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Five Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Canadian

Posted by & filed under Other / Canada.

I had some free time this after­noon and was feel­ing just a tad patri­otic, so I decided to hop on wikipedia and dis­cover some of the groovier things invented by our fel­low Cana­di­ans. What fol­lows are five of the more sur­pris­ing things I had come across, com­plete with wik­iquotes and links to the orig­i­nal arti­cles. How many did you know were Canadian?

1. Five-Pin Bowl­ing — Five-pin bowl­ing is a bowl­ing vari­ant which is only played in Canada, where many bowl­ing alleys offer it, either alone or in com­bi­na­tion with ten-pin bowl­ing. It was devised in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury to offer bowlers the chance to play a game dur­ing a half-hour lunch break. This goal was achieved by using smaller balls which travel faster than ten-pin balls and which can be thrown in rapid suc­ces­sion. Five-pin bowl­ing was invented in 1909 by Thomas F. Ryan in Toronto, Ontario.

2. Bloody Cae­sar — …was invented by bar­tender Wal­ter Chell at the Owl’s Nest Bar in the Westin Hotel in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada in 1969, to accom­pany the open­ing of a new restau­rant, “Marco’s”. In its orig­i­nal form, it con­tained tomato juice and mashed clams; Clam­ato had only just been released (with the assis­tance of Chell) by the Amer­i­can Mott’s com­pany that very year, and was not yet widely known or available.

3. The Zip­per — was invented in St. Catharines, Ontario by Gideon Sund­back, a Swedish-born immi­grant to Canada who was in 1913 the top designer at Uni­ver­sal Fas­tener Com­pany. He made his first “Hook­less fas­tener” in 1913, and designed the com­plex machin­ery needed to man­u­fac­ture it. The patent was issued in 1917 as a “sep­a­ra­ble fas­tener.” The B. F. Goodrich Com­pany coined the name Zip­per in 1923 for the line of rub­ber over­shoes that it made using the fas­tener. The name slowly came to be asso­ci­ated with the fas­tener itself, and even­tu­ally acquired generic status.

4. Robert­son Screw­driver — A Robert­son screw­driver is a type of screw­driver with a square-shaped tip…The dri­vers are famous for hold­ing onto screws (you can start dri­ving a screw hor­i­zon­tally into the wall, and leave the screw­driver in the screw while you have lunch)…Today Robert­son screws are almost unknown in the United King­dom, scarce in the United States, where they are used mainly in the­atri­cal set con­struc­tion and account for 10% of screws sold, while being very com­mon in Canada where 85% of the screws sold use the Robert­son head.

5. The Elec­tric Stove - Thomas Ahearn invented the elec­tric cook­ing range in 1892 and installed one in the Wind­sor Hotel in Mon­treal. The elec­tric stove was show­cased at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where an elec­tri­fied model kitchen was shown. But like the gas stove, the elec­tri­cal stove had a slow start, partly due to the unsta­ble tech­nol­ogy, and partly because first cities and town needed to be elec­tri­fied. By the 1930s, the tech­nol­ogy had matured and the elec­tri­cal stove started to slowly replace the gas stove, espe­cially in domes­tic kitchens.

32 Responses to “Five Inventions You Didn’t Know Were Canadian”

  1. jenifesto

    Dear God, why doesn’t St. Catharines have a “Home of the Zip­per” sign out by the Ontario Street exit?!

  2. M@

    Same with Mil­ton and the Robert­son screw­driver. I hate the damned Phillipps screws with a pas­sion. You never strip a Robert­son screw, and they’re a lot more for­giv­ing about the size of the screw­driver. Plus, you’re not using a semi-sharpened tool, and it almost never slips out of the screw no mat­ter how much torque you use — that means you’ll never acci­den­tally ruin the fin­ish on some­thing while you’re screw­ing it together.

    Truly a mar­vel of engi­neer­ing, and that damned Henry Ford screwed (ha) every­one by going with the Phillipps.

  3. Dodgey Rog

    Great arti­cle, I never heard of the Robert­son or the Swedish guy in the Zip­per clip either. The screws seem to be very good, but would need a big user to get them mov­ing over here in the UK. My son is in Canada at Cold Lake, it’s one of the coun­tries that I truly want see before I “Peg It”.
    Love the blog too. Very dif­fer­ent to mine! It’s also very nice to be able to leave a com­ment with­out hav­ing to reg­is­ter first. I find it takes the edge of com­ment­ing if you have to do that first?
    Happy New Year
    Dodge

  6. will

    just for the sake of accu­racy. I should men­tion that when Gideon Sund­back invented the hook­less fas­tener #2, he was work­ing for a com­pany that was based in Hobo­ken NJ (and a hand­ful of other US cities dur­ing the inven­tion process) for an amer­i­can. So I don’t think he was fid­dling with the hook and eye in ontario until later on when he immi­grated to canada; but that was after the fact. I guess he missed the cold of swe­den. Bri­tan­nica online men­tions that he was work­ing in the US as well dur­ing it’s cre­ation.
    It would be quite a stretch for you guys to take this one.

  7. Etiketer

    Thanks! Really inter­est­ing. I wish i could spend my time on writ­ing articles…just have no time for it.

  9. amanda

    The Robert­son screw­driver is the best screw­driver there is! You rarely ever have to worry about strip­ping the screw or scrap­ing up the item you’re putting together.…can’t say that about any other type of screw­driver. I can’t believe that they are so pop­u­lar only in Canada!

  10. randy belaire

    Here is another Cana­dian inven­tion — the tele­phone. Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell invented the tele­phone while liv­ing in Canada. He man­u­fac­tured it in Boston because he was work­ing there teach­ing
    the deaf. One of his most famous stu­dents was Helen Keller. He frquently trav­elled between Brant­ford in Canada and Boston.

  13. abbasgirl

    I’m really sur­prised that the Robert­son is only used in Canada. I think if other coun­tries were intro­duced to it they’d switch over pretty quick.

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  18. m

    So the Zip­per was invented by a Swed and the tele­phone was invented by a Scots­man. so just because it was invented on cana­dian soil make it canadian?

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