The Woulda Coulda Shoulda Guide to Canadian Inventions

by Red Green

  EGG CARTON

  Joseph Coyle

  The egg carton was invented in 1911. This was thousands of years after the invention of the scrambled egg. The world has always been full of slow learners.

  The inventor of the egg carton was a newspaper editor named Joseph Coyle of Smithers, British Columbia. He did it to solve an argument between a local farmer and a hotel owner in the area. The disagreement was over the farmer’s eggs often being delivered broken and who should take the blame. My guess is that the hotel guy didn’t want to pay for broken eggs, which meant the farmer wasn’t able to afford his newspaper subscription. In walks Mr. Coyle and everybody wins.

  I’m sure it was a big help to the entire egg industry to have a new form of packaging that cut down on the amount of breakage. Up to that point, eggs were transported in an egg basket.

  Not the smartest way to carry eggs during a time of cobblestone roads and wooden-wheeled wagons. A practice that required a general lack of respect for things like gravity. That led to the popular expression “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” But as you can see from the picture, you’d have to have a very low egg inventory to be able to get them all in one basket.

  Egg Basket Credit 18

  So the egg carton not only made the eggs safer, it increased the minimum number of eggs the customer had to buy at one time. Generally sold in dozens (although the carton in the picture only holds ten—a metric dozen, maybe?), the farmer could get more egg sales per buyer. The days of the one-egg, or the dreaded half-egg, sales were over.

  —

  But the more practical use of the egg carton was discovered by local Possum Lake resident Beatrice Schmomf. Known to residents as Bea Schmomf (which was also her motto), she recognized the egg carton as a light, compact, yet pretty strong storage container for small pieces of jewellery or craft supplies or sewing machine bobbins or individual teeth. She made her own clothes, as you can see from the nautical outfit she’s wearing on this page, but was unsuccessful in persuading any major fashion house to get on board.

  Bea had a minimal social life and instead turned to crafts as her life partner. She took up sewing and needlework and pottery and embroidery and zentangles and stained glass and watercolours and basket weaving and crocheting and quilting and solitaire and welding. Each of these crafts needed a supply of raw materials, usually made up of a whole bunch of small pieces that gave her an infinite number of possible combinations.

  Beatrice Schmomf, Craft Queen and Man Hater

  Having all those options at her fingertips meant a person could have a tea cozy for every day of the week. Or as Bea would say, “Every day of the year!” After which she’d go into her huge, snorty laugh that always ended with a crying jag that often lasted more than an hour.

  In her later years, Bea became very bitter. She stayed alone in her house with her crafts and rejected any contact with the outside world. She was over halfway through a giant, eight-foot needlepoint that said, “Drop Dead” when, ironically, she did. As the authorities searched her home, they found over twelve thousand egg cartons and her will, which asked that her body be laid out on top of the stacked cartons in the form of a raft that was to be set on fire and floated out to sea.

  Her wishes were carried out, and that is how Beatrice Schmomf left us. That was her eggsit. I can almost hear that snorty laugh.

  —

  This should be an eye-opener for you budding inventors out there. If you can’t think of anything new to invent, find something that’s already out there and invent a better holder for it. And the egg carton is not the only example in this book. Check out the jockstrap and the Wonderbra—same principle.

  There is no shame in inventing something that makes something else better. In fact, I would say that the holder is often as important as the item itself. For example, a holster. Can you imagine the Lone Ranger galloping across the plains with a six-gun in each of his pants pockets? Or a quiver. General Custer would have been fine if the Plains Indians had had to carry their extra arrows in their teeth.

  So take a look around and see if you can find something that would be better if it had some kind of decent holder. But please don’t crochet any more toilet-paper cozies.

  The purpose of a clock is to tell, and keep telling accurately, the current time in the zone where the clock is operating. The clock started out as a pretty simple machine, but as more and more men got involved, it got so complicated it’d give you a headache.

  Probably the simplest version was the sundial, which told time using the shadow cast by the sun as it moved through the sky. The technology wasn’t so great, but the best part was that on a cloudy day, nobody could tell if you were late for work. And any appointments after sundown were a crapshoot.

  Actually, lots of different things have been used to tell time over the years. Moving beads of water or sand in a glass, or incoming tides, but the most consistently reliable way is by using moms. My mother always knew when it was time for dinner, time for a bath, time for bed, and, unfortunately, even when it was time for a talking-to.

  Women have internal clocks. They start ticking loudly when that woman wants to have a baby, or when a nearby man says or does something inappropriate, or as soon as leftover chocolate cake gets put in the fridge. Those kinds of clocks are nearly impossible to understand, unless you are either a mind reader or even remotely paying attention, so I say it’s better to use a digital one. Or analog if you are a bit of a show-off.

  But whatever type of clock you like, you gotta admit it’s been a pretty useful invention over the years. Without clocks, we’d never know how late we are.

  RATING: Better than a calendar, but still not the greatest invention in the world of all time ever. Candidate #4 coming up next.

  Credit 19

  ELECTRIC OVEN

  Thomas Ahearn

  Credit 20

  Thomas Ahearn was born in Ottawa on June 24, 1855. If there was ever a guy who deserved the nickname Sparky, Tommy boy is it. A pioneer in the field of electricity and its implementations, Thomas brought streetcars to Ottawa. He then had the patent filed for the first electric car heater and the first electric oven in 1892. When you live in Ottawa, you like things that generate heat.

  Later that year, he cooked up an elaborate meal for a party of fifty (which he delivered by streetcar), using only his electric oven—the first meal of its kind ever recorded. Pretty impressive when you invent how a meal is cooked and the vehicle that delivers it.

  In school, we were taught that electricity is kind of like water. It flows. And if you’ve got a big lake at one end of a river and a little pond at the other, the water will go from the big one to the little one. Electricity does the same thing, but inside a wire instead of a river. But water will not go uphill without a pump. Electricity goes wherever it wants without anything. And water has a way of changing and adapting to whatever obstacles it comes up against. If the riverbed isn’t wide enough to handle all the water that’s going by, the water just flows up over the sides and through a bunch of basements.

  If the wire isn’t thick enough to handle all the electricity that’s going by, the electricity has nowhere else to go, so it just keeps hammering through the wire, smashing into molecules, which generates enough heat to eventually melt the wire, which breaks the connection, causing the electricity to go nuts because it has to go somewhere, so it starts arcing wildly in all directions until it senses someone nearby who has a metal plate in their head and bare feet.

  Water would never do that. So I would say electricity is different from water. In the same way that a nuclear warhead is different from a party balloon.

  —

  It’s not really a shock that Mr. Ahearn worked with streetcars before he invented the electric oven. They’re both machines that harness the energy from electricity and convert it into a more useful and controllable form. The streetcar converts the electricity to magnetism that makes a motor turn, which moves the streetcar. The oven converts the electricity
to heat. With both of them, the key ingredient is a supply of consistent, regulated electricity.

  The voltage and available amperage of direct current is supplied evenly to the streetcar motor. That’s what makes it manageable. You couldn’t do that with a lightning bolt. The result would be more of a streetcar dragster. Same thing with the oven—a steady supply of alternating current converts to a steady supply of heat and prevents the owner from fluctuating between cold soup and a kitchen fire.

  But of the two, the oven is the most scientific. That’s because of the need to match the components. It’s all about resistance. It’s like a marriage—if there’s too much resistance, everything shuts down. But if there’s no resistance, there’s no heat—not even the good kind.

  So once you’ve got your steady supply of regulated electricity, the burner becomes the next important piece of the puzzle. That’s because every element in nature has its own resistance to electric current. Copper has almost none. Electricity whips through copper like swine flu through a cruise ship. But try getting electricity to go through a rock sometime. I would say trees are more or less the middle ground. Nowhere near as good a conductor as copper, but it’s still possible to get electricity through a tree, as many lightning bolts have discovered.

  So my guess is that Mr. Ahearn’s biggest breakthrough with the electric oven was finding the right metal formulation for the burners. Something that would have enough resistance to heat up but not burn out. Without those elements, you got no elements.

  —

  The real danger with electricity again, like a marriage, is that after a while you take it for granted. And then you’re in for a shock. The average house these days has a box in the basement that distributes 220 volts of electricity at 100 amps or more. That’s a lotta juice. And if you don’t believe me, try plugging a bobby pin into an electrical outlet. Actually please, please don’t try that.

  You’ve got all kind of things in your house that convert electricity to a usable form. Like streetcars, you’ve got a bunch of electromagnetic motors in your house—ceiling fans, furnace blowers, refrigerator and air conditioning compressors, garage door openers, blenders, power tools, etc. And other stuff that converts electricity to heat—ovens, toasters, baseboard heaters, light bulbs, etc.

  And in the last fifty years or so we’ve found a way to use electricity as electricity—TVs, computers, security cameras, etc. Okay, that’s all good, but we don’t want to ever take electricity for granted. Print these rules off and hang them at eye height:

  • Never dry your hair while taking a bath.

  • Do not sit on a stove, even if triple-dog dared to.

  • Don’t wear your Abe Lincoln hat if there’s a ceiling fan.

  • If a breaker keeps tripping, don’t try to glue it in the ON position.

  • If you do your own wiring, go the extra mile and connect the ground wire. Otherwise you’ll come home late one night, flip on the porch light and the electricity will arc out of the switch and nail the car keys hammocked in your pants pocket.

  • Don’t go near anything that’s humming and smoking. Especially if it’s your uncle.

  Regardless of where our electricity comes from—waterfalls, solar or wind—I think it’s going to be a bigger part of our lives in the future.

  I’ve got all kinds of ideas for experiments that could be done to improve the human experience. Okay, maybe not all kinds. But certainly one kind. For example, we all learned at an early age that you can create a magnetic field by wrapping wire around a toilet paper roll and then hooking it up to a battery. And if you slipped it over a metal rod, the rod became a magnet. The opposite also worked: if you slipped a magnetic rod into a toilet paper roll wrapped in wire, you’d generate electricity.

  Why can’t we try that on a bigger scale? Build an experimental house, and instead of the wiring just going randomly through the walls, have it all go in windings through the perimeter.

  Now you would actually live inside a magnetic field. What would that do? Would magnetic people be more focused? Taller? Polish? For sure they’d be more attractive. And after a few years of building their magnetism, they’d be able to go off the grid by jumping up and down and generating their own electricity. What can I say? It’s a gift.

  To see a gigundo oven that I made, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Oven.”

  AN EXPERIMENTAL MEDICATION

  Willy Flann Credit 21

  In a desperate attempt to self-medicate without first getting the advice of a medical doctor, local dance instructor Willy Flann proved once and for all that hemorrhoids should never be treated with cayenne pepper.

  THE FIRST DOCUMENTARY

  It fudged the facts a little

  When it came out in 1922, Nanook of the North was the first-ever full-length documentary. The movie showed the struggles of an Inuk guy named Nanook and his family as they travelled across northern Quebec, looking for food and making trades. This later became known as “shopping.”

  There was a little brouhaha over portions of the film that were criticized for being staged, including Nanook’s wives actually being filmmaker Roger Flaherty’s common-law wives, and the Inuit hunting with spears instead of the guns they usually used.

  Talk about nitpicking. It’s not like this is a movie that anybody actually watched. Despite these hiccups, most people say the film is a testament to the heroism and accuracy of its characters. It was one of the first twenty-five films the Library of Congress chose to preserve for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s an honour, but it didn’t make Flaherty rich. The box office returns from the Library of Congress have always been pretty disappointing.

  Based on the feelings of the guys I hang out with, my guess is that most people would never watch a documentary on purpose. They prefer big stories with lots of adventure and excitement and car explosions. Normal people like horror or sci-fi or just a guy with a chip on his shoulder and a really, really big gun. But what’s weird is that these same people watch reality television. And why? Because it’s not called “documentary.” But it’s the same thing. Showing people in their daily lives, getting into big arguments and having huge emotional breakdowns just before going to commercial.

  And they’re just as fake as Roger’s Nanook movie. People only act naturally when they’re alone. Even then, some of them have to turn off the lights. Have you ever seen what happens to people when you ask them to pose for a picture? A usually normal-looking human being turns into the Madame Tussaud’s version of himself. You’re trying to capture a memory and instead get a photo of someone you don’t even recognize. That’s because most people are naturally self-conscious. And the ones who aren’t, should be.

  And if they go all fake in front of a still camera, imagine how unnatural they are when a crew of fifty brings lights and cameras and a craft-service vehicle into their world. So Roger was right on the money when he fudged the facts a little. Some people like fake because it’s entertaining. Others like true documentary because it feels real. But almost everybody likes fake documentary because it feels real and is entertaining.

  Reality is almost never entertaining. Ask a proctologist.

  —

  Inspired by Roger Flaherty’s being okay with exaggerating and even altering the actual facts, Possum Lake’s Gladys Finch decided to produce her own documentary on The Effects of Celibacy on Man. Using her husband, Walter, as the subject matter, she filmed the changes in his appearance and behaviour while she denied him any form of physical intimacy over a period of twenty years.

  Gladys Finch, Local Filmmaker and Hat Collector Credit 22

  The unfortunate few who saw the film said it seemed a lot longer than the twenty years it took to make it.

  It’s a common mistake in the movie industry for a producer to have too much power during the editing process. Critics were unanimous in their verdict that many of the scenes should have been cut out of the film. Some said all of t
he scenes should have been cut out of the film.

  The surprising part of the movie was the improvement in Walter’s appearance, health and mood as he lived through the ordeal for all that time. After each year of celibacy, he was happier, more fit, ageless, mentally sharper and getting more and more involved with charitable work in the community. Based on the film, it was natural to figure that having a physically healthy relationship makes men miserable, fat, old, stupid and useless.

  Gladys was very proud of her documentary and entered it in the Possum Lake Film Festival, where it won a prize for length. The film had a limited run at the Possum Lake Theatre. The duration of the limited run was three hours, which was around the halfway point. The last line of the movie, which almost nobody ever saw, was Walter looking straight into the camera and saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

  Years later, Gladys would admit that although the documentary made a social statement, there was a little fakery going on. It was shot in twenty weeks, not years, and the big change in Walter’s appearance and mood came at the three-week mark, when their divorce was finalized. Walter said later that the whole celibacy thing didn’t apply to him being with other women.