by Red Green
To see how the Lodge was used for a documentary, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Documentary.”
FIVE-PIN BOWLING
Thomas F. Ryan
Credit 23
Thomas F. Ryan was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1872. He moved to Toronto at the age of eighteen, and fifteen years after, in 1905, he opened the Toronto Bowling Club. That makes sense—a thirty-two-year-old swinging guy in the big city lookin’ for a little action, and step one is to open a bowling alley.
In 1909 he was getting complaints that the ten-pin ball was too heavy, so he switched to a lighter, hand-sized hard rubber ball. The smaller ball didn’t have enough oomph or size to knock down ten large, heavy pins, so Ryan cut the number of pins in half, shaved them down in size, and five-pin bowling was invented. However, girls continued to be unattracted to guys with small balls and rented shoes.
Although most of us in Canada have enjoyed five-pin bowling all these years, this story of how it all began is a little embarrassing. Modern ten-pin bowling started in New York in 1840, so the game had already been around for seventy years when suddenly a few bowlers from Toronto decided the ball was too heavy for them. Well, wah, wah, wah.
And what a message to send to our American friends—“We’re not nearly as strong as you. We are pathetic.” Lucky for us, the Americans weren’t really listening. (Not that uncommon.) But what’s worse, instead of telling the Canucks to suck it up, Ryan said, “Oh, okay…sorry…here, try this…and look, I’ve made the pins smaller. I can make them lean a little, if that would help…” This guy was obviously never in the Marines. And how about those wuss bowlers? Bowling was too hard?! We needed to make it easier?! Don’t ever try golf.
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Bowling may be a fun game, but it’s gotta be a tough business to run. Look at the investment. You have to find a big building and put in all the bowling equipment, have a huge parking lot, buy bowling shoes for men, women, boys and girls in every possible size. And in five-pin, the players don’t even bring their own balls. You can’t have other tenants in the building. You’re not gonna see a bank under a bowling alley.
Once you’ve moved in, you spend a fortune installing the wooden bowling alleys—which need to be perfectly level with a high-gloss finish. Then comes the worst part: the customers. You’re forced to rent brand new bowling shoes to a big, fat sweaty guy with holes in his socks. He lights up a stogie, grabs the heaviest ball he can find and tosses it overhand in the general direction of the pins.
By the end of the night he’s trashed the shoes and pounded dents into the alley. He pays his twelve dollars and leaves, and here’s the worst part: you’re hoping he comes back.
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Local entrepreneur and ex–pin boy Frank Shortt was offended by the introduction of this new five-pin game he called “bawling,” followed by Frank crying fake tears as he mocked the other players. He decided to go the other way. He used to say, “Bowling is a man’s game. It’s not for sissies. If you can’t stand the heat, take off your rented shoes.” Frank loved everything about bowling—the smoke-filled air, the smell of the shoes, the sounds of heavy balls rolling and pins getting smashed to the floor. Frank loved that bowling takes place in an alley, because rough things happen in alleys. To him, five-pin bowling belonged on the lawn of a daycare centre.
Frank Shortt, Lodge Member and Alley Rat Credit 24
So Frank reacted by manning up. If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll see that Frank is actually bowling with a forty-five-pound cannonball he stole from Old Fort York. How manly is that? But it still wasn’t tough enough for Frank, so he took the ten-pin concept up a notch. He made it one-pin bowling.
It was one pin for each of ten frames, so it was still technically ten-pin bowling. It made the game more difficult, but the big plus was that when Frank hit a pin with the cannonball, it splintered into a million pieces. Frank loved that part. Sadly, Frank’s version of the game never got off the ground—and neither, for most people, did the cannonball.
Bitter and alone, Frank would go to the lanes late at night and play his game all by himself in an end alley.
Rumours even circulated that he would challenge random bowlers to a “bowl duel,” where the opposing player had to stand in as the pin. No one ever took Frank up on his offer. Within a year his spine collapsed from the stress of bowling, and he was forced to have back surgery. They put a pin in it.
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And what would happen if the Ryan family tradition were to continue?
June 1, 2025—Today, Edgar Ryan, great-great-great-great-grandson of Thomas F. Ryan, the father of five-pin bowling, was appointed commissioner of the National Football League. Ed says changes will be coming.
February 1, 2026—In response to complaints from the players about the roughness of play and overall difficulty of the game, Commissioner Ryan has abolished blocking and tackling. You are permitted to stand in front of a player running with the ball, thereby viciously forcing him to go around you. As soon as the player with the ball is touched anywhere in the region of the buttocks by an opposing player, the play will be whistled dead.
October 1, 2026—Reacting to what the league office is calling an inordinate amount of buttock-region touching, Commissioner Ryan has adopted the rules of flag football, whereby the player with the ball has a flag attached loosely to his uniform—and nowhere near the buttock area—and play will be stopped when an opposing player removes that flag. When asked about attendance figures being down by over 80 per cent, the commissioner had no response.
February 15, 2027—Bad news for the Super Bowl. With fewer than one hundred tickets sold—all of them to employees of the company that made the flags—Commissioner Ryan is shutting down the league and turning it into a card game so that the fans who are not coming to the games can still enjoy the sport without anybody getting hurt. France declares football its new national sport.
To see Adventurer Bill try bowling, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Bowling.”
FOGHORN
Robert Foulis
Credit 25
Robert Foulis was born in Scotland in 1796. He came to Canada in 1818, settling in Halifax, which is in Nova Scotia, which is Latin for “New Scotland,” so he felt right at home—or at least would have if he had understood Latin. After a while, he moved to Saint John, New Brunswick. I guess he couldn’t resist the lure of the big city.
In 1853, while taking a walk, he heard his daughter playing the piano and realized that, from a distance, only the low notes came through. Maybe he went for a walk every time his daughter started practising the piano—we’ll never know. But on this occasion, it gave him the idea for the steam foghorn.
In 1859, the government gave Robert and his gang the go-ahead to build the first-ever steam foghorn on a spot called Partridge Island. Can you imagine the load of bird droppings the partridges released the first time somebody fired up the foghorn?
Not meaning to take anything away from Mr. Foulis, but the foghorn pretty much plays a second-banana role to the more popular and less annoying fog light. This is because the human senses are much better at figuring out where light is coming from than where sound is coming from. If humans were any good at identifying the sources of sounds, a lot of ventriloquists would be out of business and a lot fewer dogs would be blamed for that smell in the living room.
Sometimes when you’re driving, you’ll hear a siren, but you don’t really know where it’s coming from until you see the flashing lights on the roof of the car and see the cop get out and walk towards you. So, although the foghorn is a sort of useful bonus, if it were the only fog signal, the crews of ships at sea would be aware there was a big rock out there somewhere, just not exactly sure where. They’d have to stay perfectly still until the fog dissipated, which in Newfoundland can be months.
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In the early 1900s, local entrepreneur and self-taught astrophysicist Douglas Bigelow used the results
of Foulis’s studies as the starting point for experiments on sound and how it travels. Mr. Bigelow, or “Dougie,” as he was known to the local cops, discovered that in addition to the lowest frequencies of sound travelling the farthest, every frequency within the audible human spectrum has a distance at which it can no longer be heard.
Dougie began by having an assistant hold a high-pitched, shrill military whistle within an inch of his ear and then blow into it as hard as he could. (The whistle, not Dougie’s ear.) The results were a valuable lesson for both of them. Dougie lost the hearing in his left ear for ten days, and his assistant’s right eye was swollen shut for approximately the same length of time.
Douglas Bigelow, Lodge Member and Sound Thinker Credit 26
As they carried on doing more experiments, they were able to figure out, within a few inches, how far a sound would travel based on its frequency, amplitude, air temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction and surrounding sound levels. They sent in a report to the academic magazine Scientifica Americana, claiming that a sound with a frequency of 2,400 hertz and an amplitude of 97 decibels on a 70-degree (Fahrenheit) day with 15 millibars of air pressure, 37 per cent humidity, a 7-mile-per-hour southeasterly wind and virtually no measurable ambient noise levels would travel 507 feet before dropping out of the human hearing range. (Subject to how well that person could hear. For example, Moose Thompson can hear a dinner bell anywhere within a two-mile range, and Buster Hadfield can only hear his wife when she’s calling from the bedroom.)
The magazine decided not to publish the article, saying it was unreliable, unscientific, had no practical application and was boring, even by their standards. Dougie and his assistant wouldn’t hear of it. Instead they continued with their experiments until they ran out of funds, which was later that same week.
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There’s something about the invention of the foghorn that really points out how far technology has come. The basic premise of the foghorn, and other inventions like it, is that it is geared specifically to increase the range and power of human senses. If we had better hearing, we wouldn’t need a foghorn. We’d be able to hear the waves lapping up on shore and have a pretty good idea of how close we were getting.
Hundreds of years ago, inventors had no other choice but to gear their inventions to the limitations of human beings. IBM changed all that. These days, almost all of us are carrying a little device that can tell us exactly where we are and how to get where we’re going. It’s called a global positioning system, and it uses satellite signals instead of human ears.
Ultraviolet cameras are way better than human eyes. In fact, there are artificial detectors of everything from earth tremors to bad smells that are way more sensitive than any of our bodies.
The only thing we still have going for us is our brains, but the clock is ticking. Someday soon, the smartest person will be dumber than the dumbest computer. Some of us have a head start.
The first pinhole camera was invented in fourth-century China and was given the name “camera obscura” by the Europeans, who caught up with the idea a few centuries later.
They made excellent, sharp images. So far, so good. But until the invention of photography, it wasn’t easy to capture that image. You had to project the picture onto a piece of paper or canvas and then trace it. And if you were a really bad tracer or had a couple of extra coffees in you, the tracing could end up worse than somebody with talent just drawing the picture from scratch. So the camera obscura fell into obscurity.
In the sixteenth century, Reinerus Gemma Frisius—a math guy from what’s now the Netherlands—used the camera obscura to allow himself to watch a solar eclipse without going blind. So even though it couldn’t take pictures, a camera obscura was still worth keeping handy for when an eclipse came around every hundred years or so.
Eventually, film came along, and that was really a turning point for cameras. But there was a drawback to be overcome: cameras were huge. That’s because the size of the negatives determined the size of the picture, so if you wanted an eight-by-ten-inch photo, you needed an eight-by-ten negative. And controlling the light was a necessity. People would actually have to go into a room-sized apparatus to get their pictures taken by a gigundo camera.
The photographer would sometimes sing. “You’ve gotta accentuate the negative,” but only if he’d been paid in advance.
Gradually, cameras got smaller and smaller, and the lenses got better and better, and Photoshop made us all look good.
RATING: Okay, we’re getting closer, but we’re still nowhere near the G.I.I.T.W.O.A.T.E. Watch for Candidate #5.
FOX 40
Ron Foxcroft
Credit 27
In 1987, Hamilton, Ontario, businessman and NCAA basketball referee Ron Foxcroft invented the Fox 40 Pealess Whistle. He was frustrated by the normal sports whistle, whose pea would jam and prevent a ref from calling fouls or stopping play or directing traffic.
Mr. Foxcroft developed the Fox 40, with some help from a design consultant named Chuck Shepherd, who I guess was a whistle specialist. They introduced their new whistle at the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis. It immediately became the gold standard in sports whistles.
I think it took so long to improve on the whistle design because no one wanted to admit they were having trouble with their pea. Congratulations to Mr. Foxcroft, who got over that hurdle and found a way to make something better by making it simpler. Very rare. The horseless carriage pales when compared to the pealess whistle.
Interestingly enough, local Possum Lake referee George Fistlewick was ruined by this same invention. George had long been suspected of miscalling local middle-school girls’ basketball games to support a private gambling habit. In 1989, George was interviewed after a game where he missed calling twenty-seven fouls in a row. And they were all against the same team.
George claimed that the pea had stuck in his whistle, but unbeknownst to George, the school had switched to the Fox 40. George excused himself and went for a pea but it was too late. For the rest of the basketball season, the whistles remained pealess and the games remained Georgeless.
George Fistlewick
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I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but in this book of Canadian inventions I’ve counted eleven that are somehow connected to a sport or a game. That’s a pretty high percentage from a country that’s supposed to be a little on the serious side. The message I’m getting is that Canadians like to have their fun, and if you come up with an invention to make those things better, Canada will be there for you.
Yes, we’ve had our huge medical breakthroughs, like the cardiac pacemaker and insulin, but let’s not forget the jockstrap and the pealess whistle. They’ve gotta be right up there. To me, it shows the range of the Canadian people. There may not be a lot of us, but we don’t need a whole bunch of people to cover a lot of different areas. When you grow up in a country this big, you learn how to spread out.
FROZEN FOOD
A.G. Huntsman
Credit 28
Archibald G. Huntsman was born in Tintern, Ontario, in 1883. He was really good in academics, and after he got his medical degree at the University of Toronto, he decided to go into the field of marine biology. Today, that would probably sound fishy, but it was a different time.
From 1924 to 1928, Archie was the director of the Fisheries Experimental Station in Halifax, which is where he worked on a way to fast-freeze fish fillets. He called them “Ice Fillets” and started marketing them to the general public. It was going well, even without a catchy name or slogan or bouncy jingle, but the Canadian government had qualms about one of its own agencies competing with private companies who paid the taxes that funded the agencies that forced them to compete with themselves.
The frozen fish project was put on ice, but the technology was made available for any commercial business that was paying attention. I guess Archie wasn’t the kind of guy to take an idea and run with it. Maybe when you work
for the government, you don’t have to be.
Doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to find out that frozen food was invented in a country that has nine months of winter. Anybody who’s ever had a flat tire from driving over roadkill in February knows that it gets a little chilly north of the forty-ninth parallel.
Frozen food was not really a new concept. Any animal that doesn’t hibernate spends most of the winter eating frozen food. The real breakthrough that Archie came up with was the ability to freeze things fast. Real fast. If you just throw a side of beef into a snowbank, yes, it will eventually freeze, but it picks up a lot of bacteria and germs and dry rot along the way. But if you had a big enough catapult, you could shoot it into outer space, where it would freeze in about twelve seconds.
That’s what Mr. Huntsman figured out how to do. Not toss food into space, but get it cold at hyper speed.
It’s actually just math. The amount of heat in anything can be calculated in BTUs (British thermal units). Let’s say you’re wondering how many BTUs are in a rump roast. First you weigh it, and then you take its temperature using a rectal thermometer. You multiply those numbers together and you get a number—let’s say it’s 500 BTUs. If you put the roast into a normal freezer, which is cold enough to absorb 100 BTUs an hour, it’ll take five hours to freeze your butt.