Famous Canadian Inventors & Discoverers

Gerald Vincent Bull was a Canadian artillery expert, known for designing Project Babylon supergun for the Government of Iraq. His idea was to do away with the conventional rockets by firing satellites into orbit from a 156m-long barrel embedded inside a hill. However, his assassination within two years of the start of the project put an end to it.  

Willard Boyle revolutionized physics with the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), which also earned him, and his co-inventor George E. Smith, a Nobel Prize. During his time at Bellcomm, he was associated with the Apollo space program. Both he and Smith worked for Bell Laboratories, too.

While he initially aspired to be an artist, physicist James Hillier later earned a scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he co-invented the prototype of the first commercial electron microscope. He eventually won 40 patents and was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Charles Fenerty was a 19th-century Canadian inventor and poet. He is best remembered for inventing the wood pulp process for paper-making. His invention did not receive much attention in his lifetime and he never took out a patent on it. He was well known as a poet and published numerous poems. He was an extensive traveler as well. 

Lawrence A. Hyland was an American electrical engineer who made significant contributions that led to the invention of radar. He is best known for turning Hughes Aircraft, which was viewed by Howard Hughes as nothing more than a hobby shop, into one of the world’s best-known technology companies. Hyland also played an important role in the development of doppler radar.