MILESTONES OF CANADIAN CHEMISTRY IN THE 20TH CENTURY o f C a n a d i a n C h e m i s t r y in the 20th 

1910s 
Ernest A. LeSueur, born in Ottawa in 1869 produced the first commercial TNT in Canada. In charge of an explosive factory in Deseronto, ON, LeSueur was asked to ship 25,000 pounds of 170 degree TNT to the Belgians during the World War I. Coal from Cape Breton, NS also played an important role in World War I with the first Canadian production of toluene, used to produce TNT. Sources of ammunition were required by British forces, and officials looked to Canadian companies using coke ovens for the toluene production. By the end of the war, over 40 million pounds of TNT had been produced in Canada.

1920s
Did you know that Banting and Best were not alone in their discovery of insulin as a safe and effective treatment of diabetes? Biochemist James Bertrum Collip, on sabbatical from University of Alberta, worked on the project with the two scientists at the University of Toronto in 1921-1922 and shares the patent with them. We complain about salt damage on our roads in the winter but in the early 1900’s chemists were already working to minimize this damage. Thorbergur Torvaldson, a chemistry professor at University of Saskatchewan and his team devised a steam curing technique that changed the crystalline structure of the concrete compounds to make them immune to damage caused by alkali ground waters. 

1930s  
Canada was able to participate in the wartime synthetic rubber program, which added greatly to the growth of the petrochemical industry in Canada thanks to Imperial Oil’s Sarnia Research Centre’s first research chemist, Reginald Killmaster Stratford. Under Stratford’s leadership, a new process was created and installed at the Sarnia refinery called "suspensoid cracking." This process permitted the use of the existing facilities for the production of light hydrocarbons without large capital expenditures. 

1940s  
When Canada and its allies entered the Second World War in 1939, magnesium metal supplies were critically short. Lloyd Montgomery Pidgeon of the National Research Council worked on extracting magnesium from dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate). He was the first person to overcome the barriers to safely commercialize this process. We all use our white paper for school and in our offices but did you know that W. Howard Rapson, head of research for Canadian International Paper Company in Hawkesbury, ON produced chlorine dioxide for bleaching pulp with his colleague Morris Wayman? The first chlorine dioxide plant in any pulp mill was opened in June 1946 in Temiskaming, QC. Work carried out at the University of Saskatchewan by J.W.T. Spinks centred on phosphorus in growing wheat. Among the first in the world, Spink’s field trials using radioisotopes were able to determine the fractions of phosphorus in growing wheat that came from the soil and from added fertilizer. This brought about further studies in soil nutrition. 

These milestones were highlighted at the Canadian Society for Chemistry Conference in Calgary, AB in 2000. Drs. Cooper and Martha Langford of the University of Calgary put this exhibit together with sponsorship from the Calgary Science Centre. Look for more details on these and other Canadian firsts in future editions of Discover Canadian Chemistry.