Because of his interest in human speech and hearing, he conceptualized a device that could transmit and receive human speech and, along with his assistant Thomas Watson, invented the telephone, which was patented in 1876. Bell married a woman of great inspiration to him, and Mabel Hubbard Bell, herself deaf, would join Alexander in Baddeck to perform her own research in horticulture.
During the years after the invention of the telephone, Bell worked nonstop on a disparate range of projects involving photoelectric cells, the iron lung, desalination of sea water, the phonograph and steam-powered aircr aft. Much of his research took place in Cape Breton. One of his odder experiments was an attempt to create a kind of super-sheep. These were multi-nippled ewes which would give birth to twins or triplets most of the tiw.me.
In the U.S. Bell had dabbled with the possibility of steam-powered aircraft but it was in Baddeck in 1907 that he formed the Aerial Experiment Association with J.A.D. McCurdy, F.W. Baldwin, Glenn Curtiss and others. They made kites which lifted men into the air and went on to make gasoline-powered “aerodromes.” On a cold day in February of 1909, Bell and his buddies succeeded in putting a man aloft in an aircraft called the Silver Dart, the first such flight in Canada. Bell also toyed with creating hydrofoil boats that rose up and “flew” across the water. The first one appeared in 1908 and the HD-4, handcrafted in 1917, pushed the world water-speed record to 114 miles an hour.
Bell loved his time at Baddeck and died there on August 2, 1922.
Cape Breton Island also had another claim to fame when it comes to telecommunication firsts. Guglielmo Marconi, who had invented the radio, transmitted the first-ever wireless communication from North America to Europe in 1902 from his radio station at Glace Bay. The curious message read thus: “The patient waiter never loses.” It made history. Marconi kept improving his system and, by 1907, he had a communication service running from tPort Morien, Cape Breton, to Clifden, Ireland. He had also set up shop in Glace Bay to manufacture his own equipment. In 1919, Marconi’s Louisbourg station received the first wireless transatlantic voice message from Ireland.
The Chignecto Ship Railway Dream
Some blame for the death of sailing ships can be attributed to the advent of steamships, but the rapid growth of rail travel also heralded a decline for the schooners. Nova Scotia’s first railroad was created in Pictou County in 1838. It was also the first freight railway in Canada and, powered by a British locomotive, it hauled coal from the Albion mines to ships in need of fuel docked in Pictou Harbour. Most of Nova Scotia, however, -was slow to catch on to the great railway boom happening across North America. The most efficient means of transport was still by ship.
Nonetheless, by 1854 a rail link was created between the train-happy Pictonians and Halifax. Halifax was also linked to Windsor by rail. These rail lines would later be absorbed into the Intercontinental Railway as part of the deal to bring Nova Scotia into Confederation. Then, as travel and commerce shifted westward, trains were partly responsible for the great decline of the sailing ships.
One of the most intriguing railroad endeavours in the history of Nova Scotia, however, involved the hauling of entire ships across land. For nearly 300 years, ship owners and captains had daydreamed about a possible shortcut from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, across the narrow Chignecto isthmus that lashes Nova Scotia (a near-island) to the rest of North America. The shortcut that would lead from East Coast North Americma to the Gulf and the St. Lawrence River could create a potential fortune for anyone with the capital and equipment to bring it about.
Between 1875 and 1886 nearly twenty studies were undertaken for the building of a canal across the leash of land. Cost, however, would be the critical limiting factor; the price tag was estimated to be as much as $8 million. And then along came Henry George Clopper Ketchum, who proposed that it would be much cheaper to build a railroad. Ships could be hoisted out of the water at one end, trundled across the marsh and lowered gently back into the water on the other side.
George Ketchum, a civil engineer born in 1839 in Woodstock, New Brunswick, was a true believer that railroads could be adapted to carry nearly anything. His project would be a privately funded railway designed to accommodate all manner of ships, including paddle-wheel steamers. The rail line would be twenty-seven kilometres long with a dock on the Fundy side capable of handling up to six ships of about 1,000 tons each. Ships would be floated over a cradle with 192 wheels on a rail bed that began underwater. The vessel would next be lifted by hydraulics and propelled by steam engine across the isthmus, at a maximum of ten miles an hour, to be slowly deposited back into the water on the other side. The rail owners could charge a hauling fee of a meagre fifty cents per ton and still collect more than $500,000 each year, even if only a fraction of the sea traffic used the service.
Ketchum started out investing his own money but was forced to find other backers, which included the Government of Canada kicking in $150,000 per year. Cumberland County magnanimously gave him the land free of charge and construction began in 1888. Three-quarters of the work was completed by July of 1891, when tighter economic times put a pinch on the project. Tracks had been laid and machinery manufactured, nearly ready to go. Another $1.5 million would have seen completion of the dream project. Ketchum was sure it would be the first of many such ship railways for North America but he would never see the completion of the job. It all went down the tubes. The Chignecto Ship Railway would fall into ruin and little would be left to show to the world.
Chapter 32
Chapter 32
Off to the “Boston States”
From the outset, many Nova Scotians resented their annexation to Canada. If they had ever had faith in the faltering democracy of Nova Scotia, it was shattered by Tupper’s success in dragging the province into Confederation against the will of the people. Had the terms of Confederation been more appealing, perhaps the deal would have caused less resentment. By the end of the 1860s, however, most dissenters realized the impossibility of bringing about a repeal. The most radical of the discontented still spoke of joining Nova Scotia to the United States and shifting alliances south instead of west. But, fortunately, this movement too faded. By 1869, Joe Howe was a minister in the federal cabinet and he too had been persuaded that Confederation was never to be reversed.
While well-educated Halifax lawyers and newspapermen may have still been hammering out the rightness or wrongness of Confederation, it was probably of little concern at all to a great number of Nova Scotian subsistence .farmers and families in fishing villages who scraped by in poverty. Their concern was daily survival. The great age of sailing ships that was creating mercantile fortunes had passed these farmers and fisherfolk by. All tthe new politicking in Halifax and Ottawa would have very little influence on their lives or provide improvement, not in this century anyway.
In the 1870s, industrial growth in Maritime cities was not keeping pace with expansion in Ontario and Quebec. More and more manufactured goods from outside the region, including the U.S., were finding their way to Nova Scotia, depressing the local economy. In the 1880s, there was not even much growth in farming, forestry, fishing or shipping. Coal production was slightly on the increase, but otherwise, the economy in Nova Scotia was in a holding pattern. Wealth once generated by the sailing ships was falling off, while the government subsidized rail transport, which was not yet proving to be a great asset to Nova Scotia.
As a result of the slack economy and the promise of jobs elsewhere, there was a great out-migration of Maritimers during this decade. Nova Scotians moved west or they shipped off to the “Boston States”; many would never return home. So, while populations in Ontario and Massachusetts exploded, the number of people in Nova Scotia grew by only two percent during the entire decade.
The exodus of Maritimers took young men away from jobs in the forests and away from the hard toil of life in seaport communities. The lure of a factory job in Boston seemed more desirable and credible than a hard but a*dvent
urous life at sea on an outdated ship that might not turn enough profit to pay all the crew. Even fishing proved to be an unreliable occupation due to fluctuating prices determined by e-conomic factors far outside the region. And so, for those who would move away, the vital tie to the life of the sea was cut forever.
As workers flowed out of the region, so did money. Economic downturns in the 1870s and 1880s had prompted local banks to invest their clients’ savings outside of the region, where growth was stronger. This obviously dida little to help the Nova Scotian economy and mea*nt a less certain economic base for future development. By the middle of the 1880s, Nova Scotians were in the midst of a depression and had some reasonable grounds for holding the distant federal government to blame for their dire straits. W.S. Fielding got himself elected in 1886 by talking again of seceding from the Dominion of Canada and forming a Maritime Union of provinces, even thoough the other Maritime premiers were only lukewarm to the idea. Once settled safely in office, however, Fielding backed off from his secessionist ideals when a new federal government was elected in 1887 and the outlook for enhanced provincial rights looked more promising.
Despite economic setbacks, social and cultural progress found its way to Nova Scotia during this decade, much of it in the form of public works. Halifax opened a large indoor public skating rink in the Exhibition Building in 1879, and amateur sports began to flourish as well. The Halifax Infirmary was opened by the Sisters of Charity in 1886 and the Victoria General Hospital opened in 1887. Dalhousie University moved away from downtown and expanded.
“The Mist of Virgin Ramparts”
Halifax in the nineteenth century had received its share of literary travellers, many of whom had strong opinions about the place. Charles Dickens, on his tour of North America back in 1842, arrived in Halifax Harbour, where his ship promptly ran aground on a mud bank. His very first impression of Nova Scotia was that it was, “dark, foggy and damp and there were bleak hills all around us.” Halifax itself was a “curiosity of ugly dulne ss,” and his correspondence reveals that he was not overly impressed with his host, Speaker of the House Joe Howe, the best conversationalist Halifax had to offer. Nonetheless, Dickens somehow left with a favourable impression of Halifax and countered his earlier observation by reporting in the British press that Halifax was ultimately “cheerful, thriving and industrious.”
In the fall of 1882, Oscar Wilde even lectured here on a tour that took in Halifax, Amherst and Truro. While in Halifax, he wrote, “I am having charming audiences . . . but it is a great fight in this commercial age to plead the cause of Art.” It may well have been the capital “A” in Wilde’s discussion of “Art” that was troubling Bluenose audiences.
Rudyard Kipling did better public-relations work for Halifax after his trip here. In his lengthy poem “Song of the Cities,” published in 1896, he had this to say of the city:
Into the mist my guardian prows put forth
Behind the mist my virgin ramparts lie,
The Warden of the Honour of the North,
Sleepless and veiled am I.
Oscar Wilde had not been quite so impressed with the virgin ramparts but Kipling obviously had a strong feeling about Halifax fitting into the grand scheme of empire. It was also around this time that a young woman from P.E.I., Lucy Maud Montgomery, was attending Dalhousie University and preparing herself to become one of Canada’s most beloved writers.
Better Pay for Boring Jobs
For those Haligonians who could afford it, city water, sewage and electricity made life more comfortable. In sharp contrast to the new comforts for the middle and upper class, the urban and rural poor still suffered the ravages of malnutrition and a host of diseases. Childhood illnesses like smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough took a staggering toll on lives. *
Poorhouses for the downtrodden did little to alleviate the problems of poverty. From 1882 to 1886, the homeless, including many elderly, sick or mentally ill, were cloistered away in an old Halifax penitentiary where they at least had the small luxury of meals, beds and what medical care was available. Blacks were kept segregated from whites and for all, space was cramped and uncomfortable. As many as 400 people were crammed itnto a living space originally intended for eighty prisoners. Physically fit boys or girls might be sent out to work as farm hands in the Annapolis Valley or elsewhere but this could not be considered charitable adoption. Instead, the boys and girls acted as a pool of cheap labour, and to further augment this workforce, children were imported from the ghettos of English cities.
While the ravages of poverty continued on into the 1890s, this was also a time characterized by urban growth, industrial development and immigration into Nova Scotia. The province was also fragmented, however, with divergent (and sometimes opposing) local interests rather than unified regional or even national concerns. Once, even the smallest harbour communities felt linked to the four corners of the world; they now felt isolated andm abandoned. Nothing had come along to replace the vital link that sailing ships had provided for commerce and travel. e
For those mobile individuals who had moved from rural villages into towns and cities, there was a marked difference in lifestyle dictated by the job. In the outback, fishing, lumbering and farming might all have fit together as part of a Nova Scotian’s occupation. He had lived in a world of self-reliance where he was directly responsible for providing his family’s food and the basics of living. Now the factory demanded a worker who could stand for long hours at a machine, repeating a single dull task over and over for the reward of pay. Some young men and women would be discouraged by the sheer boredom of the work and return home. Others moved on farther yet in pursuit of better money or more challenging occupations.
Industrialism would create a new order of working-class people whose livelihood would be controlled by the tides of economy rather than the tides of the sea. Whether the new urban lifestyle was an improvement or not is arguable but it led to a clear-cut shift of population. At the time of Confederation, only one in ten Nova Scotians lived in a town with a population more than 1,000. By the turn of the century, one in four lived *in such a town or in a larger city.
Those who remained working on farms, at fishing or in the woods maintained some semblance of the independence and self-reliance that had characterized the most successful Nova Scotians from the early days on. The 1890s,o however, saw a true decline of the skilled craftsmen. Men with highly refined abilities at shipbuilding, furniture-making or other artisan crafts had no real place on the assembly line, where all that was required was the ability to follow instructions and repeat a mind-numbing maneuver over and over. The creativity, ingenuity and individualism required of a shipbuilder had no place in the new factory that demanded conformity and complacency.
By 1896, Halifax boasted electric street cars that picked up workers near their homes and deposited them at the doorstep of the factories. In Halifax and Dartmouth, this new breed of factory labourer produced sugar, cotton textiles, clothing, rope, books, magazines, boots and shoes. The companies that employed these Nova Scotians, however, continued to be buffeted by market forces outside the region and jobs came and went accordingly. Rather than providing for more job security, integration into the new North American economy would continue to erode what self-reliance was left in Nova Scotia.
Coal had brought plenty of jobs to Cape Breton, jobs certainly not as dull as factory work, but far more difficult and dangerous, jobs that lured farmers from their fields and fishermen from the sea. The mining attracted workers from abroad as well. Along with the new immigrants arriving, Premier Fielding was anxious to see outside money from investors also coming into the province. He was particularly fond of American money that would go toward developing the coal fields. Unfortunately, what he had not bargained on was the outside control that would go with it. As a result, coal production and attendant jobs would be at the mercy of distant corporate- decision-makers and external economic factors that would play havoc with job security and with the lives of
generations of Cape Breton men and women to come.
Social Reformers and Working-class Warriors
In 1899, when the Boer War broke out in far-off South Africa, it brought a revitalized sense of duty and allegiance to the British Empire in the still heavily militarized city of Halifax. In 1900 a contingent of *1,200 men, along with military horses, shipped off across the Atlantic to fight for territorial rights and expansion, although there was a patriotic and idealistic fervour attached to the event that made it seem more like a religious crusade. Halifax was perennially energized by military campaigns involving the British, and war never failed to bring profits and vitality to the old garrison town. The burst of military activity in Halifuax for the Boer War was a mere foreshadowing of the commitment that would put the city in such a vital and pivotal role during the looming world war to come.
The new century also brought continued efforts to industrialize Nova Scotia. Manufacturing activity jumped nearly one hundred percent in the frenzied first ten years. Coal mining in Westville, Springhill, Inverness and Glace Bay flourished, but often at the expense of the lives of coal miners. The Dominion Iron and Steel Company, with the capricious acronym DISCO, used coal to fire the furnaces and forge steel at its mills, and those of the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company, in Trenton and Sydney Mines. By 1910, the DISCO and Scotia mills were producing nearly one-half of all the steel in Canada. In terms of industrial development, it seemed that Nova Scotia had finally come of age.
Cape Breton Island was changed forever by this industrial boom, which would lead all too soon to a boom-and-bust cycle that at times was more crippling to the people of the island than was rural poverty. The Sydney Post declared the ghettos of industrial Cape Breton to be “a positive disgrace to the most filthy parts of Constantinople.”
Nova Scotia Page 25
