Maud Leonora Menten

Maud Leonora Menten (March 20, 1879 – July 26, 1960) was a Canadian physician-scientist who made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry. Her name is associated with the famous Michaelis–Menten equation in biochemistry.

Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario and studied medicine at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1904, M.B. 1907, M.D. 1911). She was among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate. She completed her thesis work at University of Chicago. At that time women were not allowed to do research in Canada, so she decided to do research in other countries such as the United States and Germany.

In 1912 she moved to Berlin where she worked with Leonor Michaelis and co-authored their paper in Biochemische Zeitschrift (1913;49:333–369) which showed that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex. This relationship between reaction rate and enzyme-substrate concentration is known as the Michaelis-Menten equation. After studying with Michaelis in Germany she entered graduate school at the University of Chicago where she obtained her PhD in 1916. Her dissertation was titled “The Alkalinity of the Blood in Malignancy and Other Pathological Conditions; Together with Observations on the Relation of the Alkalinity of the Blood to Barometric Pressure”. Menten worked as a pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh (1923–1950) and as a research fellow at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute (1951–1953).

Early life

Little is known about her parents and childhood other than that the Menten family moved to Harrison Mills, where Maud’s mother worked as a postmistress. After completing secondary school, Menten attended the University of Toronto where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1904 and a master’s degree in physiology in 1907. While earning her graduate degree, she worked as a demonstrator in the university’s physiology lab.

A talented student, Menten was appointed a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City in 1907. There, she studied the effect of radium bromide on cancerous tumors in rats. Menten and two other scientists published the results of their experiment, producing the institute’s first monograph. After a year at the Institute, Menten worked as an intern at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. She returned to Canada and began studies at the University of Toronto a year later. In 1911 she became one of the first Canadian women to receive a doctor of medicine degree.

Work

Her most famous work was on enzyme kinetics together with Michaelis, based on earlier findings of Victor Henri. This resulted in the Michaelis–Menten equations. Menten also invented the azo-dye coupling reaction for alkaline phosphatase, which is still used in histochemistry. She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina and Salmonella ssp. and conducted the first electrophoretic separation of proteins in 1944. She worked on the properties of hemoglobin, regulation of blood sugar level, and kidney function. She wrote or co-wrote about 100 research papers.

Personal Life and Aside Work

Despite suffering from arthritis she was also an accomplished musician and painter; there were several exhibitions of her paintings.

Skloot portrays Menten as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore “Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes.” She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies. She played the clarinet, painted paintings worthy of art exhibitions, climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, and enjoyed astronomy. She also mastered several languages, including Russian, French, German, Italian, and at least one Native-American language. Although Menten did most of her research in the United States, she retained her Canadian citizenship throughout her life. After her retirement from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950, she returned to Canada where she continued to do cancer research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute. Poor health forced Menten’s retirement in 1955, and she died July 20, 1960, at the age of 81, in Leamington, Ontario.

Throughout her career Menten was affiliated with many scientific societies, and in 1998 she was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. She was also honored at the University of Toronto with a plaque and at the University of Pittsburgh with memorial lectures and a named chair.

At Menten’s death, colleagues Aaron H. Stock and Anna-Mary Carpenter honored the Canadian biochemist in an obituary in Nature: “Menten was untiring in her efforts on behalf of sick children. She was an inspiring teacher who stimulated medical students, resident physicians and research associates to their best efforts. She will long be remembered by her associates for her keen mind, for a certain dignity of manner, for unobtrusive modesty, for her wit, and above all for her enthusiasm for research.”

 

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)

 

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (March 10, 1861 – March 7, 1913), who is commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer. Pauline Johnson is often remembered for her poems that celebrate her aboriginal heritage at a time when little social advantage attached to such an association. One such poem is the frequently anthologized “The Song my Paddle Sings.” Pauline Johnson’s writings and performances have been rediscovered by a number of literary, feminist, and post colonial critics who appreciate her importance as a New Woman and figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada. Furthermore, the increase in First Nations literary activity during the 1980s and 1990s prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, a history to which Johnson made a significant contribution.

Family history

In 1758, Pauline Johnson’s great-grandfather, Dan Hansen was baptized by Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson on the encouragement of Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern district of the American colonies. Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson eventually moved north from his home in the Mohawk River Valley, which is now New York State, to the newly designated Six Nations territory. One of his sons, John Smoke Johnson, had a talent for oratory, spoke English, and demonstrated his patriotism to the crown during the War of 1812. As a result of these abilities and actions, John Smoke Johnson was made a Pine Tree Chief upon the request of the British government. Although John Smoke Johnson’s title could not be inherited, his wife Helen Martin descended from a founding family of the Six Nations; thus, it was through her lineage and insistence that George Johnson became a chief.

George Johnson inherited his father’s gift for languages and began his career as a church translator on the Six Nations reserve. This position introduced him to Emily Howells, the sister-in-law of the Anglican missionary he assisted. News of the couple’s interracial marriage in 1853 displeased the Johnson and Howells families. However, the birth of George and Emily’s first child reconciled the Johnson family relations. In his later roles as a government interpreter and hereditary Chief, George Johnson developed a reputation as a talented mediator between Native and European interests. George Johnson also made enemies through his efforts to stop illegal trading of reserve timber for whiskey and suffered a series of violent physical attacks at the hands of Native and non-Native men involved in this traffic. George Johnson’s health was substantially weakened by these attacks, which contributed to his death from a fever in 1884.

Pauline’s mother, Emily Howells was born to a well-established British family who left England for North America in 1832, the same year as literary sisters Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill crossed the Atlantic. Henry Howells, Emily Howells’ father, was raised as a Quaker and was interested in joining the American movement to abolish slavery. He moved his family to a number of American cities, establishing schools to gain an income, before settling in Eaglewood, New Jersey. Emily Howells’ mother, Mary Best, died when Emily was five. Her father remarried twice and fathered a total of twenty-four children, who, contrary to what his educational endeavors and abolitionist agenda suggest, he treated cruelly.

Henry Howells, like a growing number of people living in the northern United States, displayed Christian outrage at the practice of slavery, which he cultivated in his children by admonishing them to “pray for the blacks and to pity the poor Indians. Nevertheless, his compassion did not preclude the view that his own race was superior to others.” When Emily Howells moved to Six Nations at age twenty-one to help care for her sister’s growing family and fell in love with George Johnson, she gained a more realistic understanding of Native peoples and her father’s beliefs.

Emily Pauline Johnson was born in Chiefswood, the family home built by her father on the Six Nations Indian Reserve outside of Brantford, Ontario, in 1861. Pauline Johnson was the youngest of four children born to George Henry Martin Johnson (1816 – 1884), a Mohawk, and Emily Susanna Howells Johnson (1824-1898), an English woman.

Her mother, Emily Howells was the first cousin of American author William Dean Howells, who disparaged Pauline Johnson’s poetic abilities. Emily Howells’ dramatic life and relationships are explored in a series of articles written by Pauline Johnson for The Mother’s Magazine, which were later reprinted in The Moccasin Maker (1913).

Early life and education

The Johnsons enjoyed a high standard of living, their family and home were well known, and Chiefswood was visited by important guests such as Alexander Graham Bell, Homer Watson, and Lady and Lord Dufferin.

Emily and George Johnson encouraged their four children, who were born on Native land and were thus wards of the British government, to respect, and gain knowledge of, both the Mohawk and the English aspects of their heritage. Although Emily Johnson fostered cultural pride, she also instilled inhibitions in her children and insisted that they behave perfectly to prevent rejection. John Smoke Johnson was an important presence in the lives of his grandchildren, especially Pauline. He spent much time telling them stories in the Mohawk tongue that they learned to comprehend but not to speak. Pauline Johnson believed that she inherited her talent for elocution from her grandfather and, near her time of death, she expressed regret that she had not discovered more of her grandfather’s knowledge.

As the youngest of her siblings and being a sickly child, Pauline Johnson was not forced to attend Brantford’s Mohawk Institute, one of Canada’s first residential schools, like her oldest brothers were required to. Instead, her education was for the most part informal, deriving from her mother, a series of non-Native governesses, a few years at the small school on the reserve, and self-directed reading in Chiefswood’s library. There she became familiar with literary works by Byron, Tennyson, Keats, Browning, and Milton. She especially enjoyed reading tales about the nobility of Native peoples such as Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha and John Richardson’s Wacousta. At age 14, Johnson was sent to attend Brantford Central Collegiate with her brother Allen and she graduated in 1877. Even according to the standards of her time, Johnson’s formal education was limited and throughout her life, and she worried that her lack of education would prevent her from achieving her high literary aspirations.

Shortly after George Johnson’s death in 1884, the family rented out Chiefswood and Pauline Johnson moved with her mother and sister to a modest home in Brantford, Ontario.

Literary and stage career

During the 1880s Pauline Johnson wrote, performed in amateur theatre productions, and enjoyed the Canadian outdoors, particularly by canoe. Johnson’s first full-length poem, “My Little Jean,” a sentimental piece written for her friend Jean Morton, first appeared in the New York publication Gems of Poetry in 1883 and the production, printing, and performance of Johnson’s poetry increased steadily afterwards. In 1885, she traveled to Buffalo, New York to attend a ceremony in honor of Iroquois leader Sagoyewatha, also known as Red Jacket, and wrote a poem which relays her admiration for the renowned orator and voices pleas to reconcile feuds between British and Native peoples. At a Brantford ceremony held in October 1886 in honor of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, Johnson presented her poem “Ode to Brant,” which expresses the importance of brotherhood between Native and European immigrants while ultimately endorsing British authority. This performance generated a long article in the Toronto Globe and increased interest in Johnson’s poetry and ancestry.

Throughout the remainder of the 1880s, Johnson established herself as a Canadian writer and cultivated an audience amongst those who read her poetry in periodicals such as Globe, The Week, and Saturday Night. Johnson contributed to the critical mass of Canadian authors who were constructing a distinct national literature. The inclusion of two of her poems in W.D. Lighthall’s Songs from the Great Dominion (1889) signaled her membership amongst Canada’s important authors. In her early literary works, Johnson drew lightly from her Mohawk heritage, and instead lyricized Canadian life, landscapes, and love in a post-Romantic mode reflective of the literary interests she shared with her mother.

In 1892, Johnson recited her poem A Cry from an Indian Wife, a work based on the battle of Cut Knife Creek during the Riel Rebellion, at a Canadian Authors Evening arranged by the Young Men’s Liberal Club. The success of this performance initiated Johnson’s 15 year stage career and encouraged perceptions of her as a girl (although she was 31 at the time of this performance), a beauty, and an exotic Aboriginal elocutionist. After her first recital season, Johnson decided to emphasize the Native aspects of her literature and performance by assembling and donning a feminine Native costume. Johnson’s decision to develop this stage persona, and the popularity it inspired, indicates that the audiences she encountered in Canada, England, and the United States were educated to recognize representations of Native peoples on stage and were entertained by such productions.

Johnson’s complete textual output is difficult to establish as much of her large body of work was published in periodicals. Her first volume of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in London in 1895, and followed by Canadian Born in 1903. The contents of these volumes, along with some additional poems, were published as Flint and Feather in 1912. This volume has been reprinted many times, becoming one of the best-selling titles of Canadian poetry. Since the 1917 edition, Flint and Feather has been misleadingly subtitled “The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson.”

After retiring from the stage in August 1909, Johnson moved to Vancouver, British Columbia and continued her writing. She created a series of articles for the Daily Province based on stories related by her friend Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people of North Vancouver. In 1911, to support the ill and poor Johnson, a group of friends organized the publication of these stories under the title Legends of Vancouver. They remain classics of that city’s literature. The Shagganappi (1913) and The Moccasin Maker (1913), posthumous publications, are collections of selected periodical stories Johnson penned on a number of sentimental, didactic, and biographical topics. Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson provide a provisional chronological list of Johnson’s numerous and diverse writings in their text Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000).

Johnson died of breast cancer in Vancouver, British Columbia on March 7, 1913. Her funeral (the largest in Vancouver up to that time), was held on what would have been her 52nd birthday and her ashes are buried near Siwash Rock in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. In Legends of Vancouver, Johnson relates a Squamish legend of how a man was transformed into Siwash Rock “as an indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood.” In another story, she relates the history of Deadman’s Island, a small islet off Stanley Park, that explains its name. In a small poem in the same book, Johnson coins the name Lost Lagoon to describe one of her favorite areas in the park because it seemed to disappear when the water emptied at low tide. Although Lost Lagoon has since been transformed into a permanent, fresh water lake, Johnson’s name for it remains.

Criticism and legacy

Despite the acclaim she received from contemporaries, Pauline Johnson’s reputation significantly declined in the decades between 1913 and 1961. In 1961, on the centenary of her birth, Johnson was celebrated with the issuing of a commemorative stamp bearing her image, “rendering her the first woman (other than the Queen), the first author, and the first aboriginal Canadian to be thus honored.” Despite recognition as an important Canadian figure, a number of biographers and literary critics deride Johnson’s literary contributions and contend that her abilities as a performer, whether in her signature Native or evening dress, largely contributed to the reputation her work received during her lifetime.

Also, W. J. Keith wrote: “Pauline Johnson’s life was more interesting than her writing … with ambitions as a poet, she produced little or nothing of value in the eyes of critics who emphasize style rather than content.”

Margaret Atwood admits that she did not examine literature written by Native authors in Survival, her seminal text on Canadian literature, and states that upon its publication in 1973, she could not find any such works. She questions, “Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because, being half-white, she somehow didn’t rate as the real thing, even among Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today.” Atwood’s commentary indicates that questions regarding the validity of Johnson’s claims to Aboriginal identity have contributed to her critical neglect.

As Atwood suggests, in recent years, Pauline Johnson’s writings and performances have been rediscovered by a number of literary, feminist, and post colonial critics who appreciate her importance as a New Woman and figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada. Furthermore, the increase in First Nations literary activity during the 1980s and 1990s prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, a history to which Johnson made a significant contribution.

In addition to her commemoration on a stamp, at least four Canadian schools are named in Johnson’s honor.

K. C. Irving

Kenneth Colin Irving, (March 14, 1899 – December 13, 1992) also known as K. C. Irving was one of Canada’s foremost entrepreneurs of the 20th century and ranked as one of the world’s leading industrialists. K. C. Irving’s business began with a family sawmill in Bouctouche, N.B., in 1881. Ownership and operation of the Irving group of companies ultimately divided among his three sons and their respective children, James, the oldest brother’s two sons, Jim Irving and Robert Irving, took more control of forest products, Arthur the middle brother assumed more autonomy in Irving Oil, which owns Saint John, New Brunswick Irving Oil Refinery, Canada’s largest refinery, and Jack. In 1989, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Biography

Early life

Born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, as a youngster Irving was viewed as a tough kid from a rough sawmill town on the Northumberland Strait. There are many accounts of his rough and tumble attitude in schoolyard fights. He began his entrepreneurial streak early, but this was tempered by the dawn of World War I. Irving, along with several friends attempted to enlist but his father put an end to it by enrolling him at Acadia University. Irving left Acadia before graduation and took a cross-country adventure to British Columbia before returning to Bouctouche. His father did not oppose his second attempt to enlist and Irving entered the Royal Flying Corps as a fighter pilot, although he never saw action as the war ended shortly thereafter. Following the war, he returned home to Bouctouche.

J.D. Irving Limited

It was the growth of Irving Oil which largely financed K.C. Irving’s other endeavours. Several years after starting Irving Oil, Irving took over his father’s sawmill company in Bouctouche, J.D. Irving Limited, which was subsequently expanded many times. Today JDI is the largest single landowner in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Maine (JDI has also been identified as being one of the four largest private land-owners in the United States). These forest lands feed several pulp and paper plants and sawmills which in turn feed the company’s paper, tissue, and diaper factories throughout New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, New York, Quebec and Ontario.

Diversification and vertical integration

As the Irving industrial empire expanded during World War II and the post-war era, K.C. Irving purchased shipyards and started various food processing, media, hardware, building supplies, transportation, engineering and construction companies – all of which are vertically integrated, meaning that each Irving company purchases the services of other Irving companies, keeping profits wholly within the conglomerate.

Privately owned

Irving companies are completely privately owned, and therefore all major business decisions are made by the family-members/owners. This has traditionally been a weakness among many family-owned empires. However, the Irvings have proven their ability to react to market situations much more quickly than their publicly traded competitors, a primary reason for their maintaining market share in so many industries throughout northeastern North America. An example can be seen in the fact that Irving Oil undertook significant upgrades and expansions to its refinery in the mid-1990s to produce low-sulphur gasoline, fully a decade ahead of the rest of the North American oil industry. As a result, Irving has been able to capitalize on the growing need for low-emission fuel in California and other U.S. markets (delivered by its own ships).

The conglomerate operates with considerable latitude which the Irving family’s wealth permits—operating somewhat as a maverick to the consternation of many of Central and Western Canada’s business leaders. Irving Oil, J.D. Irving and all subsidiary companies are actively supporting Canada’s ratification and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, since the family has invested considerable funds into environmental controls and alternative energy for its operations and wishes to capitalize on these investments at the expense of its slow-to-respond publicly traded competitors. J.D. Irving’s food processing plants in Prince Edward Island are looking to build one of the largest wind farms in Canada in that province to completely power their operations, and many Irving-owned sawmills and factories in the rest of northeastern North America are rapidly adopting co-generation and solar/wind power to complement current energy usage. The Irving family is also hoping to take advantage of deregulation of utility markets in the region by building natural gas-fired electrical generating stations and is currently building a liquified natural gas terminal near its Saint John refinery.

New Brunswick Media Concentration

The Irvings have an almost complete monopoly in print media in New Brunswick, owning all English and French daily newspapers but one (L’Acadie Nouvelle) and most English weekly and community papers. In the 1970s, when this concentration was limited to only 4 English daily newspapers, a federal commission of inquiry into media concentration took aim at the Irving family’s control. Today print media across Canada has experienced a much higher degree of concentration than existed with Irving in New Brunswick during the 1970s, and the case with Irving was one of the first in the nation. The Irving family ostensibly allows their media holdings to operate relatively independently with the only oversight supposedly being in their finances.

The son of Jim Irving, Jamie Irving became publisher of the Irving-owned New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal then vice-president of the newspaper holding company.

Irving did have a near monopoly in media in New Brunswick well into the 1980s when they owned several English radio stations and CHSJ-TV, the only CBC affiliate in the province. Irving also started MITV (Maritime Independent Television) as a competitor across the Maritimes with the ATV network. The CBC affiliate was sold to the public broadcaster in 1994 at the same time as MITV was sold to Global Television.

Many of the forest management practices at J.D. Irving have come under fire from environmentalists. While JDI has received praise from its lumber retailers and from government regulators, environmentalists point out that the company’s tree farming practices have led to an unprecedented industrialization of the forests of northeastern North America, and in turn have led to a decline in tree species variety. Logging roads and erosion problems are also frequently criticized.

Later life and death

K.C. Irving died at home in Saint John and was buried alongside his first wife in Bermuda. Later, his body was exhumed, along with his wife’s. He was re-buried outside of the Scottish-style church on the Irving Manor. Himself, and his wife’s grave only marked as “Grammy and Grampy.

Irving family wealth

According to the 2011 list of Canadians by net worth the combined net worth of the Irving family ranked third in Canada calculated with the net worth of Arthur Irving, James Irving and John Irving through Irving Oil Ltd. and J.D. Irving Ltd at $8.07 billion with no change from 2010. In 2008 the Canadian Business magazine’s annual report on the wealthiest Canadians calculated that the Irving family combined wealth rose 34 percent from 2007 to $US 7.11 billion. Only the Thompson family, with a net worth is $US 18.45 billion, were wealthier  However, since the conglomerate is privately held and the family is private with respect to financial matters, no information on net worth is available. Observers have only the tangible values of real property and industrial assets upon which to base their estimates without any ability to assess the value of cash reserves or outstanding debt and obligations.

Offshore holdings

K.C. Irving fought many battles with the federal government over income tax, business tax and inheritance tax policies. In 1972, following a particularly tough series of battles, K.C. left Canada suddenly with his sons in control of the daily operations of the conglomerate, although he remained as majority shareholder. In 1959, Taylor created the world’s first exclusive gated tax haven, Lyford Cay, Bahamas where Arthur Hailey, Sean Connery, Henry Ford II, Aga Khan IV, Prince Rainier, Stavros Niarchos and Sir John Templeton also resided. Diane Francis described her first job in Canada working for the tax lawyer of Canada’s richest individual and industrialist, E. P. Taylor. Francis created thousands of new corporations divided Taylor’s huge income, to pay minimal small business income tax. </ref>From 1972 until his death, K.C. would visit New Brunswick for “6 months, less a day” each year. In 2010 Forbes magazine estimated that the Irving’s net worth was $US4 billion.

Philanthropy

The family has long maintained their secrecy while actively supporting many community initiatives. Their philanthropy has long been rumoured in many projects, but the first time it was publicly acknowledged was during the early years of the Université de Moncton, an institution that K.C. came to support in recognition of the support that members of the Acadian community had given to his companies.

 

William George “Billy” Barker

William George “Billy” Barker (3 November 1894 – 12 March 1930) was a Canadian First World War fighter ace and Victoria Cross recipient. He is the most decorated serviceman in the history of Canada, and indeed in the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations.

Early life

Born on a family farm in Dauphin, Manitoba, “Will” Barker grew up on the frontier of the Great Plains, riding horses, shooting, and working as a youngster on his father’s farm and sawmill. He was an exceptional shot, using a lever-action Winchester that he had modified with his own peep sight. He was particularly adept at shooting on the move, even while on horseback. One biographer has suggested that he could have been a trick shooter in a circus. He was physically poised, emotionally intense, with wide-ranging interests, and had an innate flair for the dramatic act. He was a very good student in school, but had frequent absences due to farm and sawmill life; he was the hunter providing food for the workers in the sawmill while still a young teenager, and missed classes because of this obligation.

Barker fell in love with aviation after watching pioneer aviators flying Curtiss and Wright Flyer aircraft at farm exhibitions between 1910 and 1914. He was a Boy Scout at Russell, Manitoba, and a member of the 32nd Light Horse, a Non-Permanent Active Militia unit based at Roblin, Manitoba. He was in Grade 11 at Dauphin Collegiate Institute in the fall of 1914, just before his enlistment.

First World War

In December 1914, soon after the outbreak of the First World War and the subsequent call to arms in the Dominion of Canada, Barker enlisted as No 106074 Trooper William G. Barker in the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles. The regiment went to England in June 1915 and then to France on September 22 of that year. Barker was a Colt machine gunner with the regiment’s machine gun section until late February or early March 1916, when he transferred as a probationary observer to 9 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, flying in Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 aircraft.

Western Front 1916-17

He was commissioned as a second-lieutenant in April and was given five days leave in London to acquire an officer’s uniform and equipment. On his return, he was assigned to 4 Squadron and on 7 July transferred to 15 Squadron, still flying in the B.E.2. On 21 July Barker claimed a Roland scout ‘driven down’ with his observer’s gun, and in August claimed a second Roland, this time in flames. He was Mentioned in Despatches around this time. He officially qualified as an Observer on 27 August and on 15 September he worked for the first time with Canadian troops, including his old regiment. On 15 November Barker and his pilot, flying very low over the Ancre River, spotted a large concentration of German troops massing for a counter-attack on Beaumont Hamel. The crew sent an emergency Zone Call brought to bear all available artillery fire in the area onto the specified target. The force of some 4,000 German infantry was effectively broken up. He was awarded the Military Cross for this action in the concluding stages of the Battle of the Somme.

In January 1917, after spending Christmas on leave in London, he commenced pilot training at Netheravon, flying solo after 55 minutes of dual instruction. On 24 February 1917 he returned to serve a second tour on Corps Co-operation machines as a pilot flying B.E.2s and R.E.8s with 15 Squadron. On 25 March Barker claimed another scout ‘driven down’. On 25 April 1917 during the Arras Offensive, Barker, flying an R.E.8 with observer Lt. Goodfellow, spotted over 1,000 German troops sheltering in support trenches. The duo directed artillery fire into the positions, thereby avoiding a counter-attack.

After being awarded a bar to his MC in July, Barker was wounded in the head by anti-aircraft fire in August 1917. After a short spell in the UK as an instructor, Barker’s continual requests for front line service resulted in him being transferred to become a scout pilot, being offered a post with either 56 Squadron or 28 Squadron. He chose command of C Flight in the newly formed 28 Squadron, flying the Sopwith Camel that he preferred over the S.E.5s of 56 Squadron. Although Barker was reportedly not a highly skilled pilot – suffering several flying accidents during his career – he compensated for this deficiency with an aggressiveness in action and highly accurate marksmanship.

The unit moved to France on 8 October 1917 and Barker downed an Albatos DV on his first patrol, though he did not claim it as the patrol was unofficial. He claimed an Albatros of Jasta 2 (Lt. Lange, killed) on 20 October, and two more, of Jasta 18, on 27 October (Lt. Schober killed, Offstv. Klein, force landed).

Italian Front 1917-18

On 7 November 1917, 28 Squadron was transferred to Italy with Barker temporarily in command, and most of the unit, including aircraft, travelled by train to Milan.^[11] On 29 November he downed an Austrian Albatros D.III flown by Lt. Haertl of Jasta 1 near Pieve di Soligo. A Jasta 39 pilot was shot down and killed and a balloon of BK 10 destroyed on 3 December.

One of his most successful, and also most controversial raids – fictionalized by Ernest Hemingway in the short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro – was on 25 December 1917. Catching the Germans off guard, he and Lt. Harold Hudson, his wingman, shot up the airfield of Fliegerabteilung (A) 204, setting fire to one hangar and damaging four German aircraft before dropping a placard wishing their opponents a “Happy Christmas.”

Lt. Lang of Jasta 1 was killed by Barker on 1 January 1918, and two balloons, two Albatros fighters (one flown by Feldwebel Semelock of Flik 51J) and a pair of two-seaters fell to Barker during February. Awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in March, he also claimed three more Albatros and an observation balloon.

Owing to his tendency to ignore orders by flying many unofficial patrols, Barker was passed over when the post of Commanding Officer of 28 Squadron became vacant. Dissatisfied, he applied for a posting and joined 66 Squadron in April 1918, where he claimed a further 16 kills by mid-July.

On 17 April, he shot down Oblt. Gassner-Norden of Flik 41J, flying an Albatros D.III (Oef), over Vittorio. He then became Squadron Commander of 139 Squadron, flying the Bristol Fighter. Barker however took his Sopwith Camel with him and continued to fly fighter operations. He carried out an unusual sortie on the night of 9 August when he flew a Savoia-Pomilio SP.4 bomber to land a spy behind enemy lines.

By this time, Barker’s personal Sopwith Camel (serial no. B6313) had become the most successful fighter aircraft in the history of the RAF, having used it to shoot down 46 aircraft and balloons from September 1917 to September 1918, for a total of 404 operational flying hours. It was dismantled in October 1918, Barker keeping the clock as a memento, although he was asked to return it the following day. During this time Barker trialed a series of modifications to B6313, in order to improve its combat performance. The Clerget rotary engine’s cooling efficiency was poorer in the hotter Italian climate, so several supplementary cooling slots were cut into the cowling. The poor upward visibility of the Camel resulted in Barker cutting away progressively larger portions of the centre-section fabric. He also had a rifle-type, notch and bead gun-sight arrangement replace the standard gun sight fitting.

Having flown more than 900 combat hours in two and one half years, Barker was transferred back to the UK in September 1918 to command the fighter training school at Hounslow Heath Aerodrome. Barker ended his Italian service with some 33 airplanes claimed destroyed and nine observation balloons downed individually or with other pilots.

Victoria Cross

In London at RAF HQ, he persuaded his superiors he needed to get up to date on the latest combat techniques in France and he was granted a 10-day roving commission in France, wherein he selected the Sopwith Snipe as his personal machine and attached himself to No. 201 Squadron RAF, whose Squadron commander, Major Cyril Leman, was a friend from his days as a Corps Co-operation airman.

He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions on day 10, Sunday, 27 October 1918.

While returning his Snipe to an aircraft depot, he crossed enemy lines at 21,000 feet above the Forêt de Mormal. He attacked an enemy Rumpler two-seater which broke up, its crew escaping by parachute; (the aircraft was of FAA 227, Observer Lt. Oskar Wattenburg killed). By his own admission, he was careless and was bounced by a formation of Fokker D.VIIs of Jagdgruppe 12, consisting of Jasta 24 and Jasta 44. In a descending battle against 15 or more enemy machines, Barker was wounded three times in the legs, then his left elbow was blown away, yet he managed to control his Snipe and shoot down or drive down three more enemy aircraft (two German pilot casualties were Lt. Hinky of Jasta 44, wounded; and Vfw. Alfons Schymik of Jasta 24, killed). The dogfight took place immediately above the lines of the Canadian Corps. Severely wounded and bleeding profusely, Barker force landed inside Allied lines, his life being saved by the men of an RAF Kite Balloon Section who transported him to a field dressing station. The fuselage of his Snipe aircraft was recovered from the battlefield and is preserved at the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Ontario.

At a hospital in Rouen, France, Barker clung to life until mid-January 1919, and then was transported back to England. He was not fit enough to walk the necessary few paces for the VC investiture at Buckingham Palace until 1 March 1919.

Barker is officially credited with one captured, two (and seven shared) balloons destroyed, 33 (and two shared) aircraft destroyed, and five aircraft “out of control”, the highest “destroyed” ratio for any RAF, RFC or RNAS pilot during the conflict. The Overseas Military Forces of Canada recognized Barker as “holding the record for fighting decorations” awarded in the First World War.

Most decorated hero

Barker returned to Canada in May 1919 as the most decorated Canadian of the war, with the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, the Military Cross and two Bars, two Italian Silver Medals for Military Valour, and the French Croix de guerre. He was also mentioned in despatches three times. The Canadian Daily Record, a publication of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada, wrote in December 1918 that William Barker of Dauphin, Manitoba was the Canadian holding the record for “most fighting decorations” in the war. No other Canadian soldier, sailor or airman has surpassed this record, and the Canadian War Museum exhibit, located in Ottawa, Ontario, states: “Lieutenant Colonel William G. Barker, one of the legendary aces of the war, remains the most decorated Canadian in military service.” A plaque on his tomb in the mausoleum of Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, officially unveiled on September 22, 2011, describes him as “The most decorated war hero in the history of Canada, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth of Nations.” Only two other servicemen in the history of the Commonwealth or Empire have received as many British medals for gallantry. These were Mick Mannock and James McCudden and, like Barker, both were “scout pilots” in the First World War. Barker, Mannock and McCudden each received six British medals, including the Victoria Cross. McCudden was also awarded a French Croix de Guerre. But with his three foreign medals and three British Mentions in Despatches, Barker received a total of 12 awards for valour.

Postwar

Barker formed a business partnership, Bishop-Barker Aeroplanes Limited, with fellow Victoria Cross recipient and Canadian ace Billy Bishop which lasted for about three years. In 1922 he rejoined the fledgling Canadian Air Force in the rank of Wing Commander, serving as the Station Commander of Camp Borden from 1922 to 1924.

Barker was appointed acting director of the RCAF in early 1924 and he graduated from RAF Staff College, Andover, in 1926. While waiting to start RAF Staff College Course No 4, Barker spent two weeks in Iraq with the RAF to learn more about the uses of air power. He formally reported on his findings to the Minister of National Defence, and informally to Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, of the US Air Service. One of his achievements in the RCAF was the introduction of parachutes. After leaving the RCAF he became the first president of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey club, and involved in tobacco growing farms in southwestern Ontario.

Barker continued to suffer from the physical effects of his 1918 gunshot wounds, his legs were permanently damaged and he suffered severely limited movement in his left arm. He also struggled with alcoholism in the last few years of his life. He died in 1930 when he lost control of his Fairchild KR-21 biplane trainer during a demonstration flight for the RCAF, at Air Station Rockcliffe, near Ottawa, Ontario. Barker, aged 35, was at the time the President and General Manager of Fairchild Aircraft in Montreal.

Legacy

His funeral, the largest national state event in Toronto’s history, was attended by an honour guard of 2,000 soldiers. The cortege stretched for more than a mile and a half, and included the Chief of the General Staff and his senior officers, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the Mayor of Toronto, three federal government cabinet ministers, and six other Victoria Cross recipients. An honour guard was also provided by the United States Army. Some 50,000 spectators lined the streets of Toronto en route to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where Barker was interred in his wife’s family crypt in the Mausoleum.

In his hometown, Dauphin, Manitoba, an elementary school and the Barker Airport (dedicated in 1998) are named in his honour. The Dauphin squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets is named for Barker. An elementary school at CFB Borden in Ontario was also named after Barker before its closure in the mid-1990s. In 2012, Southport Aerospace Centre named their new flight student accommodation building after him. During the week of 8 January 1999, the Canadian Federal Government designated Barker a person of national historic significance. The Discovery Channel’s Flightpath series, a television documentary, included an episode entitled “First of the Few”, a biography of William Barker, broadcast in Canada on 27 April 1999. In 2003 History TV broadcast “The Hero’s Hero – The Forgotten Life of William Barker.”

Barker’s only daughter, Jean Antoinette Mackenzie (née Barker), died in July, 2007. On 22 September 2011, a memorial at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto was unveiled to mark William Barker as the “most decorated war hero in the history of Canada, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth of Nations.”

 

Simon Newcomb

Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) was a Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician. Though he had little conventional schooling, he made important contributions to timekeeping as well as writing on economics and statistics and authoring a science fiction novel.

Early life

Simon Newcomb was born in the town of Wallace, Nova Scotia. His parents were Emily Prince, the daughter of a New Brunswick magistrate, and itinerant school teacher John Burton Newcomb. John moved around teaching in different parts of Canada, particularly in different villages in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newcomb seems to have had little conventional schooling other than from his father and from a short apprenticeship to Dr. Foshay, a charlatan herbalist, in New Brunswick in 1851. Nevertheless, his father provided him with an excellent foundation for his future studies. Newcomb’s apprenticeship with Dr. Foshay occurred when he was only 16. They entered an agreement that Newcomb would serve a five-year apprenticeship during which time Foshay would train him in using herbs to treat illnesses. For two years he was an apprentice but became increasingly unhappy and disillusioned with his apprenticeship and about Foshay’s unscientific approach, realizing that the man was a charlatan. He made the decision to walk out on Foshay and break their agreement. He walked the 120 miles (190 km) to the port of Calais in Maine where he met the captain of a ship who agreed to take him to Salem, Massachusetts so that he could join his father. In about 1854, he joined his father in Salem (John Newcomb had moved earlier to the United States), and the two journeyed together to Maryland.

After arriving in Maryland, Newcomb taught for two years from 1854 to 1856; for the first year in a country school in Massey’s Cross Roads, Kent County, MD, then for a year at a school not far south in Sudlersville in Queen Anne’s County, MD. In his spare time he studied a variety of subjects such as political economy and religion, but his deepest studies were made in mathematics and astronomy. In particular he read Newton’s Principia at this time. In 1856 he took up a position as a private tutor close to Washington and he often travelled to that city to study mathematics in the libraries there. He was able to borrow a copy of Bowditch’s translation of Laplace’s Traité de mécanique céleste from the library of the Smithsonian Institution but found the mathematics beyond him.

Newcomb studied mathematics and physics privately and supported himself by teaching before becoming a human computer (a functionary in charge of calculations) at the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1857. At around the same time, he enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, graduating BS in 1858.

Peirce family

Newcomb studied mathematics under Benjamin Peirce and the impecunious Newcomb was often a welcome guest at the Peirce home. However, he later became envious of Peirce’s talented son, Charles Sanders Peirce and has been accused of a “successful destruction” of C. S. Peirce’s career. In particular, Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, is alleged to have been on the point of awarding tenure to C. S. Peirce, before Newcomb intervened behind the scenes to dissuade him. About 20 years later, Newcomb allegedly influenced the Carnegie Institution Trustees, to prevent C. S. Peirce’s last chance to publish his life’s work, through a denial of a Carnegie grant to Peirce, even though Andrew Carnegie himself, Theodore Roosevelt, William James and others, wrote to support it.

Career

Astronomy

In the prelude to the American Civil War, many US Navy staff of Confederate sympathies left the service and, in 1861, Newcomb took advantage of one of the ensuing vacancies to become professor of mathematics and astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, Washington D.C.. Newcomb set to work on the measurement of the position of the planets as an aid to navigation, becoming increasingly interested in theories of planetary motion.

By the time Newcomb visited Paris, France in 1870, he was already aware that the table of lunar positions calculated by Peter Andreas Hansen was in error. While in Paris, he realised that, in addition to the data from 1750 to 1838 that Hansen had used, there was further data stretching as far back as 1672. His visit allowed little serenity for analysis as he witnessed the defeat of French emperor Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War and the coup that ended the Second French Empire. Newcomb managed to escape from the city during the ensuing rioting that led up to the formation of the Paris Commune and which engulfed the Paris Observatory. Newcomb was able to use the “new” data to revise Hansen’s tables.

He was offered the post of director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1875 but declined, having by now settled that his interests lay in mathematics rather than observation.

Director of the Nautical Almanac Office

In 1877 he became director of the Nautical Almanac Office where, ably assisted by George William Hill, he embarked on a program of recalculation of all the major astronomical constants. Despite fulfilling a further demanding role as professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University from 1884, he conceived with A. M. W. Downing a plan to resolve much international confusion on the subject. By the time he attended a standardisation conference in Paris, France, in May 1896, the international consensus was that all ephemerides should be based on Newcomb’s calculations—Newcomb’s Tables of the Sun. A further conference as late as 1950 confirmed Newcomb’s constants as the international standard.

Work

Speed of light

In 1878, Newcomb had started planning for a new and precise measurement of the speed of light that was needed to account for exact values of many astronomical constants. He had already started developing a refinement of the method of Léon Foucault when he received a letter from the young naval officer and physicist Albert Abraham Michelson who was also planning such a measurement. Thus began a long collaboration and friendship. In 1880, Michelson assisted at Newcomb’s initial measurement with instruments located at Fort Myer and the United States Naval Observatory, then situated on the Potomac River. However, Michelson had left to start his own project by the time of the second set of measurements between the observatory and the Washington Monument. Though Michelson published his first measurement in 1880, Newcomb’s measurement was substantially different. In 1883, Michelson revised his measurement to a value closer to Newcomb’s.

Benford’s law

In 1881, Newcomb discovered the statistical principle now known as Benford’s law, when he observed that the earlier pages of logarithm books, used at that time to carry out logarithmic calculations, were far more worn than the later pages. This led him to formulate the principle that, in any list of numbers taken from an arbitrary set of data, more numbers will tend to begin with “1” than with any other digit.

Chandler wobble

In 1891, within months of Seth Carlo Chandler’s discovery of the 14-month variation of latitude, now referred to as the Chandler wobble, Newcomb explained the apparent conflict between the observed motion and predicted period of the wobble. The theory was based on a perfectly rigid body, but Earth is slightly elastic. Newcomb used the variation of latitude observations to estimate the elasticity of Earth, finding it to be slightly more rigid than steel.

Other work

Newcomb was an autodidact and polymath. He wrote on economics and his Principles of political economy (1885) was described by John Maynard Keynes as “one of those original works which a fresh scientific mind, not perverted by having read too much of the orthodox stuff, is able to produce from time to time in a half-formed subject like economics.” He was credited by Irving Fisher with the first-known enunciation of the equation of exchange between money and goods used in the quantity theory of money. He spoke French, German, Italian and Swedish; was an active mountaineer; widely read; and authored a number of popular science books and a science fiction novel, His Wisdom the Defender (1900).

Personal life

Newcomb died in Washington, DC of bladder cancer and was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery with President William Howard Taft in attendance.

Newcomb’s daughter married Assistant US Attorney General Edward Baldwin Whitney, who was the son of Professor William Dwight Whitney and the grandson of US Senator & Connecticut Governor Roger Sherman Baldwin. He was also the grandfather of mathematician and Professor Hassler Whitney.

Quotations

On the state of astronomy

1888, Simon Newcomb: “We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.”

On the impossibility of a flying machine

Newcomb is famously quoted as having believed it impossible to build a “flying machine”. . He begins an article titled “Is the Airship Possible?” with the remark, “That depends, first of all, on whether we are to make the requisite scientific discoveries.” He ends with the remark “the construction of an aerial vehicle … which could carry even a single man from place-to-place at pleasure requires the discovery of some new metal or some new force.”

In the October 22, 1903, issue of The Independent, Newcomb made the well-known remark that “May not our mechanicians . . . be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope, and give up all attempts to grapple with it?”, completed by the motivation that even if a man flew he could not stop. “Once he slackens his speed, down he begins to fall. Once he stops, he falls as a dead mass.” He had no concept of an airfoil. His “aeroplane” was an inclined “thin flat board”. He therefore concluded that it could never carry the weight of a man.

Newcomb was specifically critical of the work of Samuel Pierpont Langley, who claimed that he could build a flying machine powered by a steam engine and whose initial efforts at flight were public failures. In 1903, however, Newcomb was also saying, “Quite likely the 20th century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird. But when we inquire whether aerial flight is possible in the present state of our knowledge; whether, with such materials as we possess, a combination of steel, cloth and wire can be made which, moved by the power of electricity or steam, shall form a successful flying machine, the outlook may be altogether different.”

Newcomb was clearly unaware of the Wright Brothers’ efforts whose work was done in relative obscurity and apparently unaware of the internal combustion engine’s better power-to-weight ratio. When he heard about the Wrights’ flight in 1908 he was quick to accept it. Newcomb favored the development of rotating wing (helicopters) and airships that would float in the air (blimps). Within a few decades, Zeppelins regularly transported passengers between Europe and the United States, and the Graf Zeppelin circumnavigated the Earth.

 

Gerald Vincent Bull

Gerald Vincent Bull (March 9, 1928 – March 22, 1990) was a Canadian engineer who developed long-range artillery. He moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a huge artillery piece, to which end he designed the Project Babylon “supergun” for the Iraqi government. Bull was assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium in March 1990.

Education

Early life

Bull was born in North Bay, Ontario, to George L.T. and Gertrude Isabelle LaBrosse Bull. George Bull was from a family from the Trenton area and had moved to North Bay in 1903 to start a law firm. As a Catholic, LaBrosse would have been forbidden from marrying Bull, as he was Anglican. Bull converted to Catholicism on February 20, 1909, and the two married three days later. Over the next few years the couple had 10 children: Bernice Gwendolyn Florence, Henry, Philis, Charles Esmond, Clyde, Vivian, Ronald, Frank, Gerald, and Gordon.

George Bull was offered the position of King’s Counsel in 1928. The family was well off, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression dramatically changed their circumstances. Within a year the loans Bull had taken to buy stocks on margin were called in, and the family was forced to move to Toronto to look for work.

The next year Gertrude Bull suffered complications while giving birth to Gordon. She died April 1, 1931. George Bull suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into heavy drinking; he left his children in the care of his sister Laura, who fell victim to cancer and died in mid-1934. The next year, banks foreclosed on the family home. The same year, George, at the age of 58, met and married Rose Bleeker. He gave up the children to various relatives: Gerald ending up living with his older sister Bernice.

In 1938, Gerald was sent to spend the summer holidays with his uncle and aunt, Philip and Edith LaBrosse (Philip was the younger brother of Gerald’s mother Gertrude). During the Depression, Phil and Edith had won about $175,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, so were relatively well off. Gerald was sent to an all-boys school run by the Jesuit order, Regiopolis College in Kingston. Despite his being too young to attend, the school allowed him to start in 1938 and he returned to spend the summers with the LaBrosses. During this time he took up the hobby of building balsa wood airplanes of his own design, and was a member of the school’s modeling club. He graduated in 1946.

University

After graduating, Bull entered Queen’s University, with hopes of eventually entering officers’ training school. Philip LaBrosse visited the University of Toronto with the intention of having Bull placed there. He wrote to Bull, who was in Kingston, having found room in the medical school. Bull declined the offer and instead asked LaBrosse if a position in the new aeronautical engineering course was available. The department, being brand new, had limited qualifying criteria for entrance and agreed to interview Bull even though he was only sixteen years old – and he was accepted into the undergraduate program. Records and recollections of both classmates and his professors show little evidence of Bull’s brilliance; one professor noted that “He certainly didn’t stand out”. After graduating in 1948, with marks that were described as “strictly average”, Bull took a drafting job at A.V. Roe Canada.

Later that year, the University opened a new Institute of Aerodynamics (now the Institute for Aerospace Studies) under the direction of Dr Gordon Patterson. The Institute operated on a small budget and could afford to employ only twelve students, accepting three per year for a four-year period, and was funded by the Defence Research Board (DRB). Bull applied and was accepted at Patterson’s personal recommendation, as Patterson felt that any lack in academics was made up for by Bull’s tremendous energy. Bull was soon partnered up with fellow student Doug Henshaw, and the two were given the task of building a supersonic wind tunnel, which was at that time a relatively rare device.

When the Royal Canadian Air Force donated land adjacent to RCAF Station Downsview to the Institute, the operations were quickly moved. During construction, Bull used the wind tunnel as the basis for his September 15, 1949 Master’s thesis, on the design and construction of advanced wind tunnels. The tunnel was to be featured prominently during the opening of the new Institute grounds, leading to an all-night rush to get it fully operational in time for the presentation. The work was completed at 3:30 am, but the team was too exhausted to test it. The next day Air Marshal Curtis pushed the start button and nothing happened, but Dr Patterson quickly reached around, pushed harder, and the wind tunnel worked perfectly.

Bull had largely finished his PhD thesis on the same topic in 1950, when a request from the DRB asking that the Institute provide an aerodynamicist to help on their Velvet Glove Missile project arrived. It was to be an unpaid position on which the volunteer would remain on a normal PhD stipend from the University. Patterson selected Bull for the position, which led to a period of successful work at the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment, or CARDE.

Career

CARDE

CARDE, the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment, was formed as a joint Canadian-British operation to study artillery and ballistics, in an effort to harness the intellectual resources of Canada, as well to place developing British technology outside of German reach during World War II. Formed up on a military training area and artillery range outside Valcartier, northwest of Quebec City, CARDE was one of a number of research divisions of the DRB that were well funded in the immediate post-war era. CARDE was researching supersonic flight and a variety of rocket and missile projects when Bull was asked to join. Bull asked to build a wind tunnel for this research, but his suggestions were dismissed as too expensive.

Falling behind in their calculations, the artillerymen at CARDE suggested that they could solve their problems by firing models out of existing guns in order to gather real-world data. This provided Bull an introduction to artillery. A former Ordnance QF 25 pounder was bored out to produce a six-inch smoothbore. Borrowing an idea developed in England in 1916, cards were placed on holders along the range and scaled models of the missile fired through them. In some ways this technique was superior to wind tunnels, as it allowed for the direct measurement of real-world influences on the trajectory, as a test of theoretical calculations. On the downside, reducing the collected data to a mathematical trajectory for checking against the theoretical calculations is difficult. The range eventually developed into a 1,000-foot-long (300 m) walled and covered trench with cards hung every ten feet down its length.

Bull was at CARDE briefly before returning to the university to defend his thesis in March 1951, at 23 years old becoming the youngest PhD graduate in the Institute’s history—a record that remains to this day. He returned to CARDE, now on the DRB’s payroll, and continued working on the instrumented guns. On one of these trips, in 1953, he and a friend stopped in Charny after a fishing trip to drop off some of their catch at a local doctor’s house. Bull met Noemi “Mimi” Gilbert, the doctor’s daughter, and the two soon started dating. Given Bull’s work schedule they were rarely able to see each other, but they became engaged in February 1954, and married on July 15. Dr. Gilbert gave the couple a small house as a wedding gift. Mimi gave birth to their first son, Phillippe, on July 3, 1955, and a second, Michael, in November 1956.

In 1954 Bull decided that a wind tunnel was too important to ignore, even if he could not arrange for funding through the DRB. Instead, he gained the ear of professors at Laval University in Quebec City, and Bull and a number of graduate students started work on a tunnel similar to the one he had earlier built at the UofT. It opened in the summer of 1955 and was capable of speeds up to Mach 4, but cost only $6,000, the result of using scrap for most of its parts.

Bull’s work was brought to the public’s attention in a May 20, 1955 Toronto Telegram headline article, Unveil Canadian Gun that Fires 4,550 M.P.H. Missiles. Around this time Bull further improved the data-collection capabilities of the system by developing a telemetry system that could fit in the models. DRB staff thought the idea was unworkable and worked against having it funded, but Bull shuffled his own department’s funding and went ahead and developed it anyway. All the parts of Bull’s future efforts, smoothbore high-velocity guns, sabots for increasing performance, and hardened electronics, were now complete.

Work on the Velvet Glove ended in 1956, and the DRB turned its attention to anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs). Bull’s gun system was not fast enough to be useful in this role, so it was adapted to use a “sabot” to improve its performance. Bull then moved on to hypersonics research and the study of infrared and radar cross sections for detection. As the UK’s research efforts wound down in the post-war political environment, CARDE’s joint UK-Canadian funding was dramatically curtailed, eventually being handed over to the Canadians entirely and followed by further cuts. Bull was vocal about this turn of events, calling the Liberal government of the day “second-rate lawyers and jumped-up real-estate salesmen”.

During this period CARDE was visited by a US team, including Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, who was impressed with Bull’s work. Trudeau was director of US Army Research and Development, and he quickly set up a similar effort at the Aberdeen Proving Ground under the direction of Dr. Charles Murphy. They built an analog of Bull’s gun using a 5-inch (130 mm) gun and started test firing it over the Atlantic in 1961. The team used a fire-control radar from a Nike Hercules missile battery to track the shells, which released a cloud of chaff at altitudes up to 130,000 feet (40,000 m).

Around the same time, Bull and Murphy started discussing the idea of firing scale aircraft models from their guns. Both started working on the idea, but Bull beat Murphy when he successfully fired a model of the Gloster Javelin from his gun and managed to take shadowgraph photos of it showing supersonic shock cones. Bull then used the same method to work on the Avro Arrow, discovering an instability that led to the use of a stability augmentation system. Work on the Avro Arrow was soon cancelled, which angered Bull.

With attention turning to space after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Bull leaked a story that Canada would soon match this feat by placing a high-velocity gun in the nose of a US Army Redstone missile. The story was a complete fabrication, but caused a major stir when it hit the papers on April 22, 1958. After the story broke Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was besieged in the House of Commons press scrum, later dismissing it stating that “There is no foundation whatsoever to the story, not a scintilla of truth to it”. A major flap broke out as a result, leading to the dressing down of several of Bull’s superiors. When the press was invited to visit CARDE, the Canadian Broadcasting Company broadcast a piece covering much of the work at CARDE on May 11, including lengthy sections on Bull’s gun and their work on infrared detection and anti-ballistic missile systems.

On April 1, 1961 Bull got into an argument with his direct superior over paperwork. Bull wrote out his resignation. A report prepared after his departure stated “…his tempestuous nature and strong dislike for administration and red tape constantly led him into trouble with senior management.”

High Altitude Research Program

Bull had long prepared for this event, and soon re-appeared as a professor at McGill University, which was in the process of building up a large engineering department under the direction of Donald Mordell. Mordell had long maintained links with CARDE and became one of Bull’s ardent supporters, in spite of what other professors saw as “second-rate attempts at manipulation” and that “[Mordell] always supported Bull’s work… I think sometimes he got pretty tired of supporting Bull.” Bull, for his part, appeared to enjoy the new position, and later described it as “a marriage made in heaven”. Bull remained in contact with his counterparts in the US and the University of Toronto, and set about equipping the University with the instrumentation it would need to be a leader in the field of aerodynamics.

Several years earlier, while still working at CARDE, Gerald and Mimi had purchased a 2,000-acre (8.1 km²) plot of land on the Québec–Vermont border. Bull donated the land to be used by McGill and turned into a new ballistics lab, a private analog of the CARDE site. Renamed to become “Highwater Station” due to the local village of Highwater, the site was quickly developed under the direction of former British Army colonel Robert Stacy, who bulldozed large sections, built various test facilities and ran power to the site. There they began working with 5″ and 7″ artillery pieces.

In late 1961 Bull visited Murphy and Trudeau at Aberdeen and was able to interest them in the idea using guns to loft missile components for re-entry research, a task that was otherwise very expensive and time-consuming aboard rockets. They arranged funding for the work under Project HARP (for High Altitude Research Program, not to be confused with HAARP). The US Navy supplied a surplus 16-inch battleship gun, and a contract from the Office of Naval Research paid for the gun to be re-bored into a 16.4-inch smooth bore. The entire contract, excluding shipping, was only $2,000.

The performance of the gun was so great that the Highwater site was too small to support it. McGill had long been running a meteorological station on Barbados and had close connections with the new Democratic Labour Party (DLP), and suggested that it would make an ideal location for the gun to be set up. Bull met with Prime Minister Errol Barrow who became an enthusiastic supporter of HARP, and arranged for a firing site in Foul Bay, on the southeast coast of the island near the Seawell Airport. The guns arrived in early 1962 but could not be put ashore at the site and had to be offloaded 7 miles (11 km) down the coast, and then transported overland via a purpose-built railway that employed hundreds of locals. As the project continued, this figure grew to over 300 permanently employed with the project, and it became a major reason for Barrow’s continued support. Bull encouraged the locals to use the project as a stepping-stone to a science or engineering degree of their own, and his efforts were widely lauded in the press.

In January 1962 the first test shot was carried out, firing an empty sabot. The test was completely successful, so a further two similar firings were abandoned and the second firing was made with a dart-like finned projectile named Martlet (after the mythical bird without feet on the McGill University crest). These tests demonstrated several problems, including poor shot-to-shot performance of the decades-old gunpowder, and the fact that the projectile left the barrel so quickly that the powder did not have time to burn completely. New charges using modern powder were soon supplied, and by November 1962 the 150-kilogram Martlets were being fired at over 10,000 ft/s (3,048 m/s; 6,818 mph) and reaching altitudes of 215,000 ft (66,000 m).

The Martlets evolved through this period, growing in size and sophistication. As Bull later put it:

Martlett 2A was the first high-altitude projectile. It weighed 225 pounds. The forebody carried electronics, the aftbody carried chemical payloads. It was five inches (127 mm) in diameter, and had a very heavy pusher plate. The actual all-up weight was around 400 to 450 pounds. Then what happened was the Martlet 2C. [It] was the big workhorse, still a five inch (127 mm). Then, towards the end, we came up with the 350 pound vehicle, the same thing, only seven inches in diameter.

The idea was to find out what happens in the atmosphere from sunset to sunrise. Remember, nobody gave us grants. We had to produce tropical atmospheric meteorological [data] for the army research office, that’s how we got our money. We were trying to measure everything to the top of the atmosphere, which we labeled as a nominal two hundred kilometers.

The cost of a launch was about $5,000. We did up to eight a night. We used to do three nights in a row to try to get the data.

—Gerald Bull

The Martlet’s electronics triggered the release of the chemical markers at a set altitude. This left a sort of “smoke trail” through the atmosphere that could be used to measure winds aloft by visual means. The chemical was typically triethylaluminium, which burns on contact with air. Loading the shells was a dangerous job that required special handling. The Martlets were also used to release chaff instead of chemicals, allowing tracking via radar. Some shots used additional electronics to measure the magnetic field. Similar firings in support of the upper atmosphere research were made using 5″ and 7″ guns at Highwater, Alaska, and Wallops Island Virginia. By the time the program ran down, about 1,000 firings had taken place, and the data collected during HARP represents half of all the upper-atmospheric data to this day.

The Martlet-2 was only a stepping-stone on the way to Bull’s real interest, a gun-launched rocket that could reach outer space. The gun had been thoroughly tested and was well past intercontinental ranges, but needed modifying. In early 1963 HARP started experimenting with the Martlet-3, a 7-inch-diameter (177.8 mm) “full bore” projectile designed to test the basic problems of launching a solid-fuel artillery shell from guns. Solid shell fuel has the consistency of soft rubber and is cut into a pattern that is open in the middle, so on firing the “grain” would tend to collapse into the cavity. This problem was solved by filling the cavity with zinc bromide, a liquid that had a density close to the fuel which prevented the collapse and was then drained out after firing to allow the shell to light. Test firings began at the US Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen using a bored-out 175 mm gun from the M107. This program proved the basic concept and shots of the Martlet-3 reached altitudes of 155 miles (249 km).

The ultimate goal of the program was the Martlet-4, a three-stage 16.4″ rocket that would be fired from a lengthened gun at Barbados and would reach orbit. In 1964 Donald Mordell was able to convince the Canadian government of the value of the HARP project as a low-cost method for Canada to enter the space-launch business, and arranged a joint Canadian-US funding program of $3 million a year for three years, with the Canadians supplying $2.5 million of that. Another 16.4″ gun, mounted horizontally, was being tested at the Highwater range, and was extended by cutting the breech off the end of one gun and welding it to the end of another to produce a new gun over 110 feet long. The extension allowed the powder to be contained for a longer period of time, slowing down the acceleration and loads on the airframe, while also offering higher overall performance. Once the system had been tested at Highwater, a second barrel was shipped to Foul Bay, attached and strengthened with external bracing to allow it to be raised from the horizontal. This gun was extensively tested in 1965 and 66.

The orbital project faced a constant race with its own budget. Originally guaranteed three years of funding, the money was handled by the DRB, who was less than impressed with its former “star” going on to greater things while their own funding was being dramatically cut. Although the money was allocated for 1964, the DRB managed to delay delivery for ten months, forcing McGill to cover salaries in the interim. These problems did not go unnoticed in the US Army, and in order to ensure that firings would not be interrupted by problems on the Canadian side, a third double-length gun was built at the Yuma Proving Grounds to continue the high-altitude measurements. On November 18, 1966 this gun launched a Martlet-2 to 180 km, a world record that still stands today.

By 1967 it was becoming clear that the Martlet-4 would not be ready by the time the funding ran out in 1968. An effort started to build a simplified version, the GLO-1A (Gun-launched Orbiter, Version 1A), based on the Martlet-2G. Continued budget pressures, changing public attitudes towards military affairs, negative reviews from the press and other researchers in Canada and a change of government all conspired to ensure that Canadian funding was not renewed in 1967. Bull had been working on a last-ditch effort to launch a Canadian flag into orbit in time for the Canadian Centennial, but nothing came of this plan.

Space Research Corporation

Bull returned to his Highwater range, and managed to get HARP’s assets transferred to a new company by invoking a clause in the original contract with McGill that required them to return the range to its original natural condition. Faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction costs to wind down a project that could not garner funding, McGill was left with little choice but to trade Bull for title to the Highwater equipment. Setting up a new company, Space Research Corporation (SRC), Bull became an international artillery consultant. Incorporated in both Quebec and Vermont, a number of contracts from both the Canadian and US military research arms helped the company get started.

At SRC Bull continued the development of his high-velocity artillery, adapting the HARP smoothbore into a new “reverse rifled” design where the lands of a conventional rifling were replaced by grooves cut into the barrel to make a slightly larger gun also capable of firing existing ammunition. Normally artillery shells are sealed into the rifling by a driving band of soft metal like copper, which demands that the shell be shaped so that it balances at its widest point, where the band is located. This is not ideal for ballistics, especially supersonically where a higher fineness ratio is desirable. Bull solved this problem by using an additional set of nub “fins” near the front of the shell to keep it centered in the barrel, allowing the driving band to be greatly reduced in size, and located wherever was convenient. Re-shaping the shell for better supersonic performance provided dramatically improved range and accuracy, up to double in both cases, when compared to a similar gun using older-style ammunition. He called the new shell design “Extended Range, Full Bore” (ERFB).

Starting in 1975, Bull designed a new gun based on the common US 155/39 M109 howitzer, extending it slightly to 45 calibre through modifications that could be applied to existing weapons, calling the resulting weapon the GC-45 howitzer. Bull also purchased the base bleed technology being developed in Sweden, which allowed for further improvements in range. With ERFB round the GC-45 could routinely place rounds into 10 m circles at ranges up to 30 km, extending this to 38 km with some loss in accuracy. The gun offered ranges far in excess of even the longest-ranged heavy artillery in a gun only slightly larger than common medium-weight guns.

SRC’s first major sales success was the sale of 50,000 ERFB shells to Israel in 1973 for use in American-supplied artillery pieces. The Israelis had successfully used a number of 175 mm M107 guns in the counter-battery role against its Soviet counterpart, the 130 mm towed field gun M1954 (M-46), but the introduction of long range rockets fired from Lebanon outranged them. The ERFB shells extended the range of the already formidable M107 to as much as 50 km, allowing the guns to counter-battery even the longest range rockets. Bull was rewarded for success of this program by a Congressional bill, sponsored by Senator Barry Goldwater, making him retroactively eligible for a decade of American citizenship and high-level American nuclear security clearance. He was only one of three people ever granted citizenship by an Act of Congress.

Another early success for SRC was the sale of 30,000 artillery shells, gun barrels, and plans for the GC-45 howitzer to Armscor of Pretoria, South Africa. The South African army was using older weapons, notably the British WWII Ordnance QF 25 pounder, that were completely outperformed by Soviet-supplied artillery during the Operation Savannah in 1975–1976, which completely shut down their offensive and resulted in a rout. In order to ensure this would not happen again, they went shopping for longer-ranged weapons and were put in touch with SRC by CIA personnel, their partners in Operation Savannah. Armscor designed a new mounting to allow increased powder loads and added an auxiliary power unit to improve its capabilities in the field by helping automate various tasks and move the gun short distances. The resulting G5 howitzer was vital to the South African campaign against Cuban military forces in Angola, allowing them to stop any attempt to conduct military actions of any size in the border area.

With the change to the Jimmy Carter administration in 1977, American policy on arms sales changed dramatically. Combatting communism was no longer the primary consideration, and international criticism of the human rights record of the South African apartheid system became a major concern. Enforcing rules that had always been “on the books”, Bull was arrested for illegal arms dealing in violation of the UN arms embargo. Expecting a slap on the wrist, Bull was surprised to find himself spending six months in the US Federal Correctional Complex, Allenwood, Pennsylvania in 1980. On his return to Quebec he was sued and fined $55,000 for arms dealing.

European Poudreries Réunies de Belgique

Bull left Canada and moved to Brussels, where a subsidiary of SRC called European Poudreries Réunies de Belgique was based. Bull continued working with the ERFB ammunition design, developing a range of munitions that could be fired from existing weapons. A number of companies designed upgrades to work with older weapons, like the M114 155 mm howitzer, combining a new barrel from the M109 with Bull’s ERFB ammunition to produce an improved weapon for relatively low cost.

Bull also continued working with the GC-45 design, and soon secured work with The People’s Republic of China, and then Iraq. He designed two artillery pieces for the Iraqis: the 155 mm Al-Majnoonan, an updated version of the G5, and a similar set of adaptations applied to the 203 mm US M110 howitzer to produce the 210 mm Al-Fao with a maximum range of 56 km (35 mi) without base bleed. Although it appears the Al-Fao was not put into production, the Al-Majnoonan started replacing Soviet designs as quickly as they could be delivered. When deliveries could not be made quickly enough, additional barrels were delivered from South Africa. The guns were built and sold through Austria.

Bull then convinced the Iraqis that they would never be a real power without the capability for space launches. He offered to build a cannon capable of such launches, basically an even larger version of the original HARP design. Saddam Hussein was interested, and work started on “Project Babylon”.

A smaller 45-meter, 350 mm caliber gun was completed for testing purposes, and Bull then started work on the “real” PC-2 machine, a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000-kilogram projectile into orbit. The Iraqis then told Bull they would only go ahead with the project if he would also help with development of their longer-ranged Scud-based missile project. Bull agreed.

Construction of the individual sections of the new gun started in England at Sheffield Forgemasters and Matrix Churchill as well as in Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Assassination

Bull concurrently worked on the Scud project, making calculations for the new nose-cone needed for the higher re-entry speeds and temperatures the missile would face. Over a period of a few months following, his apartment suffered several non-robbery break-ins, apparently as a threat or a warning, but he continued to work on the project. In March 1990 he was assassinated, allegedly by Iranian or Israeli intelligence services. One account states he was shot five times in the head and back at point blank range while approaching the door of his apartment in Brussels. Another account states he was shot by a three-man team on March 20, 1990, when he answered the doorbell. According to Gordon Thomas, the assassination of Bull had been sanctioned by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Nahum Admoni sent the three man team to Brussels, where the Mossad-agents shot Bull at his door-step. Within hours after the killing, Mossad was engaged in distributing false stories to the European media, alleging that Bull had been shot by agents from Iraq.

The supergun project was stopped when its parts were seized by Customs in the United Kingdom in November 1990, and most of Bull’s staff returned to Canada. The smaller test gun was later broken up after the Gulf War.

Possible assassins

The co-operation between Bull and Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to Iran and Israel as Iran had endured an eight-year long war with Iraq, and Israel had had previous military engagements with Iraq during the Arab-Israeli war. Watching development of the gun Israel feared it could be used to launch nuclear weapons, but the re-designed SCUD missiles were of greater concern at that moment. As for Iran it was under threat from both Bull’s super-gun and his re-designed SCUD missiles.

Although it was in Iran and Israel’s immediate interest that Bull would discontinue his co-operation with Saddam Hussein, he had worked for many different parties in many critical defence projects that he became an asset and a liability for several powerful groups at the same time. It has been speculated that besides Iran or Israel, the CIA, MI6, Chilean, Iraqi, or South African governments could have been behind the assassination due to Bull’s past ventures. According to Thomas, Mossad was actively distributing false stories to the European media, alleging that Bull had been shot by agents from Iraq just hours after Bull was shot by Mossad-agents.

Peter Woodcock

David Michael Krueger (March 5, 1939 – March 5, 2010), best known by his birth name, Peter Woodcock, was a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who gained notoriety for the brutal murders of three young children in Toronto, Canada, in 1956 and 1957 when he himself was still a teenager. He was placed in a psychiatric facility and subsequently diagnosed as a psychopath. Expensive treatment programs for Woodcock proved ineffective when he murdered a fellow psychiatric patient in 1991; after his death in 2010, he was dubbed by the Toronto Star as “The serial killer they couldn’t cure”.

Life and crimes

Woodcock was born to a 17-year-old Peterborough factory worker who gave him up for adoption. He spent the first three years of his life in various foster homes; he was physically abused in at least one of those homes. He was later adopted by a wealthy family living near Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue, who paid for a private school education, therapy and bikes for Woodcock. When he reached puberty, he began to travel around Toronto on his bike, fantasizing about becoming a gang leader and, in reality, sexually assaulting children in Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Ultimately, Woodcock would brutally murder three young children in 1956 and 1957.

Woodcock was apprehended for the murders in 1957, found not guilty by reason of insanity, and placed in Oak Ridge, an Ontario psychiatric facility located in Penetanguishene. There, he legally changed his name. Following the completion of a treatment program for Woodcock and other psychopathic individuals, he was deemed greatly improved, and sent to a medium-security hospital in Brockville, Ontario, in 1991. There, Woodcock claimed, he fell in love with fellow psychiatric patient Dennis Kerr, who rejected his sexual advances. During the first hour of his first weekend pass in 34 years, Woodcock stabbed Kerr to death. Woodcock was being supervised on the pass by Bruce Hamill, a former patient who had killed an elderly Ottawa woman in 1977. Hamill was an accomplice in the Brockville murder, and both men were subsequently returned to Oak Ridge. Woodcock told how the treatment program served only to make him more adept at manipulating others. Having spent 53 years in custody, the majority of that time at Oak Ridge, Woodcock died there on March 5, 2010, his 71st birthday.

Victims

• Wayne Mallette – seven-year-old boy lured into the deserted Toronto Exhibition grounds on September 15, 1956. Originally another teen, identified only as “Ronald Mowatt”, was charged with the child’s murder.
• Gary Morris – nine-year-old boy lured to Cherry Beach on October 6, 1956.
• Carole Voyce – four-year-old girl murdered by Woodcock on January 19, 1957 in a ravine under the Prince Edward Viaduct.
• Dennis Kerr – psychiatric inmate murdered on July 13, 1991 with a knife and hatchet by Peter Woodcock with the help of a former patient, Bruce Hamill.

 

Samuel “Sam” E. Langford

Samuel “Sam” E. Langford (March 4, 1883 – January 12, 1956) was a Black Canadian boxing standout of the early part of the 20th century. (Born Weymouth Falls, Nova Scotia). Called the “Greatest Fighter Nobody Knows,” by ESPN, he was rated #2 by The Ring on their list of “100 greatest punchers of all time.” Langford was originally from Weymouth Falls, a small community in Nova Scotia, Canada. He was known as “The Boston Bonecrusher,” “The Boston Terror,” and his most infamous nickname, “The Boston Tar Baby.” Langford stood 5 ft 6 ¹⁄₂ in (1.69 m) and weighed 185 lb (84 kg) in his prime.

He was denied a shot at many World Championships due to the color bar and by the refusal of Jack Johnson, the first African-American World Heavyweight Champion, to fight him. Langford was the World Colored Heavyweight Champion, a title vacated by Johnson after he won the World Championship, a record five times. Many boxing aficionados consider him the greatest boxer not to win a world title and one of the greatest boxers in the history of the sport. BoxRec ranks him as the 4th greatest heavyweight of all-time, the 9th greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all-time and the greatest Canadian boxer of all-time.

Professional career

Langford was a boxer who fought greats from the lightweight division right up to the heavyweights, beating many champions in the process. However, he was never able to secure a world title for himself. Langford was simply too good and, as a result, was ducked by many champions. Despite the fact Langford never received his rightful chance at the heavyweight title because of Jack Johnson’s refusal to risk his crown against Langford, Ring magazine founder Nat Fleischer rated Langford as one of the ten best heavyweights of all time.

Memorable fights

Langford’s most memorable fights were his numerous encounters against fellow black boxers Sam McVey, Battling Jim Johnson, Joe Jeanette and Harry Wills, who all experienced similar barriers in their fighting careers.

Langford defeated World Lightweight Champion Joe Gans on December 8, 1903 via 15 round decision. Gans’ title was not on the line, however. The two would later become good friends. Langford considered Gans the pound for pound greatest fighter of all time.

He fought Jack Blackburn, trainer of the legendary Joe Louis, six times. The first three fights were draws, the fourth a decision win for Langford, the fifth another draw and the sixth a no contest.

Although Langford is often credited as the greatest fighter to never challenge for a world title, he fought World Welterweight Champion Barbados Joe Walcott on September 5, 1904 for his title. The fight resulted in a draw by decision, thus Walcott retained his title. However, reports of the fight say Langford clearly outpointed the champion. Langford kept Walcott at a distance with his longer reach and used his footwork to evade all of Walcott’s attacks. Langford landed lefts and rights to the jaw so effectively, Walcott was bleeding by round two and continued bleeding more after every round. Walcott was brought on one knee in the third round and the fight ended with hardly a scratch on Langford.

Langford fought various contenders throughout his career. He fought welterweight Young Peter Jackson six times, winning the first two by decision, the third was a draw via points, losing the fourth by technical knockout and winning the fifth and sixth bouts again by decision. Their bout on November 12, 1907 at the Pacific Athletic Club in Los Angeles was billed as being for the World Colored Middleweight Championship (158 lbs.). Langford won the title by besting Jackson on points in the 20-round bout.

Langford fought heavyweight Joe Jeanette fourteen times, losing the first by eighth round retirement, winning second by decision, third and fourth were a draw via points, winning the fifth through eighth by decision, ninth was a draw via points, winning the tenth on decision, eleventh was a draw via points, lost the twelfth by decision and winning the thirteenth by seventh round knock out and fourteenth by decision (Total: 8 wins (1 KO), 2 losses (1 RT and 1 PTS) and 4 draws).

He lost to future World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson on April 26, 1906 by fifthteen round decision. Johnson was 29 pounds heavier than Langford. Langford had been knocked down in the sixth round. Many spectators felt Langford had won the bout. After winning their first match, Johnson repeatedly refused rematches against Langford, who was considered by some to be the most dangerous challenger for Johnson’s crown, although Johnson cited Langford’s inability to meet his $30,000 appearance fee.

Langford fought heavyweight Fireman Jim Flynn six times, winning the first by first round knockout, losing the second by decision, winning the third by eighth round knockout, winning the fourth by decision, winning the fifth by third round knockout and winning the sixth by decision.

Winner of the World Colored Middleweight Championship in 1907 when he beat Young Peter Jackson, he fought former World Middleweight Champion Stanley Ketchel on April 27, 1910. Ketchel had vacated his championship only eight months earlier. It was a hard pressed fight by both men, each displaying terrific hitting power for all six rounds of the short bout. No knock downs were scored and both had plenty of energy in the end. Langford won by decision. A longer rematch bout was rumored, but never happened due to Ketchell’s murder six months later.

Langford fought heavyweight Battling Jim Johnson twelve times, winning the first three by decision, fourth and fifth were a draw via points, winning the sixth and seventh on points, eighth by twelfth round knockout, ninth through eleventh by points and drawing in the twelfth via points (Total: 9 wins (1 KO), 0 losses and 3 draws). Johnson was always heavier than Langford by 26-40 pounds.

Langford fought heavyweight Sam McVea fifteen times, drawing in the first via points, losing the second by decision, winning the third and fourth by decision, winning the fifth by technical knockout (McVey claimed a foul. This was not allowed and he refused to continue.), winning the sixth by thirteenth round knockout, seventh was a draw via points, losing the eighth by decision, ninth through eleventh were draws via points, winning the twelfth by decision, thirteenth and fourteenth were draws via decision and winning the fifthteenth by decision (Total: 6 wins (2 KO), 2 losses (0 KO) and 7 draws). Langford was 37 years old in the final bout.

He defeated former World Light Heavyweight Champion Philadelphia Jack O’Brien on August 15, 1911 by fifth round technical knockout. Langford outweighed O’Brien by ten pounds. The fight was stopped after a hard left hook put O’Brien on the canvas. O’Brien had to be helped to his corner. The poetic O’Brien later said of Langford, “When he appeared upon the scene of combat, you knew you were cooked.”

Langford fought heavyweight Gunboat Smith twice, losing the first by decision (many ring siders were surprised) and winning the second by third round knockout.

Langford fought heavyweight Harry Wills seventeen times. Langford was 31 in the first bout and continued to suffer from old age and failing eyesight more and more each fight. The first was a draw via points, the second a win via fourteenth round knockout, the third and fourth losses via decision, the fifth a win via nineteenth round knockout, the sixth through ninth losses via decision, the tenth a draw via points, the eleventh a loss via sixth round knockout and the twelfth by seventh round technical knockout, the thirteenth through seventeenth by decision (Total: 2 wins (2 KO), 14 losses (2 KO) and 2 draws).

Tommy Burns was referee in the third fight. At the end, he caught Langford’s hand and said to him, “Sam, this is the hardest I ever had to do in my life. I always admired you and never thought to see you beaten, but I have to give the decision against you.”

World Welterweight title fight

Although Langford is often credited as the greatest fighter to never challenge for a world title, he fought World Welterweight Champion Barbados Joe Walcott, a black man, on September 5, 1904 at Lake Massabesic Coliseum in Manchester, New Hampshire for his title. Both fighters weighed in at 142 lbs.

The fight resulted in a draw by decision, thus Walcott retained his title. However, reports of the fight say Langford clearly outpointed the champion. Langford kept Walcott at a distance with his longer reach and used his footwork to evade all of Walcott’s attacks. Langford landed lefts and rights to the jaw so effectively, Walcott was bleeding by round two and continued bleeding more after every round. Walcott was brought on one knee in the third round and the fight ended with hardly a scratch on Langford.

The Lowell Sun newspaper reported:

“Joe Walcott met his match in a 15-round bout yesterday afternoon in the Massabasic coliseum before a crowd of 1200. His opponent was Sam Langford, who clearly outpointed the champion, and the latter’s aggressiveness in carrying the fight to Langford was all that saved him from taking a decision that would have given him the short end of the purse. Langford took advantage of his longer reach and repeatedly played a tattoo on Walcott’s face, and his cleverness on his feet carried him away from (unreadable) a score or more times when Walcott endeavored by sheer brute force to deliver a knockout blow. While Walcott was the aggressor, Langford met his attacks by rights and lefts to the jaw and mouth so effectively as to draw blood in the second round and he kept Walcott bleeding in every round thereafter. In the third round, Langford brought the champion to one knee by a straight away jolt to the jaw, and he went through the entire fifteen rounds without a perceptible scratch on himself. In the opening round honors were even, but thereafter until the seventh round Langford had all the better of the argument.”

World Colored Heavyweight Championship

Sam Langford won the World Colored Heavyweight Championship a record five times between 1910 and 1918. Jack Johnson had reigned as the World Colored Heavyweight Champion from 1903 to 1908, when he relinquished the title after winning the World Heavyweight Championship. Joe Jeanrette and Sam McVey fought in Paris in February 1909 to fill the vacant title, with McVey the victor. Jeanrette took the title away from McVey two months later.

Subsequently, Langford claimed the title during Jeanette’s reign after Johnson refused to defend the World Heavyweight Championship against him. For a year there were two dueling claimants to the world colored heavyweight crown, Jeanette, the “official” champ, and Langford, the pretender, the man whom Jack Johnson “ducked.” On 6 September 1910 in Boston, Massachusetts, Langford became the undisputed colored champ by winning a 15-round bout with Jeanette on points. Still, Jack Johnson refused to give him a title shot.

Failure to secure title shot

Langford had lost to Jack Johnson the only time they had fought, on April 26, 1906, in a fifteen round decision. Johnson was 29 lbs. heavier than Langford, and though he knocked down Langford in the sixth round, many spectators felt Langford had won the bout. After winning their first match, Johnson repeatedly refused rematches against Langford, who was considered by some to be the most dangerous challenger for Johnson’s crown.

Battling Jim Johnson, the man Sam fought twelve times, beating Johnson nine times and never losing once, would be the one who got the title shot against Johnson that Langford had rightly believed his.

World Heavyweight Championship

Ironically, the color bar that had marred the world heavyweight title by blackballing boxers of color remained in force even under Jack Johnson. Once he was the World’s Heavyweight Champion, Johnson did not fight a black opponent for the first five years of his reign. In addition to Langford, he denied matches to black heavyweights Jeanette, to Langford, and to the young Harry Wills (who was Colored Heavyweight Champion during the last year of Johnson’s reign as World Heavyweight Champion).

Blacks were not given a shot at the title allegedly because Johnson felt that he could make more money fighting white boxers. In August 1913, as Johnson neared the end of his troubled reign as World Heavyweight Champion, there were rumors that he had agreed to fight Langford in Paris for the title, but it came to nought. Johnson claimed that Langford was unable to raise $30,000 (equivalent to approximately $706,346 in today’s funds) for his guarantee.

Because black boxers with the exception of Johnson had been barred from fighting for the heavyweight championship because of racism, Johnson’s refusal to fight African-Americans offended the African-American community, since the opportunity to fight top white boxers was rare. Jeanette criticized Johnson, saying, “Jack forgot about his old friends after he became champion and drew the color line against his own people.”

When Johnson finally did agree to take on a black opponent in late 1913, it was not Sam Langford, the current Colored Heavyweight Champion, that he gave the title shot to. Instead, Johnson chose Battling Jim Johnson, a mediocrity who, in 1910, had lost to Langford and had a draw and loss via knock out to Sam McVey, another former Colored Champion. Battling Jim fought fellow former Colored Champion Joe Jeanette four times between 19 July 1912 and 21 January 1912 and lost all four fights. The only fighter of note he did beat in that period was future Colored Champion Big Bill Tate, whom he knocked out in the second round of a scheduled 10-round bout. It was Tate’s third pro fight.

The fight, scheduled for 10 rounds, was held on 19 December 1913 in Paris. It was the first time in history that two blacks had fought for the World Heavyweight Championship. While the Johnson v. Johnson fight had been billed as a World Heavyweight title match, in many ways, it resembled an exhibition. A sportswriter from the Indianapolis Star reported that the fight crowd became unruly when it was apparent that neither boxer was putting up a fight.” The champ barely engaged Battling Jim, and it turned out he had broken his arm during the third round, a distinct disadvantage that Battling Jim failed to capitalize on. The fight was a draw, and Jack Johnson kept his championship.

Battling Jim’s next fight, four months later, also was a title match. On 27 March 1914 in New York City, Sam Langford won a newspaper decision in a ten-rounder with Johnson. According to the New York Times, the colored champ “won by a wide margin” because Johnson “failed to show anything remotely resembling championship ability.”

Battling Jim fought Langford ten more times (including two more colored title matches). Two of the fights were draws, including their last fight on 22 September 1918, which was also Battling Jim’s last pro bout. He faced Joe Jeanette five more times and did not win a single contest. Two of their fights were draws and their last fight on 20 August 1918, Battling Jim’s penultimate pro fight, was a no decision.

Of the other former and future Colored Heavyweight Champions that Battling Jim battled, he won only one fight, against Harry Wills, because he broke his wrist blocking a punch in a non-title match and Johnson won by a technical knockout. Battling Jim lost his other two fights with Wills and lost all of the five fights he had with ex-champ Sam McVey in the post-Jack Johnson title shot period.

Battling Jim, who died during Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, ended with a career record of 30 wins against 31 losses and six draws when his newspaper decisions are factored in. Looking at his dismal performance with the top black heavyweights of his era and his inability to best a one-armed Jack Johnson, Battling Jim Johnson cannot be considered a top contender of his era or a worthy opponent when Jack awarded him the sole title shot given to a black heavyweight from 1908 to 1937. Fittingly, he was scheduled to fight Langford before he passed away.

In 1915, Jack Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard, the last in a long line of Great White Hopes. Because of the animosity he had generated combined with the virulent racism of the period, it would be 22 years before another African American, Joe Louis, was given a shot at the Heavyweight title.

When it was in his power to give an African American a title shot, Jack Johnson refused to grant that privilege to Sam Langford, the fighter who after former champ Jim Jeffries (a man Langford said he would not face when Jeff was in the prime of his career), had to be considered the #1 contender in the heavyweight division. Johnson beat Jeffries but ducked Langford, likely as he feared losing his title. Many people consider the failure of Langford to secure a shot at the Heavyweight title one of the greatest injustices of American sports.

Later career

Langford fought heavyweight Fred Fulton twice, losing the first by seventh round technical knockout and the second by a four round decision. Langford was 34 and 35 in each respective fight. Langford was much heavier, yet much shorter than Fulton.

On June 5, 1922 Langford knocked out Tiger Flowers in only the second round. Langford was mostly blind and Flowers would soon afterwards win the World Middleweight Championship.

In 1923, Sam Langford fought and won Boxing’s last “fight to the finish” for the Mexican Heavyweight title.

His last fight was in 1926, when his failing eyesight finally forced him to retire. Langford was 43 years old and completely blind.

Films exist of Langford fighting Fireman Jim Flynn and Bill Lang. One story characterizing his career involved Langford walking out for the 8th round and touching gloves with his opponent. “What’s the matter, Sam, it ain’t the last round!” said his mystified opponent. “Tis for you son,” said Langford, who promptly knocked his opponent out.

Life after boxing

Langford eventually went completely blind and ended up penniless, living in Harlem, New York City. In 1944, a famous article was published about his plight and money was donated by fans to help Langford. Eventually funding was obtained to pay for successful eye surgery. Langford was enshrined in the Ring Boxing Hall of Fame and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1955. He died a year later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had been living in a private nursing home.

In 1999, Langford was voted Nova Scotia’s top male athlete of the 20th century.

In 2013, the jazz trio Tarbaby released a CD entitled “Ballad of Sam Langford.”

Marie-Madeleine Jarret de Verchères

Marie-Madeleine Jarret de Verchères (March 3, 1678 – August 8, 1747) was the daughter of a François Jarret, a seigneur in New France, and Marie Perrot. Her ingenuity is credited with thwarting a raid on Fort Verchères when she was 14 years old.

Thwarting a surprise attack

In the late 1600s, the Iroquois mounted attacks on the settlers of New France, looting and burning their homes. In October, 1692, Madeleine’s parents left the fort on business and to gather winter supplies. Madeleine and her brothers and sisters stayed at the fort. Now fourteen, Madeleine was in charge of the fort, with one very old man (Laviolette) and 2 soldiers.

One morning, some settlers left the fort to tend to the fields along with eight soldiers. Madeleine was in the cabbage garden, quite close to the fort. Suddenly, the Iroquois descended on the settlers. The men, caught off guard, fled to safety. But the Iroquois were too quick for them and they were easily caught and carried off. Madeleine, working only 200 paces from the fort had a head start on the Iroquois brave that was chasing her. Madeleine ran into the fort shouting, “Aux armes! Aux armes!” (To arms)

Madeleine ran to the bastions, she knew there was only one hope. Madeleine fired a musket and encouraged the people to make as much noise as possible so that the Iroquois would think there were many soldiers defending the fort. Then Madeleine fired the cannon to warn other forts of an attack and to call for reinforcements. The Iroquois had hoped a surprise attack would easily take the fort, so for the moment, they retreated into the bushes with their prisoners.

During the siege, Madeleine noticed a canoe approaching the landing site with a family named Fontaine. The soldiers inside the fort refused to leave, so Madeleine ran to the dock and led the family quickly inside, pretending to be reinforcements.

Late in the evening, the settlers’ cattle returned to the fort. She knew that the Iroquois could be hiding with the herd covered in animal skins. She had her two brothers wait with her to check the cattle for warriors but none were found and the cows were brought inside the fort.

Reinforcements from Montreal arrived just after the Iroquois left. A tired but relieved Madeleine greeted the French lieutenant, “Monsieur, I surrender to you my arms.” The reinforcements caught the Iroquois and returned the kidnapped settlers. By this time, Madeleine’s parents had returned and news of Madeleine’s heroic deed had spread through the colony.

Later life

François, Madeleine’s father, died on 16 February 1700, and his pension of 1000 livres was transferred to Madeleine due to her leadership in 1691, on the condition that she provide for her mother. Madeleine managed Verchères until her marriage in 1706, at age 28, to Pierre Thomas le Tarieu. They moved to Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, Quebec, where Tarieu was co-seigneur. Madeleine’s seigneury at Verchères was transferred to her new husband. The complex land titles led to numerous lawsuits over the course of her life, and Madeleine sailed to France at least thrice to represent herself and her husband in court.

Marie-Madeleine de La Pérade died in 1747 at the age of 69. She was buried beneath her pew at Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade.

In Modern Culture

A statue of Madeleine de Verchères stands on Verchères Point near Montreal. It was made by Louis-Philippe Hébert, who was commissioned for the project in 1911.

Madeleine de Verchères, a J.-Arthur Homier film released 10 December 1922, featured Estelle Bélanger as Madeleine. The Internet Movie Database reports this film as “lost.”^[5]

The Canadian government designated her as a Person of National Historic Significance in 1923.

Madeleine Takes Command (1946) is a historical novel based upon the siege of Verchères, by Ethel C. Brill (Whittlesey House).

Charles Herbert Best

Charles Herbert Best,  (February 27, 1899 – March 31, 1978) was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin.

Biography

Born in West Pembroke, Washington County, Maine, he was the son of Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, Canadians from Nova Scotia.

Best married Margaret Hooper Mahon in Toronto in 1924 and they had two sons. One son, Dr. Henry Best was a well-regarded historian who later became president of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. Charles Alexander Best, a Canadian politician and geneticist. He is interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto (section 29) not far from Sir Frederick Banting.

Co-discovery of insulin

Best moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1915 where he started studying towards a bachelor of arts degree at University College, University of Toronto. In 1918, he enlisted in the Canadian Army serving with the 2nd Canadian Tank Battalion. After the war, he completed his degree in physiology and biochemistry.

As a 22-year-old medical student at the University of Toronto he worked as an assistant to Dr. Frederick Banting and played a major role in the discovery of the pancreatic hormone insulin—one of the more significant medical advances, enabling an effective treatment for diabetes. In the spring of 1921, Banting travelled to Toronto to visit J.J.R. Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto, and asked Macleod if he could use his laboratory. Macleod was initially sceptical, but eventually agreed before leaving on holiday for the summer. Before leaving for Scotland he supplied Banting with ten dogs for experiment and two medical students, Charles Best and Clark Noble, as lab assistants.

Since Banting only required one assistant, Best and Noble flipped a coin to see which would assist Banting first. Best won and took the first shift. Loss of the coin toss proved unfortunate for Noble, given that Banting decided to keep Best for the entire summer and eventually shared half of his Nobel Prize money and a large part of the credit for the discovery of insulin. Had Noble won the toss his career might have taken a different path.

In 1923, the Nobel Prize Committee honoured Banting and J.J.R. Macleod with the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of insulin, ignoring Charles Best. This incensed Banting who then chose to share half of the prize money with Best.

Professor of physiology

Best succeeded Macleod as professor of physiology at University of Toronto in 1929. During World War II he was influential in establishing a Canadian program for securing and using dried human blood serum. In his later years, he was an adviser to the Medical Research Committee of the United Nations World Health Organization.

Awards and honours

Best was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948. In 1967 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in recognition for “his contribution to medicine, particularly as co-discoverer of insulin.” He was a commander of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire and was made a member of Order of the Companions of Honour in 1971 “for services to Medical Research.” He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, and was the first Canadian to be elected into the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

In 1994 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Dr. Charles Best Secondary School in Coquitlam, British Columbia, C.H. Best West Elementary School in Burlington, Ontario, and C.H. Best East Middle School in Toronto, Ontario, are named in his honour.