Collections & Connections

A Carleton history student wrestles with a “green monstrosity” at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and learns about the history of the Canadian textile industry.

The Central Experimental Farm (CEF) in Ottawa is known for agricultural ingenuity and scientific discovery, as a national historic site and urban greenspace, and for being the home of the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum. Architecture, however, is not typically the first thing people associate with this agricultural oasis in Ottawa.

The Billings Estate National Historic Site is currently displaying a curious wooden bicycle. It was hand built in the late 1890s by a teenager named James Henry Blair, using materials scavenged off his father’s Gloucester farm. Artifacts at the Canada Science and Technology Museum give us a rare chance to explore the mindset of this young inventor as he puzzled through the process of how to build a bicycle with limited resources.

With the recent announcement that James Peebles had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, it is timely to revisit the history of the Physics Department at the University of Manitoba. In 2013, I visited the department to learn specifically about their program in mass spectrometry. On a broader level, my research and collecting touched on aspects of Peebles's rich undergraduate experience in the 1950s. It has been over one hundred years since British scientists developed methods to deflect ions (charged

Born and educated in Mumbai, the culturally diverse metropolis of India, I moved to Canada in 2018 as a new permanent resident to pursue my passion of making science more accessible and building trust in the brand, “Made in India.”

Today marks 136 years since this photograph — a panorama on the banks of the Thames River at Cliveden, west of London — was taken on August 31, 1883. The 43 men in this group portrait constitute a “who’s-who” of international fisheries in the late nineteenth century. All were in London attending the Great International Fisheries Exhibition, which had opened in the spring of that year. That August day they enjoyed a river excursion, breaking away from London and the exhibition.

You might not imagine that volunteer work at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum would involve unravelling a mystery. But in truth, it can!

VIEW INFOGRAPHIC It’s no secret that Ingenium is gearing up for a big move. As staff busy themselves with this mammoth task, let us take a moment to fully appreciate just one of the MANY collections being packed up for the journey to the new Collections Conservation Center. Did you know that the Canada Science and Technology Museum holds the largest collection related to the history of bicycle technology in Canada? The Shields Collection contains over 3,000 items from the early nineteenth