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Peanut - Science Photo Library/Shutterstock.com

Peanut Butter

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The protein substitute. Step aside, George Washington Carver. Contrary to almost universal belief, the celebrated American botanist didn’t create peanut butter. The stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth glory goes to Marcellus Gilmore Edson. In 1884, the Quebec chemist was awarded the first patent for peanut butter—or peanut-candy, as it was called then. Marcellus discovered it when he found that heating the surfaces to grind peanuts to 100 degrees Fahrenheit caused crushed peanuts to emerge as a

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

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

Kayak - Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Marine Transportation

Kayak

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The high-speed hunter. The kayak is the hunter’s boat in name; it means exactly that in Inuktitut, the language of its creators. The kayak is also the hunter’s boat in design; it is fast and manoeuvrable, used by Inuit hunters with equal effectiveness on rivers, inland lakes, and coastal waters. The kayak is old. Inuit hunters have relied on them for at least four thousand years. The classic vessel is constructed entirely out of natural materials, made of stitched sealskin or the skins of other

Blue Box Recycling - Andrew Park Shutterstock.com

Household Technology

Blue Box Recycling

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The better way. Earth-changing ideas are not the property of Ph.Ds. Anyone can innovate if they just look around and ask, “Can’t we do this a better way?” Nyle Ludolph asked that question. The Kitchener, Ontario, garbage man was troubled by the vast amounts of waste he saw during his daily pickups, for he knew the landfills in his town were bursting at their seams. His answer came in the form of a simple blue box. In 1983, Nyle championed the world’s first municipal curb-side recycling program

Electric Wheelchair courtesy of the National Research Council of Canada

Household Technology

Electric Wheelchair

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The veteran’s new legs. War is often an exercise in unintended consequences. The wonder-drug penicillin, for instance, enabled thousands of gravely injured World War Two servicemen to survive their wounds, yet many of these otherwise doomed veterans returned to their homes and families as paraplegics and quadriplegics. Conventional wheelchairs were of little use to these men, whose manual strength and dexterity had been impaired or eliminated. George Klein embraced this new challenge—an

Electric Radio courtesy of Ingenium

Household Technology

Electric Radio

Ingenious - Ingénieux

The freedom from batteries. Today the name Rogers is synonymous with communication in Canada. While most associate the surname with the tv and mobile empire, the first man behind the name was a radio guy. And not just any radio guy. In 1925, Edward Rogers Sr. developed the first commercially viable all-electric radio in Toronto, Ontario. The tireless inventor also created an adaptor set that made it possible for owners of old sets to throw away their batteries and plug their radios into the

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