Us Canadians are a proud people and yet there are so many inventions that people don’t realize we came up with. Some include the Wonderbra, the paint roller and well we all know about hockey but sports like basketball and football just to name a few. Some inventions were not so good like Hawaiian pizza. Here is my list for the top 5 Canadian inventions:
5. Garbage Bag
Starting off the list is something we tend to use quite often if not everyday which is a garbage bag. The garbage bag was invented by a Winnipeg man Harry Wasylyk along with Larry Hansen of Lindsay, Ontario, created the disposable polyethylene garbage bag in 1950. The garbage bag was intended for commercial use rather than home use interestingly enough with the first being sold to Winnipeg General Hospital.
4. Egg Cartons
Something so iconic yet wasn’t thought of for the longest time. Eggs were collected and carried in baskets and pales but would often break so Joseph Coyle, a journalist and publisher for the Interior News in the Bulkley Valley. Coyle patented his idea in 1918. In 1919, he sold his newspaper and moved to Vancouver, putting all of his effort into his new business. He moved on to cities such as Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles, setting up factories as he went.
3. Peanut Butter
This one shocked me until I saw a certain Super Bowl commercial and looked into it. The inventor of the peanut butter paste spread that would eventually become known as peanut butter was from Quebec. Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a chemist and pharmacist promoted the idea of peanut paste as a delicious and nutritious foodstuff for people who could hardly chew solid food, a common state in those days. In 1884 Edson was awarded United States Patent No. 306727 for the invention.
2. AM Radio
There has always been a debate over who invented radio, but no question as to who invented AM radio and it was Reginald Fessenden a Canadian born in East Bolton, Canada East (Quebec). Reginald discovered amplitude modulation (AM) radio and explaining its scientific principles. With his heterodyne principle, he put into practice the idea of mixing two high frequency signals to carry the audible low frequency of the human voice. In 1900 he did just that, transmitting his voice with his “wireless telephone.” Six years later, history was made on Christmas Eve when Fessenden transmitted the first radio broadcast from Brant Rock Station, Massachusetts. Fessenden held over 200 patents, including a version of microfilm and an early form of sonar.
1. Insulin
The invention that saved lives and got Sir Frederick Banting ranked number 4 on The Greatest Canadian back in 2004. Banting from Alliston, Ontario, co-discovered of insulin, which would lead to him becoming a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Banting concluded that the digestive secretions that Minkowski had originally studied were breaking down the islet secretion, thereby making it impossible to extract successfully. Banting and Charles Best, a fellow Canadian from Coquitlam, British Columbia, in 1921 successfully isolated the hormone insulin for the first time. The breakthrough research took place at the University of Toronto, where Banting and Best successfully isolated insulin from dogs, produced diabetes symptoms in the animals, and then provided insulin injections that produced normal blood glucose levels. By 1922 insulin were tried on humans and would take diabetes, which was a certain death sentence to manageable.
– Everett
