AN NRC TIMELINE

1916

The Honourary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research begins as a committee of university and industry leaders aimed at mobilizing technology in the national interest.

1924

What’s now Canada’s National Science Library launches.

1932

The landmark building at 100 Sussex Drive opens, but it is not a replica of Buckingham Palace, as oft repeated. Architect Henry Sproatt’s model was Toronto’s Union Station but “less severe.”

1939

The NRC becomes Canada’s official timekeeper with “The beginning of the long dash” now utterly familiar to CBC listeners.

1939-45

By the end of the Second World War, the NRC has developed 30 types of radar, anti-gravity suits, military walkie-talkies and portable refrigeration units to get food to the front.

1941

The NRC publishes the first National Building Code, which would be adopted by provinces and cities over the next two decades.

1945

The Zero Energy Experimental Pile or ZEEP, the first nuclear reactor to operate outside the United States, goes critical in Chalk River, Ont.

1951

NRC produces the isotopes for the cobalt 60 bomb treatment — a new age of radiation therapy for cancer.

1971

The NRC’s Gerhard Herzberg is introduced as “the world’s foremost molecular spectroscopist” from the “undisputed centre for such research” when he is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

1981

Saran Narang discovers how to synthesize insulin, resulting in a drug used by about 300 million people.

1982

Harold Jennings patents a vaccine that, for the first time, protects infants from Group C meningitis, protecting children around the world against a scourge that kills one in four victims.

1983

The Canadian Astronaut Program is established under NRC management, with a team — including Roberta Bondar and Marc Garneau — which was selected from more than 4,000 applicants.

1987

In just four days, NRC investigators identify a toxin that has killed five, sickened hundreds and shut down the shellfish industry on the East Coast.

1989

The Bank of Canada issues new $50 bills incorporating the NRC’s thin films technology to foil counterfeiters now in use around the world.

1994

Bertram Neville Brockhouse, a pioneer in neutron spectrometry, shares the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in neutron scattering — a field he invented — in Chalk River in the 1950s.

2001

A team led by Paul Corkum produces and measures the world’s fastest laser light flashes — measured to one quintillionth of a second — to find out what is happening inside atoms and molecules.

2004

An NRC team takes their 3D imaging technology to the basement of the Louvre to scan Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

2005

A breakthrough in creating a single-molecule electrical circuit at the NRC’s National Institute for Nanotechnology is published in the journal Nature.

2008

An international team led by the NRC’s Christian Marois captures the first images of planets circling a star other than the sun, billed as “a milestone in the search for other worlds.”

2009

A Halifax neurosurgeon is the first to remove a patient’s brain tumour with the help of a virtual-reality simulator developed by the NRC.

2012

NRC calls it a major milestone for the aviation industry when it flies the first civil jet powered by 100 per cent unblended biofuel.