October 29, 2024

Professor to speak on Canuck inventions — lots of ‘em!

BY JOHN BUTLER — Mark Rector, a professor of electronics engineering with a specialty in telecommunications, loves us Canadians — all of us, coast to coast to coast — because we create things.

Professor Mark came to his love of Canadian history and innovation early in life. He will share his “discovery of discoveries” at a free public lecture, entitled OH CANADA! Our Home & Inventive Land, sponsored by the Grey Highlands Probus Club in cooperation with the Kimberley Community Association and the Grey Highlands Public Library on Wednesday November 13 at 2:00 pm (doors open at 1:30 p.m.) The event, open to all, will be held at the Kimberley Community Hall, 235309 Grey Road 13, in the village of Kimberley.

From as early as he can remember, Mark has been fascinated by Canada’s history. As a child he was captivated first by this country’s iconic narratives of voyageurs and fur traders — and in Grade Four, he discovered Alexander Graham Bell and the many inventions of our best known inventor. His interest in Canadian history was strongly encouraged by a Grade Seven teacher — support that helped move the history of Canadian invention from a pastime to a life’s passion for Mark. With justifiable pride, Mark points out that a third of his collection of 5,000 books comprises books about history.

Mark was a tinkerer too, with an interest not only in what gizmos did, but why and how they did it. This tinkering took a serious turn when he discovered electronics, particularly radio. A family friend Gary White was a TV repairman: he spotted Mark’s interest and aptitude, and by the time Mark was fourteen, Mark was working occasionally in Gary’s repair shop in Cambridge. This launched him on a multi-decade career in the electronics field.

Mark credits Gary White for giving him a lifelong respect for mentoring and teaching, and when Mark retired from radio and telecommunications work with the Toronto Police Service in 2002, he pursued his second career — as a professor in Ontario’s community college system.

In 2016, Mark took a sabbatical from college work. His associate dean had encouraged him to write a book about what was obviously his passion, and during his sabbatical he embarked on a cross-country voyage to further discover the who, where and what of Canadian inventions. One of the highlights of the research that led to his book was the opportunity to meet with descendents of Alexander Graham Bell, and to review all 600 volumes of Bell’s notebooks that detailed his inventive genius.

The results of Mark’s explorations are captured in his book, OH CANADA! Our Home and Inventive Land!, published (after five major redrafts as newly discovered inventions came his way) in the fall of 2018. The book is now in its sixth printing, with over 5,800 copies sold. Signed copies will be available for purchase at the Probus Club presentation.

The book tells the stories of about 230 different inventions and their inventors — from peanut butter to the Wonderbra. We might be surprised to know, says Mark with his characteristic enthusiasm, that gasoline and the light bulb were Victorian-era Canadian inventions. The subsequent invention by Canadians of BlackBerry smartphones, pacemakers and microsurgery robots carried on that Canadian inventive tradition.

The raw material for the book had its origin in a series of handouts he had prepared for college-level electronics engineering students. “I had to figure out how to interest twenty-year-old students in what I had to teach them,” says Mark, “and the fun-to-know and nice-to-know nature of the handouts was my way to get their attention.”

A highlight of his teaching career was a project in which he developed a way for his students to communicate directly from the classroom to astronauts aboard the International Space Station — a project that received a Canadian Telecommunications Hall of Fame award in 2009. At the Hall of Fame ceremony he met the grandson of Frederic Newton Gisborne, a Canadian whose nineteenth century equipment and inventions led to the transoceanic telecommunication cable technology used in oceanic telegraph and telephone cables. As Mark explored the story of failure, persistence, adventure and ingenuity that characterized Gisborne’s life, he realized that the stories of inventors and their inventions could be more than college course material — it could be deepened and broadened to enlighten a wider audience. That, in turn, led to his book.

Mark says Canadians have always been an exceptionally inventive nation. “We had to be inventive,” he says. “We had to scratch out an existence in an often hostile environment, as a thin string of population connected by railway from Atlantic to Pacific. Invention was not a hobby for us — we needed what we invented.” Yet he points out that we haven’t been good at celebrating our culture of invention. As a result, many Canadian inventions have wrongly been ascribed to Americans — the light bulb, for example, which is attributed to American Thomas Edison, when in fact Edison bought the patent for the light bulb from two Canadian inventors.

Does he have a favourite Canadian inventor? Although answering that question for Mark is like identifying one’s favourite child out of an array of beloved offspring, Mark hesitates only briefly before identifying Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866 - 1932), a Canadian-born inventor who was a pioneer in radio communications, with over five hundred patents to his name in many fields, most notably related to radio and sonar.

His favourite Canadian invention? It’s gasoline.

For more information, visit Mark’s website. You will find his lecture entertaining and enlightening — it might just provoke you to invent something!

 

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