The Imperial Airship Scheme — A Blimp Above 1930s Toronto

In 1928, Germany launched the world's greatest airship, the Graf Zeppelin. For the next decade, it would make hundreds of flights all over the world: from Germany to the United States, Brazil, Japan, even the north pole. With the Second World War only nine years away, it was enough to make the British very nervous.

Their answer was the Imperial Airship Scheme. It was a contest between a private military contractor and the British government to build the best blimp. The first to be finished was the "Capitalist ship", the R100. It was the fastest airship in the world, with a top speed of 130 km/h. And its first big test was a trip to Canada. For three days in the summer of 1930, it cruised across the Atlantic before finally reaching Quebec. A couple of weeks later, it was flying around the skyscrapers of downtown Toronto.

The whole trip was a rousing success. So much so, in fact, that once it returned home, the team working on the government-built "Socialist ship", the R101, decided to push ahead with their voyage to India, which they'd thought they might postpone due to safety concerns. Their blimp made it all the way from England to France before plummeting to the ground and bursting into flame. The disaster killed 48 people, more than the Hindenberg. The Imperial Airship Scheme was abandoned, the R100 was grounded and then sold for scrap.

The R100 in Bedfordshire, England, just before leaving for Canada

A version of this post was originally published on August 29, 2010. It has been updated to add more photos.

A Junkyard Flying Saucer, 1964

We're in a junkyard in Downsview in 1964. It's the Golden Age of science fiction. Flying saucers are all the rage. In fact, just a few years before this photo was taken, AVRO was building and testing their own flying saucer at a facility not that far away, in Malton. The Avrocar was funded first by the Canadian government and then by the U.S. Air Force before the money was finally pulled in 1961. But flying saucers, of course, lived on in pop culture — and in homemade toys like the one this kids are playing with.

Someday, I suppose I should probably write a full post about the Avrocar. For now, I'll leave you with some footage of the saucer hovering around Malton:

The photo comes via York University's Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections here.

Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey, or The Great Dead Monkey Project

DEC VAX 11/780

Okay, so, this story seems to vary wildly from one source to the other, so I have no idea how much is true and how much is urban legend. But there's no way in hell I'm passing up the opportunity to write a post about The Great Dead Monkey Project, so here goes:

They say Mabel was a monkey, maybe a chimpanzee, trained by scientists at the University of Toronto in the late '70s. They called her Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey  because they'd taught her how to swim underwater; she could breathe with a kind of scuba system. The researchers would pump in various gasses to determine the kind of effects they had on her body. 

The whole system was controlled by an early computer—the DEC VAX-11/780. It was a brand new, state of the art machine which took up most of a room, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and came with up to 2 MB of memory. But the one the researchers at U of T were using had developed some kind of problem, so one day, while Mabel was in the pool, a technician came in to fix it. And while he was working on it, he accidentally screwed with part of the system regulating Mabel's air. The Swimming Wonder Monkey drowned.

Her death, according to a dictionary of computer geek slang, is how they got the term "scratch monkey"—an extra drive used to back-up data while troubleshooting. Apparently it's a common expression for safety-conscious computer folk: "Always mount a scratch monkey". If they'd done that at U of T, their monkey wouldn't have died.

There's another version of the story out there as well. It comes from someone who claims to have interviewed the woman who programmed the computer. According to her, the experiment had nothing to do with swimming underwater, but involved five monkeys who were hooked up to the computer so that it could read their brain waves. When the DEC VAX-11/780 was being worked on, it supposedly accidentally sent out electrical signals, directly into the monkeys' brains. It killed three and stunned the other two. The experiment became known as The Great Dead Monkey Project.

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I was tipped off to this one by a couple of friends who run the Once Again, to Zelda blog and are editors with me over at the Little Red Umbrella and who were trying to figure out why an ad for a "Toronto Bucket List" with a photo of a chimpanzee in a wetsuit kept showing up in the sidebar of their Facebook feeds. Which is still confusing. You can read the online dictionary's version of the story here, and The Great Dead Monkey Project version here. Also, coincidentally, there's a monkey gargoyle at U of T, on one of the doorways to University College, which you can see a photo of here.

Meet The Univac 1107 Supercomputer

The Univac 1107

Meet the Univac 1107 Thin Film Memory Computer. Back in the '60s, the "Seven" (as all the hip computer scientists called it) was on the cutting edge of technology. All it needed was a small team of people to type up punch cards, transfer tape reels, flip some switches, turn some knobs, and occasionally unjam the cards when they got stuck and the Univac 1107 could calculate an entire company's payroll in just about four hours. You could even get it with a "high-speed" printer. Miraculous.

Univac's were originally developed to help with the US census, and they were made by the world's second biggest computer company, Remington Rand. They're probably better remembered for their typewriters and electric shavers, but back in the day, apparently only IBM was ahead of them when it came to these things. In total, 36 Univac 1107's were sold and one of them—with a 6 MB hard drive and 256 RAM—was sold to the city of Toronto. We paid $1.5 million for it in 1966 and used it to control all of the traffic lights in the city.

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A friend of mine stumbled across a great picture of our Univac as she was flipping through the most beautiful Toronto history book I've found so far, the Historical Atlas of Toronto. I can't find the photo online, but it shows a big console station surrounded by banks of electronics and tape reels, and a huge map of Toronto on the wall behind it, with little lights showing all the relevant intersections in the city. It looks like something from 2001 and Sleeper and Dr. Strangelove all rolled into one.

If you've got 17 minutes to kill, you can also watch this great promotional video Remington Rand released about the history and features of the Univacs: