Canada’s Greatest Inventions and the Myth of the Lone Inventor

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Canada's 5 greatest inventions — Wonderbra, five-pin bowling, the light bulb, the telephone & insulin. The real engineering, human drama, and ethical choices behind each. Featuring the $1 insulin patent that changed medicine forever.

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

This is Heliox, where evidence meets empathy. Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe easy. We go deep and lightly surface the big ideas. Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are, we're shifting gears a little bit. Usually we take a single concept, like a specific cognitive bias or some weird breakthrough in quantum computing, and we just drill down until we hit bedrock. But today we are looking at a collection, a list.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Right. It is a list, but I mean, it's not just some BuzzFeed style, you know, top 10 things you didn't know. This is a list with some serious gravitas behind it. It actually comes from this massive national conversation that took place in Canada back in 2007.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Yeah, this was the CBC project, right? The greatest Canadian invention. They had Bob McDonald, the science journalist, hosting this whole television special, and they literally asked the public to vote on 50 finalists. And what's fascinating is looking at the winners, you really start to see a specific personality emerge. It is not just about what was invented. It's about why.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Exactly. Because when you look at the American narrative of invention, it's often about the lone genius. You know, Thomas Edison, the Steve Jobs. It's about disruption and conquest and building empires. But when you look at this Canadian list, the theme is very different. It's about survival. It's about communication across these vast, empty distances. And weirdly enough, it's about making life less strenuous.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Strenuous is definitely the keyword of the day. We are going to count down the top five from that vote. And the mission for this deep dive is to strip away the Maple Leaf branding and just look at the raw engineering and the human drama. Because, wow, some of these stories are incredibly messy. We have the Wonder Bra, five pin bowling, the light bulb, the telephone and insulin.

Speaker 2: 2:24

It's an incredibly eclectic mix. You have lingerie sitting right next to a hormone that literally saves millions of lives.

Speaker 1: 2:30

And that is exactly where I want to start. Number five, the Wonder Bra. Now, I have to be honest, when I first saw this on the list, I laughed. It feels like a pop culture entry. But then I started reading the patent notes you sent over, and...

Speaker 2: 2:41

And you realized it's heavy-duty structural engineering.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Yes, it is.

Speaker 2: 2:47

It really is. It's basically suspension bridge technology applied to the human body. To understand why this is a great invention, you have to understand the actual problem it's solved. And the problem wasn't sex appeal. The problem was World War II.

Speaker 1: 3:00

Wait, the World War?

Speaker 2: 3:02

Yeah, the logistics of a global war affected absolutely everything. So in 1939, 1940, materials were strictly rationed. Rubber and elastic were strategic resources. They were needed for tires, for gas masks, Jeep parts. You couldn't just use rubber for underwear anymore.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Right. And before this, bras or foundation garments, as they were charmingly called back then, they relied really heavily on elastic to get that fit. You needed the stretch to allow for movement. I mean, if you have a rigid fabric and you take a deep breath, something has to give.

Speaker 2: 3:31

Exactly. If there's no elastic, you're wearing a cage. So you have this massive crisis of materials. Enter a guy named Israel Pilot. He's a New York designer, and he files a patent in 1941. It's a U.S. patent, 2,245,413. And the absolute genius of this patent is that it solves a chemical shortage using geometry.

Speaker 1: 3:52

This is the diagonal slash thing, right, which, again, sounds like the title of a slasher film. But reading the description, it's all about the bias of the fabric.

Speaker 2: 3:59

Yeah, let's explain that for people who don't sew because it's brilliant. Woven fabric is essentially a grid. You have the warp threads going up and down and the weft threads going left and right. If you pull that fabric top to bottom, it's rigid. It does not stretch. You pull it side to side, it's rigid.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Like a piece of printer paper, it has zero give.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Precisely. But if you rotate that fabric 45 degrees on the diagonal, which Taylor's called a bias, and you pull it, suddenly the grid distorts. The little squares become diamonds. The fabric actually stretches.

Speaker 1: 4:27

So Israel Pilot realizes that if he cuts the shoulder straps and the side panels on this 45 degree angle, the fabric itself becomes the elastic.

Speaker 2: 4:37

That is the core innovation. He replaced rubber with physics. The patent explicitly describes how this diagonal slash allows the garment to adjust to the body's movements without constriction, solely due to the orientation of the weave.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Wow. And then we have the Canadian connection, Mo Nadler.

Speaker 2: 4:54

Right. Mo Nadler runs the Canadian Lady Corset Company up in Montreal. He travels to New York, sees Pilate's patent, and realizes this is the exact answer to the wartime shortages they're facing in Canada. So he licenses it. He brings the Wonder Bra, and it was hyphenated back then to Canada.

Speaker 1: 5:10

So initially, this is just a highly functional utilitarian success. Like, hey, the bra that fits even when we have no rubber. But the reason it's number five on this list isn't because of wartime rationing, is it? It's because of what happened in the 1960s.

Speaker 2: 5:24

Yeah, this is where the story completely shifts from engineering to sociology. Fast forward to 1960. The war is a memory. The baby boomers are teenagers now. And there is a massive cultural war brewing regarding women's bodies.

Speaker 1: 5:38

The whole burning of the bra era.

Speaker 2: 5:40

Well, the burning was mostly a media myth from the 1968 Miss America protests. They didn't actually set them on fire. But the sentiment was very real. Women were violently rejecting the girdle.

Speaker 1: 5:51

The girdle was basically armor.

Speaker 2: 5:53

It was. For the older generation, the mother's generation, the girdle was quite literally armor against sex. It was about containment, smoothing everything out, hiding the natural shape. It was about propriety. But Mo Nadler's son, Larry Nadler, who had just gotten this Harvard MBA, he looked at the sales data. He saw a massive drop in girdle sales, and the initial was terrified. They thought women were just going to stop wearing underwear altogether.

Speaker 1: 6:18

The no bra movement, Rudy Gernreich, and that whole sheer, completely natural look.

Speaker 2: 6:23

Exactly. But Larry Nadler did something really brilliant. He conducted focus groups, which, by the way, was pretty novel for the corset industry at the time. They didn't usually ask women what they wanted. And he found a bifurcation in the market. The younger women, the 15 to 20-year-olds, they didn't want no bra. They wanted less bra.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Meaning less coverage.

Speaker 2: 6:40

Meaning less containment. They didn't want to be flattened or encased in armor. They wanted to be enhanced. They viewed the bra as a cosmetic device, almost like lipstick. It wasn't about hiding anymore. It was about attraction.

Speaker 1: 6:52

So he pivots the entire company based on this focus group data.

Speaker 2: 6:55

He creates a Model 1300. They called it the Dream Lift. This was introduced in 1961. It took that diagonal slash engineering, which was originally just great for structure and movement, and applied it to a plunge design. It pushed up and in. It is virtually identical to the push-up bras that are sold today.

Speaker 1: 7:13

And then they actually had to sell it. And this is where the Canadian part of the story gets kind of funny to me. Because the CBC, the public broadcaster, they refused to air the commercials.

Speaker 2: 7:22

They absolutely did. The ad campaign was, we care about the shape you're in. And the visual on the TV screen was a woman actually wearing the bra. Scandalous.

Speaker 1: 7:31

It's completely scandalous.

Speaker 2: 7:32

I mean, for 1960s Canadian television, it was. The CBC said it was way too risque. They flat out rejected it. But the private network, CTV, they looked at it and said, yeah, we'll take it. And, of course, the controversy just fueled the sales. Everyone wanted to see the band bra. It became the best-selling style in the entire country.

Speaker 1: 7:51

It's interesting, though, that the massive global explosion didn't happen until much later. Like the 90s, right?

Speaker 2: 7:57

Yeah, that's the third act of the Wonder Bra story. In the early 90s, the brand had been pretty quiet for a while. Then suddenly there's this huge resurgence. You get the Hello Boys campaign with Eva Herzegova. You have Keith Moss saying, even I get cleavage.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Oh, right, that famous quote in the New York Times.

Speaker 2: 8:12

Exactly. and suddenly this Montreal company's product becomes a global icon of the supermodel era. Think about that trajectory. It started as a clever way to save rubber to fight fascists in World War II and it ended up on billboards causing traffic accidents in the 90s.

Speaker 1: 8:29

It really is a perfect example of adaptation. The core technology that bias cut remained the cornerstone, but the purpose of the technology shifted completely from comfort during rationing to structural enhancement for fashion.

Speaker 2: 8:43

And that willingness to adapt, to tweak something just slightly to solve a new problem, is a theme we're going to see again on this list. Which brings us to number four.

Speaker 1: 8:52

Right, number four. Five-pin bowling.

Speaker 2: 8:55

Now, I know if you're listening to this outside of Canada, you might be thinking, what bowling is bowling? But five-pin is a distinct, parallel, evolutionary branch of the sport.

Speaker 1: 9:05

It's like the Galapagos Island of bowling games. It just evolved in total isolation.

Speaker 2: 9:09

It really did. And again, it starts with a very specific problem. The year is 1909. The place is Toronto. A man named Tommy Ryan owns the Toronto Bowling Club.

Speaker 1: 9:19

And this was a posh place, right? Not like a greasy alley with cheap beer.

Speaker 2: 9:22

Oh, very upscale. It was a gentleman's club. You had bankers, lawyers, the absolute elite of the city. And they liked the idea of bowling, which at the time was 10-pin bowling, the standard American game. But they had a complaint.

Speaker 1: 9:34

And this is maybe the most Canadian elite complaint ever recorded.

Speaker 2: 9:39

They complained that the game was too strenuous.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Too strenuous. My arm brings me such fatigue, Mr. Ryan. I simply cannot bowl.

Speaker 2: 9:47

I mean, it sounds ridiculous now, but think about it. A standard 10-pin ball weighs up to 16 pounds. If you play a few games, you are hauling a lot of heavyweight around. These gentlemen wanted to bowl during their lunch hour, but they did not want to arrive back at the bank sweating and physically exhausted.

Speaker 1: 10:06

So Tommy Ryan has a massive customer experience crisis on his hands. His product is literally too physically demanding for his target demographic.

Speaker 2: 10:14

Exactly. So what does he do? He decides to scale it down. This is purely an accessibility innovation. He takes the standard 10 pins, he puts them on a lathe, and he whittles them down to about 75% of their original size.

Speaker 1: 10:26

And the ball, because you can't throw a 16-pound ball at tiny pins.

Speaker 2: 10:30

The ball is the biggest change. He gets rid of the finger holes entirely, he shrinks the ball down, makes it out of hard rubber, and it's only about 5 inches in diameter. If it's entirely in the palm of your hand, think of the size of a grapefruit or maybe a large softball.

Speaker 1: 10:45

See, that changes the physics of the throw completely. In 10-pin, with the finger holes, you can generate a ton of torque and spin by lifting your fingers right at the release. That's how you get that big, aggressive hooking curve down the lane.

Speaker 2: 10:58

Right. But with five pin, you can still spin it, but it's all in the wrist and the palm. It's a much faster, snappier release.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Right.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And because the ball is smaller and lighter, the pins don't fly around as explosively. They kind of tumble. It's much more precision based than power based.

Speaker 1: 11:14

And of course, he reduced the number of pins from 10 to 5.

Speaker 2: 11:17

Hence the name. And he arranged them in a V shape instead of a triangle.

Speaker 1: 11:21

But the scoring. This is where people just get totally lost. I tried to explain this to an American friend once, and he looked at me like I was doing advanced calculus at the bar.

Speaker 2: 11:29

The math is definitely quirky. In 10-pin, a pin is a pin. You knock one down, you get one point. Simple. In 5-pin, every single pin has a specific, different value.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Okay, walk us through a frame. Picture the V shape.

Speaker 2: 11:42

Okay, so you have five pins in a V. The front pin, the head pin, right at the tip of the V, is worth five points. The two pins directly behind it are worth three points each. And the two corner pins at the very back are worth two points each.

Speaker 1: 11:55

So five plus three plus three plus two plus two equals 15.

Speaker 2: 11:59

Exactly. So a strike is 15 points. But here is where it gets incredibly strategic. If you hit the head pin dead on that five pointer, often the small ball just goes straight through the middle and leaves the other four pins standing. We call that punching the head pin at bat. You lose the five points and now you have a brutal split. You actually have to hit the pocket between the front pin and the three pin to carry the others.

Speaker 1: 12:21

And the perfect game score, because in 10-pin, it's 300.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Right. In 5-pin, because the strike is 15 and the bonus scoring multiplies differently in the later frames, a perfect game is actually 450 points.

Speaker 1: 12:33

And how common is that? Do people hit 450 often?

Speaker 2: 12:36

It is astronomically difficult. I mean, in 10-pin, you see perfect games on TV all the time. Professional bowlers throw 300s constantly. in five pin across all of Canada. There are usually only about 15 to 30 sanctioned perfect games per year.

Speaker 1: 12:51

Per year.

Speaker 2: 12:52

Per year. The margin for error with that small ball is just so tiny. If you miss your mark by half an inch, you're leaving a corner pin.

Speaker 1: 13:00

That's wild. Now, there is a linguisting legacy here, too, that I want to touch on. Hockey fans listening to this, pay attention.

Speaker 2: 13:06

Yes, this is such a great piece of trivia. You know the term five hole, right?

Speaker 1: 13:08

Yeah, when a shooter puts the puck right between the goalie's legs, It's standard hockey terminology everywhere.

Speaker 2: 13:15

There is a very strong, widely accepted theory that this term comes directly from five-pin bowling. In the early days of the sport, if you hit the center pit, the five-pin, and took it out cleanly, you created a gap right down the middle of the formation. You found the five-hole. And since hockey players and bowlers in Canada were often the exact same people during the long winters, the terminology naturally migrated from the bowling alley to the hockey rink.

Speaker 1: 13:40

That makes total sense. So 5-pin is number four. It's an invention born purely of a desire for accessibility. It took a game that was exclusive to the strong and made it playable by children, by the elderly, and by, you know, tired bankers on their lunch break.

Speaker 2: 13:56

And it is still huge in Canada. If you go to a bowling alley in Winnipeg or Calgary today, it's very likely a 5-pin alley. It has somehow survived over 100 years of American cultural pressure from 10-pin.

Speaker 1: 14:07

All right, let's move on to number three. And this is where we might get some angry emails from the Thomas Edison fan club.

Speaker 2: 14:12

Look, the Edison fan club is large and powerful. The facts are facts. Number three is the light bulb.

Speaker 1: 14:19

Specifically, the Canadian light bulb.

Speaker 2: 14:21

Which came first?

Speaker 1: 14:22

Okay, lay out the timeline for us. Because in school, everybody learns. Edison, Ben Lopark, 1879, let there be light. He's the guy.

Speaker 2: 14:30

That is the commercial timeline. That's the business timeline. But the patent timeline tells a very different story. We actually need to go back to 1873 and 1874 again in Toronto. We have two guys, Henry Woodward, who was a medical student, and Matthew Evans, who was a hotel keeper.

Speaker 1: 14:46

A medical student and a hotel keeper. It honestly sounds like the start of a bad joke.

Speaker 2: 14:50

It does. But they were tinkerers. They were absolutely fascinated by electricity, which was the cutting-edge tech of the day. They were experimenting with a battery and a spark coil, an induction coil, and they realized that if they passed a strong current through a piece of carbon, it glowed white hot.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Right. The basic principle of incandescence.

Speaker 2: 15:10

Right. But the problem, and this is a problem that everyone working on this at the time knew, was that carbon burns. You get it super hot in the open air, the oxygen immediately reacts with the carbon, and poof, it just turns to ash in seconds.

Speaker 1: 15:22

So you have to protect the filament from the air?

Speaker 2: 15:25

Exactly. And Woodward and Evans came up with a genuinely clever solution. They built a glass cylinder. They put the carbon rod inside it. And then, and this is their specific brilliant innovation, they filled that glass cylinder with nitrogen.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Because nitrogen is an inert gas. It pushes all the oxygen out of the tube.

Speaker 2: 15:42

Exactly. No oxygen means no burning. The carbon just gets hot and glows. So they built this thing. They tested it. It worked. They filed a Canadian patent on July 24th, 1874.

Speaker 1: 15:53

1874. That is a full five years before Edison's famous demonstration.

Speaker 2: 15:58

Five years. They had a working, legally patented electric light bulb in 1874.

Speaker 1: 16:04

So why are we sitting in the dark regarding these guys? Why isn't it called the Woodward bulb?

Speaker 2: 16:08

Because invention is only half the battle. The other half is the arguable harder half is commercialization. Woodward and Evans were mocked by the local press. They were called cranks. They tried to raise money to build a company around this, but investors in Toronto looked at this glowing glass tube and said, what is the point of this? We have gas lamps. They work perfectly fine. Your thing requires batteries and wires, and it's complicated. It's just a toy.

Speaker 1: 16:31

Ah, the classic innovator's dilemma. The infrastructure just wasn't there to support it.

Speaker 2: 16:36

Precisely. A light bulb is completely useless without a socket. And a socket is useless without a wire. And a wire is useless without a massive electrical generator down the street. Woodward and Evans had the bulb, but they couldn't build the entire grid.

Speaker 1: 16:51

So what did they do? Did they just give up?

Speaker 2: 16:53

Pretty much. In 1879, Henry Woodward finally sold the patent rights to Thomas Edison.

Speaker 1: 17:00

Do we know for how much?

Speaker 2: 17:01

The exact records are a bit fuzzy, but it definitely wasn't a fortune. It was just enough to cut their losses and move on. Now, Edison didn't buy the patent just to put it on a shelf and hide it. He bought it because he needed the legal claim. He was already building his own version and wanted to clear the patent path.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Now, we do have to be fair and give Edison his due here. He didn't just copy their exact design and slap his name on it. He improved the underlying design significantly.

Speaker 2: 17:27

He did. Woodward and Evans used nitrogen, which stopped the burning, but gas conducts heat. So the bulb got incredibly hot. Edison realized that a pure vacuum was better. If you pump all the air out, there's zero resistance, zero oxidation, and less heat loss. But to do that, you needed a very advanced vacuum pump, the Sprengel pump, which Woodward and Evans just didn't have access to in Toronto.

Speaker 1: 17:51

And Edison developed a much better filament, right?

Speaker 2: 17:54

Right. Woodward used a thick piece of carbon. It drew a massive amount of electrical current. Edison and his team tested literally thousands of materials. They tried carbonized bamboo, cotton thread, everything. They finally found a thin, high-resistance filament. This allowed him to run the bulbs at a higher voltage with much less current, which meant he could use incredibly thin copper wires to power them.

Speaker 1: 18:16

Which made the whole electrical system drastically cheaper to build for a city.

Speaker 2: 18:20

Exactly. Edison was a systems thinker. Woodward and Evans were gadget thinkers. They invented the device, but Edison invented the entire industry that made the device viable.

Speaker 1: 18:29

But legally, fundamentally, the Canadian patent stands as the prior art.

Speaker 2: 18:34

It does. And it really reminds us that being first isn't the same thing as being successful. But for the purpose of this greatest invention list, Canada officially claims the spark.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Speaking of sparks and wires, let's go to number two on the list, the telephone.

Speaker 2: 18:51

Oh, boy. Another highly controversial one.

Speaker 1: 18:54

Yeah, the late 19th century was apparently just a bunch of guys desperately racing to patent offices.

Speaker 2: 18:59

It really was. You had Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci, Johan Rice. All of them were circling the exact same idea at roughly the exact same time. But the man who actually crossed the finish line and who held the master patent that survived all the court battles was Alexander Graham Bell.

Speaker 1: 19:16

And the Canadian claim here is very strong. I mean, Bell was Scottish-born. He lived and worked in the U.S. But the actual mental discovery the moment it clicked happened in Brantford, Ontario.

Speaker 2: 19:25

Correct. The Bell homestead is still there as a museum. He spent his summers there resting because he was often in poor health. And he explicitly stated on the record that the core concept of the telephone was formed while he was sitting looking at the river in Brantford.

Speaker 1: 19:38

Let's get technical for a second, because I think we take the concept of the phone totally for granted now. But before Bell, the state of the art was the telegraph.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Right, and the telegraph is digital. It's binary. It's what they call a make-and-break circuit. You press the key down, the circuit closes. That's a one. You release it, the circuit opens. That's a zero. Click, clack.

Speaker 1: 19:59

You can send information via Morse code, but you cannot send tone. You can't send the complex quality of a human voice.

Speaker 2: 20:08

So what was the massive conceptual leap that Bell made to get past that?

Speaker 1: 20:12

Well, you have to look at his background. Bell was utterly obsessed with sound. Both his father and grandfather were elocutionists, and Bell himself was a teacher of the deaf. He understood deeply that sound is a wave. It's a physical vibration pushing through the air. He realized that to transmit speech, the electrical current in the wire couldn't just turn on and off like a telegraph. It had to undulate.

Speaker 2: 20:33

Undulate, that's a great word. It had to ripple continuously. The electrical current had to become a perfect analog of the physical air wave. So if the air pressure from your voice went up slightly, the current's voltage had to go up slightly. We call this amplitude modulation today, or AM.

Speaker 1: 20:51

So he needed a mechanical device that could literally translate physical air pressure into electrical resistance.

Speaker 2: 20:56

Exactly. And that device is the variable resistance transmitter. The basic idea is brilliant. You speak into a diaphragm, just a thin membrane, kind of like a drum skin. Your voice makes the membrane vibrate. As it pushes in, it compresses carbon granules, or in his earlier models, it dips a needle into a cup of acid.

Speaker 1: 21:15

Wait, acid?

Speaker 2: 21:16

Yeah. In the early liquid transmitters, it was literally acid water. So the needle dips deeper into the acid, which lowers the electrical resistance, allowing more current to flow through the wire. As the membrane pulls back, the needle lifts up, resistance goes up, and the current flows less.

Speaker 1: 21:31

So the electricity is literally dancing in perfect sync with your voice.

Speaker 2: 21:34

That is the poetry of it. It's beautiful. And the drama surrounding the patent is just incredible. On February 14, 1876, Valentine's Day, Bell's lawyer marches into the patent office in Washington, D.C. and files the patent application.

Speaker 1: 21:49

And Elisha Gray.

Speaker 2: 21:51

Elisha Gray's lawyer files a caveat, which is basically a formal notice of intent to patent on the exact same day.

Speaker 1: 21:57

Who got there first? Do we know?

Speaker 2: 21:59

The official records say Bell's lawyer was the fifth entry in the ledger that day, and Gray's was the 39th. Bell won the race by a matter of hours. And because Bell filed a full, complete patent application, and Gray only filed a caveat, the Patent Office awarded priority to Bell.

Speaker 1: 22:15

That led to a massive lawsuit, though, didn't it?

Speaker 2: 22:17

Oh, it led to the 10-year war. Over 600 separate lawsuits were filed against Bell's patent. He won every single one of them. His patent, U.S. Patent 174,465, is very often called the single most valuable patent in human history.

Speaker 1: 22:30

And what about the very first transmission, the famous Mr. Watson moment?

Speaker 2: 22:34

That happened just a few weeks after the patent on March 10. And it actually involves that liquid acid transmitter we just mentioned. Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were setting up the equipment in separate rooms in their boarding house in Boston. Bell accidentally spilled the battery acid all over their trousers.

Speaker 1: 22:51

Ouch!

Speaker 2: 22:52

Right. So in pain and panic, he shouted into the transmitter, Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. Watson was in the other room standing by the receiver, and he didn't just hear a muffled click or noise. He heard the actual words clear as day.

Speaker 1: 23:07

So the very first telephone call in history was basically an emergency distress call?

Speaker 2: 23:11

In a way, yes. And from there, the technology moved incredibly fast. But the first true long-distance call, the first distinct two-way conversation over real geographical distance, was made later that year from Brantford to Paris, Ontario. That's why Brantford claims the title of the telephone city.

Speaker 1: 23:27

It's just amazing to think about the trajectory of that. We went from a guy spilling acid on his pants yelling, Mr. Watson, come here, to holding an iPhone that connects to satellites in less than 150 years.

Speaker 2: 23:38

And yet the fundamental principle, the idea of converting sound waves into electrical waves, remained exactly the same until we finally switched to digital sampling in the late 20th century. Bell completely nailed the physics of it on the very first try.

Speaker 1: 23:51

All right. We have reached the summit, the number one greatest Canadian invention. And frankly, looking at the list, this one is in a league completely of its own.

Speaker 2: 24:00

It really is. The other inventions we've discussed so far, they made life more comfortable or more fun or more connected. But this one, this one literally conquered death. Number one is insulin.

Speaker 1: 24:11

I really want to pause on the stakes here for a second, because today we think of diabetes as a manageable chronic condition. You check your blood sugar, you take your meds, you live your life. But in 1920, what did a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes actually mean?

Speaker 2: 24:25

It was a death sentence, a guaranteed unavoidable death sentence, and a horrific one. Type 1 diabetes means your pancreas simply stops producing insulin. Without insulin, your body's cells cannot process sugar. So the sugar just builds up in your blood, which becomes toxic. But meanwhile, your cells are literally starving because they can't access that energy.

Speaker 1: 24:45

So you are starving to death while swimming in a sea of plenty.

Speaker 2: 24:48

Exactly. The body is so desperate for energy that it starts cannibalizing its own fat and muscle tissue. This breakdown produces acids called ketones. The patient goes into diabetic ketoacidosis. They slip into a coma and they die. Period. The only treatment available before 1921 was something called the Allen starvation diet.

Speaker 1: 25:07

Which was what? Exactly.

Speaker 2: 25:08

It's essentially cruelty disguised as medicine. They would take the patient and remember, type 1 often strikes children and they would restrict them to maybe 400 or 500 calories a day. Just a little bit of lettuce, maybe some boiled, thrice washed vegetables. The grim logic was to keep the blood sugar low by simply not putting any sugar or carbs into the body at all.

Speaker 1: 25:26

So you actively starve the child to keep them from dying of diabetes.

Speaker 2: 25:30

You were just buying time. A few months, maybe a year. These children were walking skeletons. They were living in hospital wards that were essentially just waiting rooms for death. Everyone knew how it was going to end.

Speaker 1: 25:41

God. So enter the team that changes this. And I say team, but from what I read, this wasn't exactly a happy collaborative family. This was practically a gladiatorial arena.

Speaker 2: 25:50

Oh, it was vicious. They're known as the Toronto Four. And it starts with Frederick Banting. Now, Banting is a surgeon. He's not a research scientist. He's actually struggling to set up a private medical practice in London, Ontario. And one night, he has this sudden idea after reading a medical journal paper about the pancreas.

Speaker 1: 26:09

What was the specific idea?

Speaker 2: 26:11

Well, scientists already knew the pancreas was the key. They knew if you completely removed a dog's pancreas, it instantly got diabetes. But they couldn't isolate the mysterious antidiabetic substance from the pancreas because the organ also produces very harsh digestive enzymes. Whenever they tried to mash up a pancreas to extract the good stuff, the digestive enzymes would just chew up and destroy the insulin before they could isolate it. Banting's late-night idea was ligate the pancreatic ducts.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Meaning tie them off?

Speaker 2: 26:40

Right. Surgically tie off the tubes that release the digestive juices into the intestine, let that specific part of the organ atrophy, and die off over a few weeks. He hoped that the islets of Langerhans, the specific cell clusters that make the insulin, would remain intact. Then you could safely extract the insulin without the digestive juices eating it.

Speaker 1: 26:59

So he takes this completely untested idea to the University of Toronto to a guy named J.J.R. McLeod.

Speaker 2: 27:04

Right. McLeod is a world-famous, highly respected physiologist. He looks at this small town, no-name surgeon, and basically says, this is incredibly naive. Far better, more experienced men than you have tried to isolate this internal secretion and failed.

Speaker 1: 27:21

But he gives him a chance anyway.

Speaker 2: 27:22

Banting is incredibly persistent. So McLeod basically says, fine. He gives him a dingy little lab for the summer while he goes on vacation to Scotland. He gives him 10 dogs to experiment on and gives him an undergraduate assistant.

Speaker 1: 27:35

And the assistant is Charles Best.

Speaker 2: 27:36

The 22-year-old undergrad. And here is a crazy piece of history. Best actually won a coin toss to be there. He and another student named Clark Noble were assigned to help Banting. They flipped a coin to see who would have to work the grueling first shift of the summer. Best won. Noble went off to do something else and never worked on the project. Talk about sliding doors.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Wow. So it's summer in 1921. It's sweltering hot in Toronto. The lab is notoriously smelly and cramped. They are doing nonstop surgery on these dogs.

Speaker 2: 28:04

It was incredibly grisly, exhausting work. Banting was doing the surgery. Best was testing the blood and urine. But by August, they actually had results. They had a dog, famously named Marjorie, who had her pancreas removed. She was fully diabetic. They injected her with the crude extract they got from the ligated pancreases of other dogs. Her blood sugar dropped significantly. She lived for weeks.

Speaker 1: 28:26

They called it isletin at first, right?

Speaker 2: 28:28

Right, named after the islets of Langerhans. But they immediately hit a wall. You obviously cannot surgically ligate enough living dog pancreases to treat human patients on any kind of scale. They needed a massive supply. They eventually figured out how to use whole ox pancreases straight from the local slaughterhouse, using a chemical wash of acidified alcohol to temporarily freeze the digestive enzymes.

Speaker 1: 28:51

And this is where the fourth man comes in, James Collop.

Speaker 2: 28:54

Right, because Banting and Best were not biochemists. Their slaughterhouse extract was terrible. It was described as a thick brown muck. It was full of useless proteins and impurities. When McLeod came back from Scotland and saw they actually had something, he brought in James Collop, a brilliant biochemist, to purify this muck.

Speaker 1: 29:13

And the clock is seriously ticking at this point because they desperately want to try it on a human patient.

Speaker 2: 29:19

Yes. January 11, 1922. Carano General Hospital. They select a patient named Leonard Thompson. He is 14 years old. He weighs exactly 65 pounds. He's drifting in and out of a deep diabetic coma. His father, with no other options, agrees to the experimental injection.

Speaker 1: 29:38

So Banting and Best inject him with their version of the extract.

Speaker 2: 29:41

And it fails.

Speaker 1: 29:42

It fails.

Speaker 2: 29:43

Completely. It dropped his blood sugar slightly, but he developed massive, painful, sterile abscesses at the injection sites. His body was violently rejecting the impurities, all those cow proteins that weren't insulin. The chief doctor stopped the trial immediately. He was deemed unsafe. Leonard was going to die.

Speaker 1: 29:57

Oh, man. That must have been the absolute breaking point for the team.

Speaker 2: 30:00

It was. Kallup felt the weight of this child's life. He went into his lab and for 12 days he basically didn't sleep. He developed a highly complex technique called fractional precipitation. He realized that pure insulin precipitated out of the liquid solution at a very specific concentration of alcohol. Now he was roughly 90 percent. While all the other toxic proteins stayed dissolved. He figured out how to catch the pure insulin at exactly the right moment.

Speaker 1: 30:29

It was just a giant chemistry puzzle.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Exactly. So on January 23, they went back to Leonard Thompson. They injected him again, but this time with the purified colop extract.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Again.

Speaker 2: 30:40

The glycosuria, the sugar spilling into the urine, just vanished. His blood sugar normalized completely. He woke up from the coma. He became bright and alert. He started eating. It was viewed as a complete miraculous resurrection.

Speaker 1: 30:51

There is a story about the coma ward. Is that true?

Speaker 2: 30:54

Yes. It gets slightly dramatized in movies, but the core truth of it is incredibly powerful. Once they had enough of Kolob's pure insulin, the doctors went into a large hospital ward filled with multiple comatose diabetic children. They started at one end of the room and began injecting them one by one. By the time they reached the last child at the end of the row, the first children they had injected were already waking up from their comas. It was almost biblical. You had families who were literally planning funerals, suddenly planning hospital discharges.

Speaker 1: 31:27

That gives me chills just hearing it. But despite this miracle, you mentioned a feud earlier.

Speaker 2: 31:31

Oh, the infighting was bitter and poxic. Banting was incredibly paranoid. He thought McLeod was trying to steal all the credit because McLeod, as the senior academic, was one presenting the initial findings to the prestigious Association of American Physicians. And Banting didn't trust Collip at all. He thought Collip was going to patent the purification process secretly and cut them out. It got so bad that at one point, Banting literally tackled Collip in the hallway of the university and physically restrained him to try and force him to hand over the chemical recipe.

Speaker 1: 32:02

Wait, an actual physical fight between scientists?

Speaker 2: 32:05

Yes. Fists were thrown. The pressure was just immense. And then, to make it worse, came the Nobel Prize in 1923. The Nobel Committee decided to award it to Frederick Banting and J.J.R. McLeod.

Speaker 1: 32:17

Just the two of them, leaving out Best and Collip completely.

Speaker 2: 32:21

Banting was absolutely incensed. He felt McLeod did nothing but give them the keys to a dirty lab. He famously telegraphed Charles Best immediately upon hearing the news and said, I am splitting my prize money with you. You are my partner.

Speaker 1: 32:35

And McLeod, how did he react to that?

Speaker 2: 32:37

McLeod, seeing the PR nightmare unfolding and probably feeling some guilt, decided to split his half of the prize money with James Collip. So ultimately, all four men got the money and the recognition in the press. But officially, the Nobel history books only list Banting and McLeod.

Speaker 1: 32:53

But surely the most famously Canadian part of this entire story is what happened with the patent itself, because this drug was obviously going to be needed by millions of people every single day, forever. It was worth billions of dollars.

Speaker 2: 33:04

Banting, Best and Collip agreed to sell the patent rights to the University of Toronto for exactly one dollar.

Speaker 1: 33:10

One dollar. One dollar.

Speaker 2: 33:12

Banting famously said, insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world. They wanted to ensure that no private pharmaceutical company could ever create a monopoly and price gouge dying patients for access to it.

Speaker 1: 33:24

Which is, well, it's a very stark contrast to the modern pharmaceutical landscape, particularly in the U.S. right now.

Speaker 2: 33:30

It really is the ultimate act of scientific altruism. And it cemented insulin as the undeniable number one invention on that CBC list. Not just because of the brilliant science, but because of the deep ethics behind how it was handled.

Speaker 1: 33:45

So let's step back and recap this list. We have a bra that used geometric bias cuts to solve a wartime rationing crisis. We have a bowling game that scaled down its physics to be more inclusive for regular people. We have a light bulb that proved the chemical concept but totally failed the market test. We have a telephone that captured the analog undulation of the human voice. And we have a purified hormone that turned a guaranteed death sentence into a completely manageable life.

Speaker 2: 34:08

It is quite the list. It spans so much of human experience.

Speaker 1: 34:12

When you look at these five things together, what is your main takeaway? What's the thread?

Speaker 2: 34:16

I think, for me, it totally dismantles the Eureka myth. The lone genius having a sudden flash of perfection. None of these were instant successes. The light bulb needed Edison's advanced vacuum pump to actually work. The telephone needed the messy trial and error of an acid spill. Insulin needed Collib's relentless 12-day chemistry bender. The one at Barra needed a massive 1960s cultural shift to find its true purpose.

Speaker 1: 34:41

So invention isn't just an event, it's a drawn-out process.

Speaker 2: 34:45

And it's a wildly collaborative, often very combative process. It involves lawyers racing to patent offices, chemists fighting in hallways, marketers running focus groups, and fierce rivals pushing each other. But the common thread in this specific Canadian context seems to be a real focus on the practical. Making the heavy ball lighter. Making the voice clearer over the wire. making the human body function when it fails.

Speaker 1: 35:08

It's innovation purely in the service of a less strenuous, longer, and better life.

Speaker 2: 35:12

I really couldn't have put it better myself.

Speaker 1: 35:14

But it does leave you with something to think about, right? We love to assign ownership to an idea. We name buildings after Bell and Edison and Banting. But when you see how much they relied on the people around them, the assistants who won a coin toss, the rivals who pushed them, the manufacturers who adapted their patents, You have to wonder if any single person can truly claim they invented anything on their own. We're all just tweaking the work of the people who came before us.

Speaker 2: 35:42

That's very true.

Speaker 1: 35:43

Well, thank you for guiding us through this deep dive into Canadian ingenuity. It's been an absolutely fascinating ride.

Speaker 2: 35:48

Always a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1: 35:50

And thank you for listening. We will see you next time. Stay curious.

Speaker 2: 35:55

Helioxx is produced by Michelle Bruecher and Scott Bleakley. It features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers curated under their creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals. Thanks for listening today. Four recurring narratives underlie every episode. Boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge and quantum like uncertainty. These aren't just philosophical musings, but frameworks for understanding our modern world. We hope you continue exploring our other episodes, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles at helioxpodcast.substack.com.