Victoria JL Fisher

Historian, Author, Photographs

Tag: Canadian history

The Artifacts of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the David Dunlap Observatory

June 12, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This year, the David Dunlap Observatory (DDO), a historic observatory in and run by the city of Richmond Hill, celebrates its 90th Anniversary! On the weekend of May 31st and June 1st, 90 years to the day of its opening, the observatory celebrated with a special event featuring a cake displays from the two groups that run programming at the observatory, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada – Toronto Centre and the David Dunlap Observatory Defenders.


Part of the 90th Anniversary weekend display in the ornate David Dunlap Observatory library, showing items displayed on a table with walls of books behind. Photo by Victoria Fisher.

To celebrate the anniversary, I created a exhibit of objects in the observatory’s stunning library. The items on display were all either used at the observatory or connected to people who worked there, and drawn from the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics’ historic collections, which I curate.

This was an amazing opportunity. Many of the artifacts were originally used at the DDO or even designed for it–this includes the “Newtonian Breechpiece” that held photographic plates for the observatory’s huge 74-inch telescope. Other items related to work of the observatory’s researchers, such as the light table that belonged to Helen Sawyer Hogg, a prominent researcher in the field of variable stars who worked at the DDO for decades and took hundreds of photographs she would have viewed with this table. While I use objects from the collection for teaching and pop-up exhibits, this is the first time I have been able to bring them out for an extended display where they can be examined by visitors. I was so excited to get this chance.

Over the anniversary weekend, I was on hand with a colleague, chatting with visitors about the artifacts and the observatory’s history, something I always love to do. Although I can’t be there all summer, and some items had to return to storage for one reason or another, most of the objects are remaining on display all summer for the observatory’s highly popular “Tour the DDO” events, free to the public.

At the birthday even on May 31st, I was invited to speak about Clarence Augustus Chant, a professor at the University of Toronto from whose efforts the observatory came about. This story is a fantastic one, as it highlights a fascinating period in Canadian science at the beginning of the 20th century when the country was just beginning to develop a scientific research identity.

Victoria Fisher speaking at the Richmond Hill David Dunlap Observatory 90th Anniversary event. Photo by Phil Morrow.

Initially a physics professor, Chant taught the first astronomy classes at U of T in 1905. Keen to develop the program’s capacity and impressed by the importance of scientific public education and amateur access to science, he had a vision that not only should the university have its own large telescope for teaching and research, but also that the city of Toronto should have access to a major observatory so that the public could come and learn something about the universe. This “observatory for Toronto”, as Chant called it, opened on Chant’s 70th birthday, May 31st, in 1935, and hosted what was then the world’s second biggest telescope as well as three others. It spent many decades at the heart of the university’s astronomical research program as well as delighting a steady stream of interested members of the public.

In 2007, the University of Toronto sold the observatory. Through the efforts of the City of Richmond Hill and groups of local people determined to maintain the observatory and its surroundings as a historic site and park, it became a National Historic Site in 2019, and still welcomes thousands of visitors a year.

Chant’s legacy is one I’m glad to celebrate, because it still resonates so strongly today. Not only did he believe that Canadian astronomers should have access to high quality research facilities at a time when Canada, but–perhaps even more importantly in the emergence of scientific research and industry in Canada–that science and science education should be accessible to the broader public. As we face a bewildering array of crises and problems that connect with science, industry, and technology, this access, for adults as well as kids, is perhaps more important than ever before.

The main dome of the David Dunlap Observatory on May 30th, 2025. Photo by Victoria Fisher.

I was so excited to include some elements of the DDO’s public education history in the exhibit: Chant’s educational lantern slide set designed to assist in teaching adults and children about astronomy, and a faux “Oscar” statuette featuring an astronaut jokingly awarded to professor Donald MacRae by his department colleagues for his “starring role” in the 1960 documentary, Universe, partly filmed at the DDO.

The display will be at the DDO until October. My hope is then to move it to the St George campus at U of T so staff and students can see these amazing artifacts downtown.

Artifacts and Opportunity: Discovering Canada’s Scientific Collections

March 31, 2025 / / 0 Comments

One way the history of science and technology in Canada is recorded is in artifacts–the flotsam and jetsam of scientific and technological activity across the country. From scientific instruments to hospital supplies to botanical specimens and objects of design, many of these artifacts survive in collections, formal and informal, large and small, across the country.

Through 2023 and 2024, with my colleague at the University of Toronto, Erich Weidenhammer, I guest edited an issue of Canada’s history of science academic journal, Scientia Canadensis, that collects new scholarship focusing on some of these collections.

The Special Issue, called “Artifacts and Opportunity: Science and Technology Collections in Canada,” was published in December 2024. You can find and read the articles–all open access–here. The issue is still growing! We expect to add more articles in the near future.

Editing this Special Issue was a fantastic experience. I loved discovering collections through the eyes of the people who care for them. The variety of perspectives, interests and knowledge of the historians, curators and others who work with these collections is distinctive and wonderful. History that pays attention to material artifacts is a special kind of history–it is often local, practical, down-to-earth, and represents types of people and work who may not be recorded in other ways.

Excitingly, I know that these collections represent only a fraction of the material that survives and represents the fascinating stories of natural knowledge, science, technology and ingenuity that Canada has to offer. But many of such collections are at risk, including some of those documented by the authors here. Often already underfunded and under-resourced, collections and the people who care for them are often regarded as expendable. Scientific or technology collections, especially, are often very vulnerable; this is especially true in Canada, where scientific and technology history has sometimes been overlooked.

Yet the history of Canada is tied inextricably with science. From the natural knowledge that enabled Indigenous people from time immemorial to the present day to traverse, understand and live in this land; through the role of navigation and surveying in the processes of colonization; through the central role of natural resource discovery, use and exploitation across the country; through our ingenious scientist, doctors and engineers who developed new technologies that changed how we do things and what we can do; to our extensive and growing understanding of our natural environment and its role in our endangered planet–we have been continually shaped and reshaped by what we know about the world and what we do in it.

Preserving and protecting and learning from these collections is therefore preserving and learning from Canadian history. There are so many stories that are going untold–or that we’ve let be told by someone else! I was very pleased, therefore, to play host to this great collection of scholarship that will help, just a little, to raise the profile and highlight the value of Canada’s amazing and little-known scientific collections.

The Canadian Einstein Camera

October 28, 2023 / / 0 Comments

In September 1922, a small group of Canadian scientists led by astronomer Clarence A. Chant joined an expedition to Western Australia to photograph a total solar eclipse in order to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Taking a specially-made camera with a six inch lens, the Einstein Camera, the team successfully took photos of the eclipse and used them to make the precision measurements necessary to confirm (or, almost confirm), Einstein’s predictions.

I wrote about this grand adventure with science writer Dan Falk in the University of Toronto Magazine.

The six-inch wide objective lens of the Canadian Einstein Camera, used by a Canadian team to photograph a total eclipse of the sun in 1922 in Western Australia, and again in Quebec in 1932. The lens is part of the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection.

© 2025 Victoria JL Fisher

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑