Going the Distance

Key moments when technology brought Canadians—and the world—closer.

Written by Danelle Cloutier

 — Posted July 11, 2016

JULY 21, 1836

July 21, 1836: The Dorchester is the first train to travel a public railroad in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada

Canada’s first public railroad opens in Lower Canada (now Quebec). The Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad connected La Prairie on the St. Lawrence River and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. The first train to travel the line was the Dorchester, shown above, which burned wood for fuel and had a top speed of forty-eight kilometres per hour.

AUGUST 10, 1876

Alexander Graham Bell, August 10, 1876
Musée des sciences et de la technologie du Canada

Alexander Graham Bell, left, receives the world’s first long-distance call. Bell received the call from Brantford, Ontario, while using a telephone at a telegraph office in Robert White’s Boot and Shoe Store in Paris, Ontario. The distance between the two callers was approximately thirteen kilometres.

NOVEMBER 7, 1885

Sir Donald Smith
Library and Archives Canada

Donald A. Smith, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, drives the last spike in Canada’s first transcontinental railway. However, due to the need to continue working on sections of the line, it would take six more months before the first cross-Canada train voyage could be completed. That occurred on July 4, 1886, when a Canadian Pacific Railway passenger train arrived at Port Moody, British Columbia, nearly six days after it had departed from Montreal.

FEBRUARY 23, 1909

February 23, 1909: J.A.D. McCurdy flies the Silver Dart, the first powered flight in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada

Five years after a pair of American brothers achieve the world’s first powered flight, a small group gathers at Baddeck, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to make Canadian history. Led by inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the team watches pilot J.A.D. McCurdy fly the Silver Dart a distance of around eight hundred metres, completing the first powered flight in Canada.

OCTOBER 14, 1912

October 14, 1912: Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney ride in a 1912 REO, taking forty-nine days to cross Canada by automobile.
Library and Archives Canada

Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney roll into Vancouver after a journey of forty-nine days, completing the first cross-Canada automobile trip. The duo had departed from Halifax in a 1912 REO, bearing a bottle of water from the Atlantic Ocean that was poured into the Pacific as a symbolic ending to their historic road trip.

OCTOBER 5, 1984

Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian to reach outer space. He served as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
NASA

Marc Garneau takes a trip that’s literally out of this world, becoming the first Canadian to reach outer space. Garneau serves as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger. During his career as an astronaut, Garneau logged a total of 677 hours in space over three shuttle missions.

Themes associated with this article

Related to Science & Technology

The Polio Epidemic in Canada

From the archive: Decades before COVID-19 began its spread and stoked fear and anxiety across the globe, polio advanced rapidly and caused terror both worldwide and here in Canada. 

Article

Isolation

A Canadian professor’s research into sensory deprivation and its connection to disturbing new methods of interrogation.

Article

Anatomically Incorrect: Bodysnatching in the 19th Century

It was a dilemma, medical students needed cadavers for dissection. But procuring cadavers was illegal. In nineteenth-century Montreal there was only one solution. And it was ghoulish. 

Article

Shut Away

Fiction Feature: Lily doesn’t like the school she was sent to just because she learned things more slowly. But she’s happier now because she has a new friend.

Article