priorities of the space program changed."
Exchange-traded fund
In 1990, the Toronto Stock Exchange introduced the world's first successful exchange-traded fund (ETF), the Toronto 35 Index Participation Fund, known as TIPs, changing the way the world invests.
The appeal was clear: The units traded throughout the day, they provided instant diversification to Canadian blue-chip stocks, and management fees were zero.
Institutional investors loved the ETF because they could use it to move money in and out of the market easily. But small investors eventually discovered that the ETF gave them the chance to invest like big-shot pension funds, with access to a basket of stocks for little more than a one-time commission on a stock trade.
The success of the first ETF in Canada – now known as the iShares S&P/TSX 60 index ETF, and owned by BlackRock Inc. – helped spawn a global industry that numbers thousands of funds worldwide, giving investors access to emerging market stocks, gold, corporate bonds and just about every other asset class you can think of.
The success of the first ETF in Canada – now known as the iShares S&P/TSX 60 index ETF, and owned by BlackRock Inc. – helped spawn a global industry that numbers thousands of funds worldwide, giving investors access to emerging market stocks, gold, corporate bonds and just about every other asset class you can think of.
Stem cells
Two Canadians, biophysicist James Till and cellular biologist Ernest McCulloch, discovered stem cells in 1961. They published a series of studies redefining the hallmark properties of stem cells, namely an ability to renew themselves and repair and replace tissue in the body, and showing they were transplantable. Their research laid the foundation for regenerative medicine and fuelled the emergence of the biomedical industry, particularly in Canada.
Glow in the dark coins
Deep inside a Winnipeg factory, past the pumping presses, past the gurgling acid baths and past the tumbling vats of corn-cob grit, there’s a room where the Royal Canadian Mint is crafting its latest weapon in the global race to make money: making the coins glow in the dark.
It’s the first time the Mint has added fluorescence to a circulation coin and it’s the institution’s latest innovation in a global chase for security, durability and profit.
JOHN WOODS/FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Insulin
Before insulin, children with juvenile diabetes (now called Type 1) lived only 1.4 years on average after diagnosis. Adults fared only slightly better: One in five lived 10 years after diagnosis, but with severe complications such as blindness, kidney failure, stroke, heart attack and the necessity to amputate limbs.
Insulin forever changed the lives of people with diabetes. It’s one of the great medical discoveries of all times, a Canadian innovation that has saved millions of lives.
1
People with Type 1 diabetes
have a total lack of insulin.
Without insulin, cells cannot
absorb glucose, which they
need to produce energy. They
can suffer from dangerously
low blood glucose.
LOW
BLOOD
GLUCOSE
Glycogen released
by alpha cells
of pancreas
Raises
blood sugar
LIVER
glucose*
glycogen*
PANCREAS
Insulin
released by
beta cells
of pancreas
Tissues
take up
glucose
from blood
Lowers
blood
sugar
People with Type 2 diabetes
cannot use insulin effectively.
They tend to have high levels of
blood glucose, which causes
damage to blood vessels and a
host of complications.
2
HIGH
BLOOD
GLUCOSE
*Insulin stimulates the liver to remove glucose from the blood and stores it as glycogen.
Glucagon stimulates the conversion of stored
glycogen in the liver into glucose.
CARRIE COCKBURN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL,
SOURCE: THE SCIENTIST
1
People with Type 1 diabetes have a
total lack of insulin. Without insulin,
cells cannot absorb glucose, which
they need to produce energy. They
can suffer from dangerously low
blood glucose.
LOW BLOOD
GLUCOSE
Raises blood
sugar
Glycogen released
by alpha cells of
pancreas
glucose*
LIVER
glycogen*
PANCREAS
Insulin
released by
beta cells
of pancreas
Tissues
take up
glucose
from blood
Lowers
blood
sugar
People with Type 2 diabetes cannot
use insulin effectively. They tend to
have high levels of blood glucose,
which causes damage to blood vessels
and a host of complications.
2
HIGH
BLOOD
GLUCOSE
*Insulin stimulates the liver to remove glucose from the blood and stores it as glycogen.
Glucagon stimulates the conversion of stored
glycogen in the liver into glucose.
CARRIE COCKBURN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: THE SCIENTIST
People with Type 1 diabetes have a total lack of
insulin. Without insulin, cells cannot absorb
glucose, which they need to produce energy. They
can suffer from dangerously low blood glucose.
1
LOW BLOOD GLUCOSE
Raises
blood sugar
Glycogen released
by alpha cells of
pancreas
Insulin
stimulates
the liver to remove
glucose from the blood and stores it as glycogen
LIVER
glucose
glycogen
Glucagon stimulates the conversion of stored
glycogen in the liver into glucose
PANCREAS
Insulin released
by beta cells
of pancreas
Tissues take up
glucose from
blood
Lowers
blood sugar
People with Type 2 diabetes cannot use
insulin effectively. They tend to have high levels
of blood glucose, which causes damage to blood
vessels and a host of complications.
2
HIGH BLOOD GLUCOSE
CARRIE COCKBURN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: THE SCIENTIST