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Groups of stories handpicked by the team at Ingenium

Innovation Storybook

This board features articles that were originally written and submitted as part of a Canada 150 Project, the Innovation Storybook, to crowdsource stories of Canadian innovation with partners across Canada. The content has since been migrated to Ingenium’s Channel, a digital hub featuring curated content related to science, technology and innovation.

507 Stories:

Telesurgery - courtesy of the National Research Council of Canada

Telesurgery

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The remote operation. Innovation often involves marrying seemingly unrelated methods to tackle pressing problems. In 2013, surgeons at the University Health Network in Toronto—led by Dr. Allan Okrainec—and engineers at Canada’s National Research Council—led by Nushi Choudhury—brought together the latest advances in communications and simulation technology to provide long-distance teaching to neurosurgeons in Ghana. The need for teaching is plain. More than fourteen thousand young children are

Kit Coleman - The Carbon Studio/Library and Archives Canada

Syndicated Journalism

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The insight readers wait for. Anyone who grew up with Ann Landers and Dear Abby may be forgiven for thinking that advice to the lovelorn is an American innovation, but they’d be wrong. The honour must be given (among many others) to Toronto’s Kit Coleman, who in 1889 began penning her regular column “Woman’s Kingdom” in the Toronto Mail. While the bylined feature was styled “for women only,” it was avidly read by men too, notably Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who, by his own admission, would

Retail Cosmetics - gresei/Shutterstock.com

Business & Economics

Retail Cosmetics

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The new way to be ladylike. Born in 1878, Florence Nightingale Graham learned about business at her father’s side whenever they rode in their horse-drawn vegetable cart from Woodbridge, Ontario, to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. Life was tough; the market trade earned little and, after her mother died young, Florence routinely went to bed hungry, shivering in the cold. She vowed to reverse her fortunes later in life. At the turn of the century, she made her way to New York and worked as one of

Nuclear Physics - snapgalleria/Shutterstock.com

Nuclear Physics

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The logic of the atom. Ernest Rutherford is widely considered the father of nuclear physics. His defining accomplishment came in 1917 when he split the atom in a nuclear reaction. In doing so, he discovered and named the proton, and blasted the world into the atomic age. This breakthrough didn’t happen in a vacuum. Rutherford carried out much of his early work in nuclear physics at Montreal’s McGill University from 1898 to 1905. While there, he conceived the idea of radioactive half-life, proved

Multi-touch screen - OmniArt/Shutterstock.com

Household Technology

Multi-touch screens

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The pinch and the zoom. Innovators had the idea for multi-touch screens in their minds and down on paper for years. The true breakthrough in this technology came in 1982. It occurred at the University of Toronto when members of the school’s Input Research Group actually made the first human-input multi-touch screen. Their screen featured a frosted-glass panel with a camera behind. The camera detected when a finger or fingers were placed on the panel and registered these input points as black

Life Jacket: Pitchayarat-Chootai/Shutterstock.com

Household Technology

Life Jacket

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The Inuit fisher’s insurance. When exposed to Canada’s frigid waters—both coastal and inland—you will often perish more quickly from heat loss than drowning. Inuit whale fishers knew this truth. They made what are known as spring-pelts, which are sealskin or seal gut stitched together to create a waterproof covering for their torsos. These early life jackets evolved, more insulated and buoyant over time, until they became the sailor’s salvation we know today.

Zipper - urfin/Shutterstock.com

Household Technology

Zipper

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The hookless fastener. Many great innovations simply speed up or eliminate the actions that consume our time. The hookless fastener, more commonly known as the zipper, is one of the classics. The man on the other side of the zipper is Swedish-born Gideon Sundback. In 1913, he came up with something he called the Hookless No. 2. It’s the metal zipper as we know it today—two strips of teeth brought together tightly by a slider. No more tricky buckles or time-consuming hook-and-eye fasteners

Jolly Jumper: Photograph courtesy of Jolly Jumper

Household Technology

Jolly Jumper

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The back saver. Life is hard enough with two arms. When one of them must hold a squirming youngster, it can be downright impossible. After her first child was born in 1910, Toronto mother Susan Olivia Poole was keen to stay active. Inspired by the papooses used by Aboriginal mothers to carry their children, she fashioned a harness of er own. It was a cotton diaper fashioned as a sling seat, a coiled spring to suspend its wearer from above, and an axe handle to secure the contraption. Susan

Insulin - Photo courtesy of Ingenium

Insulin

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The end of terror. Diabetes. There was a time when the word struck terror in the hearts of parents. A child diagnosed with the disease could expect to live a life of perpetual illness and suffering that would likely end in death before the child emerged from adolescence. That the word no longer strikes terror is largely because of three Canadians: medical scientist Dr. Frederick Banting, his assistant Charles Best, and their University of Toronto patron and adviser J.J.R. Macleod. In their

Lightbulb - Photo courtesy of Ingenium

Household Technology

Light Bulb

Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation

The bright future. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the electric light bulb. Credit for that illuminating discovery must go to an unlikely duo from Toronto. Dreaming of a bright future in 1874, medical student Henry Woodward and hotelkeeper Mathew Evans fashioned a bulb out of a glass tube that contained a large piece of carbon connected to two wires. When they hit the switch, the current flowed and the carbon glowed. But not for long. They then filled their bulb with inert nitrogen to prolong the

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