Sir John Henry Lefroy & Queen Victoria's Coronation

On the first night of The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour, I headed straight for the most famous place in London: Westminster. In my pocket, I was carrying a dream for one of the most interesting scientists from the history of Toronto: Sir John Henry Lefroy. I made my way through the hordes of tourists and — in a moment when it seemed like no one was watching — I left the dream here, in the middle of Westminster Bridge. I left it here because this is the spot where Lefroy was standing in the early afternoon of June the 28th, 1838 — at the exact moment when the Imperial State Crown was first placed upon Queen Victoria's head.

Lefroy was still just a teenager back then, a young lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. But it was only a few years later that he began the scientific work that would make him famous. When the British government decided to study the Earth's magnetic field — to figure out why it kept changing — Lefroy was chosen to play an important role in the project. So, by the time he was 25, he found himself living in Canada as the superintendent of "Her Majesty's Magnetical and Meteorological Observatory at Toronto".

The original facility was built on the grounds of what's now the University of Toronto, right next to where Convocation Hall is today. There's a plaque for Lefroy there. And there's a slighter newer version of the observatory that still stands on the lawn outside Hart House. Plus, there's an even more recent version: the building where the Monk Centre is now (on Bloor Street just west of Varsity Stadium).

While he was in Canada, Lefroy also made a famous trek into the Northwest Territories, travelling more than 8,000 kilometers with a team from the Hudson's Bay Company. He took hundreds of measurements along the way, getting even further north and further west than Yellowknife. Thanks to that trip, there's now a mountain in the Rockies named after him. And he became the subject of a Paul Kane painting. It's called Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy, or, sometimes, The Surveyor. They've got it at the AGO. It's the most expensive painting in Canadian history. The Toronto billionaire Ken Thomson (who owned the Globe & Mail, the London Times and all sorts of other stuff) paid more than $5 million for it in 2002. That's more than double the previous record.

Paul Kane's The Surveyor

Lefroy lived in Toronto for more than a decade and left a lasting legacy in our city. While he was here, he teamed up with Sir Sanford Fleming and some other scientists to found the Royal Canadian Institute — it's still the oldest scientific society in Canada; its collection eventually became part of the ROM.

He also married a Torontonian. Emily Mary Robinson was the daughter of Sir John Beverley Robinson: a hero of the War of 1812, a Tory judge, and a hardcore member of the Family Compact who infamously sentenced two of William Lyon Mackenzie's rebels to death. Funny enough, she was also cousins with the Boultons: the family who built the Grange, the house that would eventually become the AGO, where that $5 million portrait now hangs.

Eventually, Lefroy headed back home to London and continued to lead a fascinating life. He teamed up with Florence Nightingale to reform the army, spent years as the Governor of Bermuda, and travelled all the way to the other side of the world to be the Administrator of Tasmania. He spent the rest of his life as of the senior figures of the British Empire — all in the heyday of Queen Victoria's reign.

Which brings me all the way back to that day in 1838, when Lefroy was a teenaged lieutenant standing on Westminster Bridge.

The coronation of the young queen — only a teenager herself back then —  was, of course, a Very Big Deal. London was buzzing. There were special songs written, special medals given, special ribbons designed. Huge crowds gathered. There were military bands and long lines of horses and soldiers. Guns fired a salute at dawn and then again when Victoria left Buckingham Palace in her carriage, part of a lavish procession of royalty and soldiers and ambassadors and officials. Decades later, the Sydney Morning Herald remembered the moment: "As the procession passed on through the streets—where sidewalks, balconies, windows, and the very roofs (where possible) seemed alive with spectators waving scarves and handkerchiefs, and shouting their loyal greetings—the sight was one never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it."

Finally, Victoria arrived at Westminster Abbey, where the coronation would take place. It's a absolutely stunning church even on an ordinary day. I visited the Abbey on my last morning in London; it's spectacular, home to breathtaking history, including the bones of monarchs like Elizabeth I and Henry V, scientists like Darwin and Newton, and writers like Dickens, Chaucer, Tennyson and Kipling. On this day, it was even more beautiful than usual. The floors and walls were draped in cloth of crimson, purple and gold. The most hallowed royal relics were on hand, ready to play their part in the ceremony. And the most important people in the Empire had gathered to watch it all happen.

The Coronation of Queen Victoria

Young Lefroy was supposed to be there, too. His commanding officer had selected him to play a role in the ceremony. He was going watch from a small window high above the throne where Victoria was to be crowned. His job was to wait until the moment when the crown touched her head, and then pass along the signal. He'd even been allowed to visit the Abbey the day before, getting to see it dressed in all the regal splendour of the occasion.

But at the last minute a big, famous military official learned about the plan and chose someone else instead. So, rather than getting to give the signal, Lefroy was now supposed to receive the signal and pass it along to the soldiers at the Tower of London, just around the bend of the Thames, so they could let the crowd there know that their queen had been crowned.

So, when the big moment happened, John Henry Lefroy wasn't perched high above his monarch, in the middle of all the action. Instead, he was outside, as he later remembered: "posted in the centre of... Westminster Bridge, in full uniform, to enjoy the jeers of the populace that came pouring in from Lambeth and the Old Kent Road."

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Westminster Abbey

St. Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square
where Lefroy was baptised by the Bishop of London

1 Savile Row, formerly the Royal Geographical Society
The Bealtes played their rooftop gig next door

A dream for Lefroy at the old Geographical Society
where he was a member

 

Swanky Cambridge Terrace, where Lefroy lived
overlooking Regent's Park

Burlington House, home to the Royal Society

A dream for Lefroy outside the Royal Society
where he was a member

The Royal Automoblie Club on Pall Mall
formerly the Ordnance Office

A dream outside the Ordnance Office
which Lefroy used to run

St. George's Hanover Square

A dream at St. George's Hanover Square
where Lefroy married his second wife

The view toward Westminster Bridge

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John Henry Lefory's autobiography, where that last quote comes from, is available to read for free at Archive.org here. The details and description of the coronation came from the Sydney Morning Herald via Queen Victoria Online, which you'll find here. And there's more information about the history of Toronto's magnetic observatory on Wikipedia here.

Both paintings come via the Wikimedia Commons.

This post is related to dream 33 The Magnetic History of Toronto John Henry Lefroy, 1847

This post is related to dream 31 Saving the Canadian Artist Paul Kane, 1865

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.

The Very First Black Hole Ever Discovered Was Discovered At U of T

HDE226868

This is a photo of a star called HDE226868. It's a blue supergiant, more than 20 times as big – and hundreds of thousands of times as bright – as the Sun. And it's relatively close by, in the same part of the galaxy as we are: a thin line of stars in between two of the great spiraling arms of the Milky Way. Still, it takes light 1600 years to reach us from there. It's about 16 quadrillion kilometers away. And you can't see it with your naked eye; you need at least a small telescope to glimpse it through the clouds of interstellar gas and dust that stand between us and it.

But as far as X-rays go, this patch of sky is a shinning beacon. The signal we get from it is stronger than pretty much anything else we can see. And since blue supergiants don't give off that kind of radiation, we know those X-rays must be coming from something else. Something powerful. Something we call Cygnus X-1.

Charles Thomas Bolton figured that Cygnus X-1 was probably another star. He was just a young astronomer back in 1971, having come up from the States to do his postdoc at the University of Toronto. He spent a lot of his time at the school's astronomy facility in Richmond Hill: the David Dunlap Observatory. The beautiful stone and dome complex had been built in the 1930s on an estate of nearly two hundred acres just north of the city. It housed the second biggest telescope in the world when it opened. William Lyon Mackenzie King was here to help celebrate the opening. Stuttering King George and his wife Elizabeth (who you might know better as the Queen Mum or Helena Bonham-Carter in The King's Speech) made sure to see it on their trip across Canada. It's still the biggest telescope in the country. And when Bolton pointed it at Cygnus X-1, he was hoping to find evidence of a neutron star.

Neutron stars are small but incredibly heavy, the dense remnant of a bigger star after it dies in a supernova explosion. They give off X-rays like crazy. And early observations seemed to confirm Bolton's suspicions: he could see that HBE226868 was wobbling slightly, which meant that there must be a massive source of gravity nearby. If that source of gravity was a neutron star, he'd have discovered a binary system: two stars orbiting around each other. That would have been a pretty exciting find for the young astronomer, who was particularly interested in those systems.

But Cygnus X-1 was no neutron star. After a couple of months spent collecting data at the Dunlap Observatory, Bolton began to suspect the truth about what he'd actually found. HDE226868 was orbiting something massive, alright. But it was orbiting it at an incredible speed: more than 200 times the speed of sound. That meant Cygnus X-1 was much smaller and much denser than a neutron star. It meant Cygnus X-1 was a black hole.

It seems that once upon a time, there was a really, really, really, really, really BIG star. Like more than 40 times bigger than the Sun big. For most of its life, it did what all stars do: crush hydrogen atoms together, the immensity of its gravity causing nuclear reactions to fuse them into helium. In fact, it was so big that eventually it was fusing that helium into even more complex elements, stuff like carbon and neon and oxygen and silicon. That's where all that stuff comes from: every single atom of it in the entire universe forged within a star. By the end of their lives, the very biggest stars make an even more complex and heavier element: iron. And so, at the centre of this particular gigantic star, a great iron core was building up. In the end, it was so heavy that its atoms couldn't support its own weight anymore. It imploded. The enormous mass was crushed down into a tiny space. It became so dense, and its gravity so strong, that nothing that came close to it could ever escape again. Not even light. It became a black hole.

An artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 and HBE226868

HBE226868 whips around it at a staggering velocity of once every five or six days. A long tail of material gets sucked from the star down toward the black hole, heating up into a disc of plasma as it nears the event horizon – the point of no escape. That, it seems, is where all those X-rays are coming from. Meanwhile, two long jets of particles are sent streaming away at the near the speed of light.

Now, no one had ever found a black hole before. Einstein's theories of relatively – and the quantum physics that followed – had predicted them, but there were still plenty of scientists who didn't believe they existed at all. Bolton knew that going public with his discovery was going to be risky. It would either make or break his career. It wasn't until a pair of scientists in England – and then another one in the United States – seemed to confirm his findings that he published his paper. Even then, it was extremely controversial. People put forward plenty of arguments against it. It even became the subject of a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and another physicist, Kip Thorne. Hawking, who had long believed in black holes, says he was 80% sure that Bolton was right, but bet against it anyway. That way, even if he'd been wrong about black holes his entire career, he'd still win something.

But he wasn't wrong. In 1990, enough evidence had finally piled up to convince Hawking without a doubt. Bolton had been right. Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The David Dunlap Observatory had discovered an extraordinary phenomenon never seen before. Hawking broke into Thorne's office at night and signed the bet. Thorne had officially won himself a one-year subscription to Penthouse magazine.

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These days, black holes are widely-accepted as an important part of our universe. And supermassive black holes, waaaay bigger than Cygnus X-1, are believed to sit at the centre of many galaxies — including the Milky Way. 

Tom Bolton still works as a professor at U of T, though they recently kicked him out of the David Dunlap Observatory so they could sell it to a developer, who has promised to preserve the facility itself. It's still open to the public, which more details on their webiste here.

As for the open land around it? That's currently being fought over at the Ontario Municipal Development Board. The developer wants to build on it, while community groups want to preserve the parkland, protect local wildlife (like this baby coyote, awwwww), and ensure that light pollution doesn't interfere with the view through the telescope. You can read about the fight here and support those who want to protect the land here.

In the late-'70s, Toronto prog-rockers Rush wrote a 28 minute-long, two part song about Cygnus X-1, which spanned two albums and tells the story of a spaceship captain who is pulled into the black hole only to find himself in the Greek mythological home of the gods, Olympus, where he settles a conflict between Apollo and Dionysus, and then becomes a god himself. You can listen to the whole crazy thing right here.

Also interesting: the Dunlap's telescope mirror was carved from the same glass the famed Palomar telescope in California, which inspired an Italo Calvino book and a Rheostatics song.

 You can read a bit more about Tom Bolton in the U of T paper here.

And here's a sketch of the plans for the observatory, drawn in 1933, along with a couple of my favourite more recent photos of it:

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.

Freezing To Death In Antarctica

Taylor and Wright and the Terra Nova

One of the guys in this photo, I'm pretty sure it's the one on the right, is Sir Charles Seymour Wright. He was born in Toronto in the late-1800s, grew up in Rosedale, went to Upper Canada College, studied physics at U of T and then headed off to England on a scholarship to study cosmic rays at Cambridge.  But while he was there, he met a man who had just returned from Antarctica,  where he had spent two and a half years climbing mountains and glaciers and nearly freezing to death on an expedition with one of Britain's most famous explorers, Sir Ernest Shackleton. They hadn't made it all the way to the South Pole, like they'd hoped to, but they'd gone farther than anyone else ever had before. And soon, there would be a new attempt, led by Sir Robert Falcon Scott, another one of the Empire's great Antarctic heroes.

Wright was determined to be part of Scott's expedition. He applied and when his application was initially rejected, he walked into London to make his case in person. From Cambridge. A hundred kilometers away. This time, he was accepted; when Scott's team sailed south from New Zealand in 1910, Wright was on board as part of the scientific contingent.

But things got off to a rough start. Before their ship, the Terra Nova, had even made it to Antarctica, they ran into storms and got stuck in the ice for twenty days. One of their sled dogs drowned, the pack ponies they'd brought along were weak and dying and not cut out for the cold. When they did finally arrive and started unloading their equipment, some of it sank into the water. And, worst of all, they'd learned that Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who had been the first to make it through the Northwest Passage, was already there, camped closer to the Pole, planning to beat them to it.

For the next year and a half, Wright and the other men lived out of an insulated hut in some of the coldest, harshest conditions on Earth, preparing for the months-long journey from their camp to the South Pole. Occasionally, some of them would set out across the ice for weeks and months at a time, studying geology and wildlife or laying down supplies along the route they planned to take south. Each trip was an ordeal. There were blizzards and there were dangerous accidents. More dogs and ponies drowned. Some froze to death or keeled over from exhaustion. Back at camp during the winter, the men would try to keep from going crazy in the darkness, giving lectures and playing football in the faint light outside the hut.

Finally, in November of 1911, Scott lead 16 men, including Wright, out onto the ice and headed for the South Pole. His plan was to send men back in teams the closer they got, taking sled dogs and ponies and motorized sledges part of the way. The sledges died within the first 80 kilometers and after running into a blizzard, all the ponies had to be shot. But the men soldiered on, across the ice shelf, up one of the biggest glaciers in the world and onto the Antarctic plateau, which stretched for hundreds of kilometers between them and their goal. Wright and most of the other men, along with the dogs, headed back to replenish the supply drops, while Scott and four others set off on foot to become the first people to have ever stood on the planet's most southern point.

On January 17, 1912, two weeks later and two and a half months after they'd left camp, having traveled 1300 kilometers in that time, the five men made it to the Pole. Amundsen's flag was already there. The Norwegian had beat them by five weeks. They'd lost.

And the return trip would be an even worse disaster. They spent a month trudging back over the plateau and down the glacier, starving, exhausted and severely frostbitten. Toes turned black. Fingernails were lost to the cold. They kept falling. Getting lost. When they reached the bottom of the glacier, one of them collapsed and died.  And after a few more weeks suffering through some of the worst weather ever recorded in that part of the continent, another simply walked out of the tent to die. "I am just going outside," he said, "and may be some time."

Scott and his last two surviving men struggled on for a few more days, but ran into another blizzard just a few kilometers from their supplies. They couldn't go any further. "We shall stick it out to the end," Scott wrote in the last entry in his diary, "but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people."

It would be Charles Wright, as part of a search party months later, who be the first to spot the tent. Inside, their frozen bodies lay beside their letters, photos and journals. The  survivors buried them in snow, erected a cross and headed back home, to civilization, for the first time in years.

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The hut that Wright and the others lived in is still there, full of supplies, nearly a hundred years later. The Scott Polar Research Institute has tons of incredible photos from the expedition, including many of Wright, and some he took himself, here. There's one he took of some pengiuns. And some he took of the other men, surrounded by snow and snow and more snow. Here's what Wright looked like with frostbite. And here's what he looked like standing beside one of the ponies. There's a map of their route to the Pole here. And here's their ship, stuck in the ice. Here are Scott and his men at the South Pole, standing beside Amundsen's tent and flag. A couple of weeks ago, a collection of Wright's photos and other artifacts from the voyage were sold at auction for a crapload of money, which is how I first learned about him. You can read about that, in the Star, here.

This post is related to dream 41 The Waiting Winter Charles Seymour Wright, 1903

The University of Toronto's 1853 Screw Up

T.H. Huxley

This giggle-inducingly werewolfish fellow is T.H. Huxley. These days he's probably best known as the grandfather of superfamous mescaline user and Brave New World  author Aldous Huxley, but decades before baby Aldous was even born, his grandpapa was already one of the world's best known and most important scientists. He was a pioneer in evolution, called himself "Darwin's Bulldog" and was, next to Darwin himself, the leading advocate of the theory. He's the guy who suggested that birds were descended from dinosaurs, who coined the term "agnostic" and who got British universities to start giving out degrees in science. Dude wasn't just one of the leading naturalists of the 19th century, he was probably one of the most important figures in the entire history of science. And in 1853,  he wanted to work at the University of Toronto.

At the time, the U of T was looking to hire someone to head up their brand new natural history department, and Huxley—who in those pre-Origin of Species days was a young, but already award-winning biologist—applied, backed by glowing recommendations from many of Britain's best scientists, Darwin included.

His main rival for the position was a one-time Unitarian Minister from Ireland, the Revered William Hincks. And Hincks was no T.H. Huxley. He didn't believe in Darwin's theory, and would soon be attacking it in favour of the “unity of plan and perfection of design” put forth by the Old Testament. Scientifically, he adhered to his own version of the totally bullshit theory of quinarianism, which claimed that all species had been created in groups of five and sought to arrange them into pretty little circles. His biggest professional accomplishment would prove to be a collection of dead birds and plants, which he donated to the Royal Ontario Museum. Tellingly, while Huxley's contributions are now listed in a nearly 10,000 word Wikipedia article, Hincks doesn't have one at all. And if you're looking for a photo of the good Reverend to, oh, I don't know, say, stick at the top of a blog post about him, good freaking luck. He's an obscure footnote; his views on natural history were completely wrong-headed, his contributions were negligible at best and harmful at worst.

But!

Hincks had one qualification that Huxley didn't: he was the older brother of Francis Hincks, who just so happened to be the Premier of Ontario. So guess who got the job.

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This post is related to dream 02 The Adultorous Fox William Hincks, 1853