The Woulda Coulda Shoulda Guide to Canadian Inventions

by Red Green

  If every day you wake up and all you see is trees, you figure out things to do with them. In the early years, Canadians chopped down the trees to build, and then heat, log houses. They also used them to build barns and carriages and fences and silos and railway ties and bridges and whatever else they could think of.

  The number of trees in this country was not lost on Mr. Fenerty. He met many of them every day at the mill. He was probably one of very few poets to work in the lumber industry, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy to combine the two worlds. Very few words rhyme with coniferous.

  And more important, if there were no women working there, what would be the point of writing poetry anyways?

  So Charles was forced to channel his innovation in a different direction, and I’m guessing that finding another use for trees was his obvious first choice. Papermaking would never have been invented in Saudi Arabia, unless maybe it was sandpaper.

  Chucky Boy got busy experimenting with all kinds of trees and chemicals until he got the right combination that made a pulp that was strong enough to hold together but flexible enough to be extruded in very thin sheets. It was a great invention and it changed the world, but—and I could be wrong about this, and it would be very unusual for a poet—I suspect that Charles Fenerty had no sense of smell. I mean, have you ever been through a town with a paper mill? If you had, you’d remember it, believe me. It really is a bad, bad smell and it travels well. When you stop and ask for directions to a paper mill, locals tell you, “Just follow your nose.”

  I can’t imagine eating scrambled eggs with that smell in the air. I can’t imagine a walk in the park or a baseball game or a wedding with the smell of rotting pulp burning the hair in your nostrils. The bride isn’t crying tears of joy, it’s just the stink in her eyes. If the groom doesn’t seem to notice the smell, though, perhaps that would be a clue for her to rethink the whole situation.

  But the point is—as I have hinted above—that paper mills reek. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe after you grow up on a pig farm, the paper mill is like a rose garden. I just know that when I drive past a paper mill, I make sure I do drive past, as fast as possible.

  Somebody smarter than me might see it as an opportunity. Air fresheners and perfume and aftershave sales are probably through the roof in those towns. Maybe by now somebody can figure out how to make paper out of something else. Something that smells better. Chrysanthemums or licorice or something. Bad smells are tremendously underestimated (until you run into one).

  These days, people put a lot of time, effort and money into looking good and feeling good. But smelling good is way more important. For a person and for a town. So thank you, Charles Fenerty, for pulped wood paper, and please pass the scented candle.

  —

  When I look around at the world we live in today, I can’t help but think Charlie Fenerty would not have been happy. Between emails and texts and Twitter and online billing, we are quickly becoming a paperless society. It doesn’t matter what paper is made of if nobody is using any. No more notepads, no chequebooks, no stationery, not even any newspapers. Even the grocery bags are plastic.

  In another twenty years, the only thing left from Mr. Fenerty’s invention will be toilet paper. So sad—an industry that flourished for hundreds of years, flushed down the john.

  —

  In honour of poet Charles Fenerty:

  OWED TO CHARLIE

  There once was a woodsman named Charlie

  Who tried to make paper from barley

  He said with a gulp,

  “I prefer extra pulp.”

  It worked, but the odour was gnarly.

  ROBERTSON SCREW

  P. L. Robertson

  Credit 55

  P.L. Robertson was born on December 10, 1879. In his late twenties, he worked as a Canadian salesman for an American tool company. They would have preferred an American salesman, but they couldn’t get any of them to move up here.

  During a sales demonstration, the slot-head screwdriver he was demonstrating slipped out of the screw and cut Robertson on the hand. I’m sure he swore a couple of times—in both official languages—but it prompted him to design and patent the Robertson screw, a square-headed screw that would be more stable and way safer than the normal slot-head.

  I’m thinking this might have led to a bunch of jokes about square heads and stable screws, but I can’t think of any. P.L. patented the Robertson screw internationally in 1909, and his factory in Milton pumped out a ton of Robertson screws for the war effort during World War I in 1914 and its sequel in 1939. Come to think of it, there’s probably a couple of square-head jokes to be made about that.

  Wanting to cash in on a similar device, Lodge member and all-around tool Ernie Gaither once invented a circle-head screw and screwdriver. Although at first well received, it didn’t work, which is a setback for any invention. There was nothing for the screwdriver to grab on to, so it just spun around aimlessly, as did Ernie. He was disappointed, as he had already come up with a great catchphrase for the circle screwdriver: “What goes around, comes around.”

  Ernie Gaither, Bartender and Screwdriver Expert Credit 56

  SEWAGE CANNON

  Doctor Ferguson, Septic Visionary

  Doctor Ferguson was born in Mercury Creek in 1914. He was not a doctor, but his parents named him Doctor because they wanted a doctor in the family. He had two siblings: a sister, Nurse Ferguson, and a younger brother, Arthroscopic Surgeon Ferguson (who later changed his name to Famous Actor Ferguson, and then finally to Waiter Ferguson).

  From a young age, Doctor had been interested in human waste—he was a huge fan of his own diapers—and dedicated his life to finding a way to deal with it in an environmentally friendly way.

  As an adult he would often take a picnic lunch and spend all day at the sewage plant, although even he could not do it with an egg-salad sandwich. He became familiar with the sewage treatment process and eventually realized they were going at it all wrong.

  His family had a long tradition of moving away from problems rather than dealing with them, and Doctor thought this same approach could be used on sewage. If you get rid of it, you don’t need to treat it. That’s what the human body does.

  Doctor believed the answer would come from physics, not chemistry. All he needed was an effective way to move large quantities of sewage over long distances, quickly and permanently.

  When he read about the huge V-3 cannon the Germans were building in World War II, which would be powerful enough to shoot large shells from Paris to London, he knew he had his answer. Doctor began working on his sewage cannon. Not to aim at other towns, but to fire the sewage into outer space, where it would either atomize or go into a distant orbit light years away from earth. He didn’t really care what happened to it, as long as it was gone and would stay gone.

  German WWII Cannon

  The scientific community rejected Doctor’s theory and tried to have him arrested. Doctor pressed on, claiming that sewage already existed in space and was probably a component in some of the planets. He would often point at Uranus and say, “You tell me.” Doctor had been told by his Grade 10 science teacher that to put an object into orbit, it would have to reach a speed of twenty-five thousand miles an hour to be able to break free of earth’s gravitational pull.

  Doctor knew he’d never get that out of the cannon alone, but he believed the large quantities of methane would work as a second-stage booster rocket. Just one more of the many advantages when you’re working with sewage.

  Abandoned Pipe/Cannon/Lewd Drawing

  Although reasonably well thought out when compared to his other plans, it did not go well. On September 18, 1951, Doctor completed construction of a makeshift cannon, using a truckload of explosives he borrowed from the munitions factory in Nobel, Ontario. He poured the explosives into the top end of a section of the Trans-Canada Pipeline that had fallen off a railway car and become embedded in a dried-up riverbed on the outskirts of town.

  Once he had
the charge compacted, he filled the rest of the pipe with raw sewage, which took contributions from everyone in town. Some gave more than others. When it was fully loaded and the area had been cleared, Doctor lit the 100-foot fuse and watched with nervous anticipation. What followed was a huge explosion that split the pipe from bottom to top while it launched a massive blob of steaming sewage into the twilight sky. Even though the methane booster rocket kicked in as expected, the load only reached a top speed of seventeen miles an hour, which was disappointingly lower than the twenty-five thousand required.

  The waste did not atomize but instead formed a compacted ball of sewage that landed in the middle of the town square, where it served for the next several months as a wind direction indicator.

  SNOWBLOWER

  Early Snowblower Credit 57

  Arthur Sicard was born in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, Quebec, on December 17, 1876. In 1894, he got the idea for a snowblower while he was looking at a farm threshing machine, which worked by using a set of revolving metal “worms” that chopped up straw and a fan that blew the straw bits up a pipe into a strawstack. If you’ve ever been to Quebec in the winter, you’ll know why snow removal was on Arthur’s mind.

  But it wasn’t until thirty years later, in 1924, that he got up the nerve to invest forty thousand dollars into his first machine, which was built by hand and patented. Arthur called it the Sicard Snow Remover Snowblower. Not what you would call a catchy name, but it allowed him to start up Sicard Industries in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec. Although the snowblower was a huge success for Sicard, the shovel industry was hit hard and forced to move its focus from homeowners to cattle ranchers and gravediggers.

  As usual, there’s a lot more here than meets the eye. This invention did not start on paper or even as an idea. There wasn’t a lot of research or even theory involved with this baby. Most of the work had already been done by the guy who invented the thresher.

  What Mr. Sicard really did was to find a different use for an existing, and proven, technology. And more power to him. He saved plenty of time and money by repurposing rather than creating. It was unfortunate for the thresher folks that they didn’t do this themselves, and fortunate for Mr. Sicard that the patent board didn’t see it as an infringement on an existing patent. Maybe the thresher gang was busy separating the wheat from the chaff and didn’t have the time or interest to separate the original from the copy.

  A good lesson for all of you inventors out there: you’re way better off to find something that already exists and works, and then find a way to use it in a completely different application that is not covered by their patent. Like, say, using a clothes dryer as a popcorn maker. Or a Ping Pong table as an adjustable bed.

  (To see how we used a clothes dryer as a popcorn maker, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Popcorn”. To see how we used a Ping Pong table as an adjustable bed, go to the same place and click on “Ping Pong”.)

  The other and way more important difference between the snowblower and the thresher is what they do with the material they’re handling. The thresher blows the straw into a wagon or a hopper. The snowblower just blows the snow away—to somewhere else. You don’t care where it goes, as long as it’s off your driveway.

  But maybe your neighbour cares. Maybe he thinks that when you blow your snow at his house, it’s the same as him having to shovel his driveway and yours. How long do you think he’s going to wanna do that? Not long, that’s how long. And what’s he gonna do? Well, he’s not gonna come over and make a big deal out of it. He’s not gonna start an argument or poison your dog. He’s gonna take a hard look at your snowblower and then he’s gonna go down to the hardware store and buy one about three times the size. Game on. He who snowblows last, snowblows best.

  Again, kudos to Sicard—he created a product that by its very annoying nature generates more sales of said product. It’s called the domino effect, and it works for snowblowers, cars, guns—and breast implants.

  —

  Perhaps the most dangerous of all of the messages carried by a snowblower is the disturbing idea that if you have something on your property that you want to get rid of, it’s not necessary to dispose of it safely. Instead, you can just toss it—into the street, into your neighbour’s yard, into the lake. Until the snowblower came along, these were all unacceptable options. In reality, a snowblower just throws snow at other people better and faster than you could on your own. It would be like saying that using a potato gun as a pooper scooper is okay when just throwing the stuff wouldn’t be.

  And sure, I know you’re going to say it’s only snow, but that’s because you don’t have a gravel driveway. The truth is, powerful snowblowers can throw a lot more than snow—rocks, logs, car parts, garden gnomes. House window sales are up over 500 per cent since the invention of the snowblower. That’s not a coincidence.

  —

  In the middle of last winter, when satellite reception at the Lodge was not working because of a pretty big difference between the amount paid and the amount owed, a bunch of the guys decided to attack the boredom head on by designing and then building the world’s largest and most powerful snowblower. (Actually, I said that wrong. Their style is not to design, but to just build. The design part happened along the way.) The first step was to get our hands on the largest double auger we could find. The output of any snowblower is tremendously affected by how much snow it can take in. We decided to go with two spiral slides from the park in the middle of town. Kids don’t go to the park in the winter anyway.

  Next, we needed a small auger to raise the snow inside the snowblower. We decided to use the posthole digger the county uses for telephone poles. Nobody puts up telephone poles in the winter anyway.

  With these sizes of augers, we were going to be supplying a lot of snow, so we needed a big, big fan to handle that load. I know bankrupt airlines don’t have garage sales very often, but when they do, you can pick up a decommissioned turboprop real cheap. Especially if it’s never going to be airborne—well, at least not on purpose.

  The last and probably least important component was the vehicle on which to mount all the gear. It needed to be big and heavy with a lot of road clearance. We decided to go with a used school bus. It was strong enough to hold the mounting brackets, with a big enough engine to drive the augers, and with a Lodge member in every seat, we could get a GVW of over twenty thousand pounds. Nobody uses a school bus in the winter anyway.

  We did the first—and last—trial run of our Super Snowblower on a quiet Saturday in February after a big snowstorm. We didn’t tell anybody what we were doing, but once the turboprop fired up, it was pretty hard not to be noticed. We picked the Fifth Line as our test road, because there’s not much traffic and, thanks to its location between Possum Lake and the escarpment, it gets a lot of heavy snowdrifts. We decided to do our first pass at a fairly good clip because if the bus got stuck, we’d never get it back out. We were doing about fifty klicks when we hit the first snowdrift. Every window of the bus was immediately covered with hard-packed snow. That was a setback, but we decided to keep the pedal to the metal with the heater on and eventually the snow on the windows would melt.

  We could tell by the straining noises on the machinery that we were moving a lot of snow. None of us could tell you how far we got down the Fifth Line, but the arresting officer estimated it at around three miles. If we had it to do over (which the judge has assured us we won’t), we would have aimed the exhaust chute away from the centre of town. Our five-minute drive-by has gone into the record books as the most severe snowstorm in the history of our town. And it wasn’t just snow we were throwing. In the end, the mayor offered to drop charges if we shovelled everyone’s driveway, paid to have the road resurfaced and fished the roadkill out of the lake.

  If you want to see another way I use a snowblower, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Snowblower.”

  In the late nineteenth century, an Italian inventor name
d Guglielmo Marconi started working with radio waves to try to make a wireless telegraph system that could be turned into a commercial business. For it to work, the signal needed to travel a long distance, which Marconi was able to do by grounding both the receiver and transmitter (and maybe his teenaged daughter) and raising the antenna height. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that raising the antenna was more or less a given.

  Before long, Marconi was able to transmit and receive radio waves up to two miles. That was great news for anyone who lived near him, but pretty much meaningless to everyone else. Guglielmo knew that he needed to be able to market this thing to people who were more than two miles apart. He kept experimenting, and on December 12, 1901, he successfully transmitted a wireless telegraph signal from England to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Now you’re talkin’—or should I say, now you’re typin’. In any case, the seeds of modern radio had been planted. This meant the writing was on the wall for vaudeville, but fortunately many of the performers couldn’t read.

  RATING: You know it can’t possibly be radio, because it was totally eclipsed by television. There’s a hint about Candidate #10.

  Credit 58

  SNOWMOBILE

  Joseph-Armand Bombardier