Famous Canadian Inventors and Inventions — Insulin, Telephone, Basketball, Pacemaker

# Famous Canadian Inventors and Inventions

For a country with a relatively small population, Canadians have produced an outsized number of inventions and discoveries. Some of these come up on the citizenship test. Here are the most famous, with the details you should know.

In 1921, Frederick Banting and his student Charles Best, working at the University of Toronto, isolated insulin — the hormone that regulates blood sugar. Their discovery transformed Type 1 diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable condition. Millions of lives have been saved.

• 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — awarded to Banting and lab supervisor John Macleod (Banting shared his prize money with Best)
• Banting and Best gave the patent rights to the University of Toronto for $1 so insulin could be produced affordably
• Banting was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine at the time
• He is a Canadian national hero — November 14 (his birthday) is World Diabetes Day

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. He was born in Scotland but spent much of his life in Canada (Brantford, Ontario; Baddeck, Nova Scotia). He held citizenship in three countries (UK, Canada, US) and tested his early telephone in Brantford. His estate at Baddeck on Cape Breton Island is now a National Historic Site.

The first long-distance telephone call (Brantford to Paris, Ontario) was made in 1876. The telephone revolutionised global communication.

James Naismith — born in Almonte, Ontario — invented basketball in December 1891 while teaching at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts. Asked to invent an indoor winter sport, he wrote 13 rules and used a soccer ball and two peach baskets nailed to a balcony.

Basketball is now one of the most popular sports in the world. Naismith later coached basketball at the University of Kansas.

In 1950, Canadian electrical engineer John Hopps invented the artificial pacemaker — a device to maintain a steady heartbeat in patients with cardiac arrhythmia. Hopps's invention saved millions of lives.

The Canadarm is a Canadian-built robotic arm used by NASA's Space Shuttle (1981–2011) and the International Space Station. The Canadarm2 (a larger version) is still in use on the ISS today. It made Canada one of the most respected space-engineering nations in the world.

Canola was developed by Canadian agricultural scientists at the University of Manitoba and Agriculture Canada in the 1970s. The name CAN-O-LA means "Canada Oil, Low Acid". Today, canola is one of Canada's largest agricultural exports — most of the world's canola comes from the Canadian Prairies.

Canada has produced 27 Nobel Prize winners (including those who held Canadian citizenship at some point). Highlights:

• Frederick Banting — Medicine (1923) — insulin
• Lester B. Pearson — Peace (1957) — UN peacekeeping
• Sir Frederick G. Banting — see above
• Sidney Altman — Chemistry (1989) — molecular biology
• Bertram Brockhouse — Physics (1994) — neutron scattering
• Alice Munro — Literature (2013) — short stories
• Donna Strickland — Physics (2018) — chirped pulse amplification

Common citizenship-test questions:

• Who invented insulin? *(Frederick Banting and Charles Best)*
• Who invented the telephone? *(Alexander Graham Bell)*
• Who invented basketball? *(James Naismith)*
• Who won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing UN peacekeeping? *(Lester B. Pearson — see [Canadian Peacekeeping History](/blog/canadian-peacekeeping-history-un))*

Try our [free practice test](/practice-test) — it covers Canadian inventors and inventions in the same format you will see on test day.