The bright minds of Brantfordians will be featured in an upcoming exhibit at the Brant Museum & Archives but intends to go further than the two local inventors who changed the world.
Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone while living in Brantford, and James Hillier, who led the work building the first successful high-resolution electron microscope, are the first to mind when one thinks of Brantford scientists, says museum curator Nathan Etherington.
Both Bell and Hillier are inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
But this exhibit will also feature those who were working in area businesses, including the burgeoning phone industry.
Etherington, whose own background is in science, said the Lorimer Brothers, from St. George, will be featured as inventors who worked to develop automatic switching for telephones so they wouldn’t require – as Bell’s system did – operators to connect a call.
“Scientists also worked in business and industries, like Harold Dunsdon of the Mohawk Creamery in Eagle Place,” said Etherington.
“He used scene equipment in the operations to determine the quality of cream delivered to the dairy to produce award-winning butter.”
The museum will also have on display an electronic microscope developed by Hillier as part of his work that changed today’s health outcomes but producing images ten times better than traditional light microscopes.
The Scientists and Inventors Exhibit opens at the museum on Thursday and will run until Labor Day, on Sept. 4. The museum, located at 57 Charlotte St., is open Monday to Friday from noon to 5 pm and Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm
Admission is by donation.
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