5-31-2016: Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

Today we went on a bus tour which took us to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum.

Alexander Graham Bell Museum

The Ride to the Museum

On our way to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum, our guide talked about a few interesting things about Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Canada in general. (He also said some of this on the ride back, but I’ll just summarise it all here.)

By the way, if you want a solid source of information about any of the topics I’ve written about, I am not that solid source so don’t cite me on any of this. The reason I do this is a) to let people back home know that I’m alive and b) to sort all of the information I’ve learned and things I’ve seen in my own mind.

• The Town of Sydney is located on the island of Cape Breton, the northern island of Nova Scotia.
• Cape Breton has a huge lake in the middle of it. The lake is called Bras d’Or Lake.
• Thousands of years ago it was a fresh water lake but as the glaciers melted after the Ice Age, the seawater rose to a level where it flooded into the lake basin creating the current salt water lake.

On the way we stopped at a look out spot (overlook in American English). It is said that this lookout spot was the reason that Alexander Graham Bell decided to settle in Nova Scotia after his success with the telephone.

The Museum

Before visiting the Alexander Graham Bell Museum, I only knew about Alexander Graham Bell’s work on the telephone. Alexander, however, contributed so much more than just that to society. I’ll list a few of his most notable contributions.

• Alexander’s father was a speech therapist and his mother was deaf. His father developed a system called Visible Speech (or something like that) which was a phonetic language which put speech mechanics into a language.
• Alexander got a job at a school for the deaf and he used his father’s system to teach his students how to speak.
• After becoming successful with the invention of the telephone, Alexander worked on a variety of other things. One of which was helping build the first airplane in Canada. He worked with Mr. Curtiss and a bunch of other men on the project. Curtiss subsequently went off to create a successful airplane manufacturing company in the States.
• Another of his post-telephone projects was a hydroplane, a boat which used “wings” underwater to provide lift allowing the boat to move across the water with minimal drag.
• He had many other side projects, some of which were successful, others were very unsuccessful, but Alexander kept busy with all of his projects.

Alexander is best know for his work on the telephone. It was neat learning about how he created the telephone after taking Physics II which focuses a lot on electromagnetism. The telephone uses the properties of electromagnetism to transmit sound. It specifically uses the fact that solenoids (essentially wraps of wire around a spool) create magnetic fields when current is run through them and that current is induced through the wire of a solenoid when there is a changing magnetic field inside the solenoid. Graham discovered that both sound waves and electromagnetic waves are sinusoid all waves. Because of this, sound waves can be encoded as AC current and transmitted across a wire. All of this was new to me and it was neat being able to see how the stuff I learned in Physics is actually used in real life.

Outside the museum, there was a great view of a lighthouse.

Evening

My evening consisted of the normal activities so just read the older blog posts and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what I did.

5-30-2016: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Today we went to the Canadian Immigration Museum and the Halifax Citadel.

Our original plan was to do a Segway tour of Halifax, but because of the weather, the tour was cancelled. We were very disappointed, but we still had plenty to do today.

Immigration Museum

The first thing we went to was the Immigration Museum at Pier 21, the main entry point for immigrants to Canada. Pier 21 was the Ellis Island of Canada. Pier 21 is right next to the cruise port terminal, in fact, we came into Building 22 so it was super easy to get to the immigration museum. The museum had exhibits on the history of immigration to Canada, the Pier 21 immigration process and an exhibit about the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history.

History of Immigration to Canada

Like the United States, Canada is a nation of immigrants. Also like in the United States, the indigenous population historically were often mistreated. Canada was originally settled by French and British and there were many conflicts between the French and British. Eventually after all that was sorted out, the Canadians realized that they needed people to help settle the vast lands of Canada. They adopted a fairly opened immigration policy allowing most people who wanted in to come. As with the United States, Canada admitted many refugees during both World Wars. Pier 21 processed about one million immigrants to Canada while it was operating.

Pier 21 Immigration Process

Pier 21 is a pier, our ship docked within 20 metres of the facility just as many cruise liners had docked in the past. They would take the passengers in groups into the processing center. The immigrants would undergo health examinations and have their papers examined. Then, if they were eligible to immigrate, their documents would be stamped with a “Landed Immigrant” stamp. (They have since renamed that to “Permanent Resident”.) They were then free to move about in Canada.

The Trans-Canada Railway would take many of those immigrants to places elsewhere in Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces (the ones by the Atlantic Ocean) or to the Central and Western provinces.

The museum had a film about immigration to Canada featuring some more recent immigrants. In the film, they told stories about their experiences arriving in Canada and learning the culture. One of the best lines from the film:

Everyone was so apologetic, I would step in front of them and they’d say “sorry” and I’d be like, “you don’t need to say sorry for that”, and they’d say “sorry” again!

It was neat to see all of the people who wanted to become Canadian because they knew that Canada represented a better life for them and or their family.

The Sinking of the Empress of Ireland

Just a few years after the Titanic sunk, the Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence Seaway. To this day, it remains the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history. It was a foggy night when the captain saw another ship. The captains of each vessel assumed that the other would go one way, but in reality, they went the other way. The smaller vessel broadsided the Empress of Ireland and she sunk in only 15 minutes. After the sinking of the Titanic, the number of lifeboats on the Empress of Ireland was more than doubled (20 to 42). This didn’t help because of the crew did not have time to deploy most of them. Of the around 1200 passengers, only a few hundred survived.

Interestingly, the captain didn’t “fall” out of the ship onto a lifeboat. (Looking at you Costa Concordia.)

The Halifax Citadel

After lunch back on the boat, we headed to the Halifax Citadel, a fortress built to defend Halifax against potential attackers. Halifax has been attacked by many different countries. The first came from the French during the Franco-British wars. For example, Halifax was attacked during The Seven Years War, better known as the French and Indian War on this side of the pond (at least on the south side of the 49th Parallel). After the United States separated from Great Britain, Halifax became even more important because the British had lost the excellent harbors of Boston and New York among others. During the War of 1812, the United States attacked Canada in an attempt to rid the entire North American continent of British influence. Halifax was attacked, but in the end the United States failed in taking Canada (evidenced by the fact that Canada still exists).

The current Halifax Citadel was built after the War of 1812 and did its job very well, Halifax has not been attacked since.

We arrived at the Citadel right before the changing of the guard ceremony so we watched that. It’s nothing like the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, but it was still interesting. We then headed inside to the main building at the center of the star shaped citadel. We began by walking through some of an exhibit on the history of the British Military. Then we watched a film about the citadel which discussed the history and significance of the citadel. After that we went to the ramparts and looked for a few minutes.

At this point, it was time to return to the boat so we headed back to the boat. The evening proceeded much like the previous evenings.