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the great
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FREDERICK HENRY
HARVEY
LEWIS LATIMER
Without Fred Harvey (1835-1901), modern life would
be devoid of such staples as McDonalds, KFC and
Holiday Inns, for Harvey pioneered the restaurant and
hotel chain in North America and thus elevated the
restaurant itself from a small-town business to a
formidable industry.
Lewis Latimer (born 1848) is considered one of the 10
most important black inventors of all time. In 1876,
Latimer was sought out as a draftsman by a teacher for
deaf children. The teacher had created a device and
wanted Lewis to draft the drawing necessary for a
patent application. The teacher was Alexander Graham
Bell and the device was the telephone.
Arriving from England in 1850 at the age of 15, Frederick
Harvey worked as a dishwasher before creating the very
first chain of hotels in the United States. The travellers
of that era moved through Chicago on a slow journey
westward on hard board seats in overcrowded crude
coaches. At a time when most railroad food was poor
and even inedible, Fred Harvey provided appetising
meals in comfortable dining quarters. He opened his
first railroad restaurant in Topeka, Kansas in 1876.
He was also a leader in promoting
tourism in the American Southwest
in the late 19th century. Fred Harvey
and his employees successfully
brought new higher standards of
both civility and dining to a region
widely regarded in the era as
“the Wild West.” He created a legacy
which was continued by his sons
and remained in the family until the
death of a grandson in 1965.
In 1880, U.S. Electric Lighting Company hired Latimer to
improve Thomas Edison’s light bulb and focused on the
main weakness of Edison’s bulb – their short life span
of only a few days. Latimer set out to make a longer
lasting bulb. This enabled electric lighting to be installed
within homes and throughout streets.
Latimer’s abilities in electric lighting became well
known and soon he was sought after to continue to
improve on incandescent lighting as well as arc
lighting. Eventually, as more major cities began
wiring their streets for electric lighting, Latimer was
dispatched to lead the planning team. He helped to
install the first electric plants in Philadelphia, New
York City and Montreal and oversaw the installation
of lighting in railroad stations, government building
and major thoroughfares in Canada, New England
and London.
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TWIN PEAKS
RALPH ELLISON
Twin Peaks was a sensation from the moment it first aired and
still, 20 years later, the influence of David Lynch’s groundbreaking
series can be felt in TV drama. From The Sopranos, CSI, The Bridge,
The Killing, True Detective, Lost and now Fortitude, they all have
many elements originated and comparisons set up by Twin Peaks.
Written in 1952, Invisible Man
would be the only novel Ellison published.
It is an incendiary novel and explores the
theme of man’s search for his identity
and place in society, as seen from the
perspective of an unnamed black man in
the New York City of the 1930s.
Twin Peaks was an American television serial drama created by
Mark Frost and David Lynch. It followed an investigation
headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan)
into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
Its pilot episode was first broadcast on April 8, 1990. From the
very beginning of the first episode, we see the dead body of
Laura Palmer. The mystery then zig zags forwards and
backwards in time, a technique that had seldom been seen this
way in a television series.
Lynch tore up conventions and almost single-handedly
reinvented TV drama. The standard narrative arc went out of
the window, and in its place came idiosyncratic character studies,
an elliptical plot, dialogue that brought the bizarre and the
banal together in a captivating verbal marriage, and imagery
quite unlike anything seen on the small screen. The audience
was not just hooked but enthralled, beguiled and bewildered.
Ellison created characters that were
dispassionate, educated, self-aware and
explored the contrasts between the
Northern and Southern varieties of racism
and their alienating effect. The narrator is
“invisible” in a figurative sense, in that
“people refuse to see” him. His greatest skills
were in his clever descriptions of America’s
contradictions and hypocrisy and the novel
is particularly relevant today as it was then.
Invisible Man won the 1953 U.S. National
Book Award for Fiction. It established him
as one of the most important American
authors of the twentieth century.
DIANE ARBUS
Diane Arbus was born in New York City in 1923 and found most of her
subjects there. She was a photographer primarily of people she
discovered in the city and its environments. Her portraits of couples,
children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites,
people on the street, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities have a
captivating direct style and capture the broad landscape of a postwar
America. Her work viewed today look very contemporary and her ability
to be unsentimental and direct has influenced many photographers.
Diane Arbus had a remarkably original and consistent vision and her
pictures remain as powerful and controversial today as when they were
first seen. Arbus’s gift for rendering strange those things we consider most
familiar continues to challenge our assumptions about the nature of
everyday life, and compels us to look at the world in a new way.
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“Talent hits a target no one else can hit;
Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
NADIA COMANECI
ANTONI GAUDÍ
The 14-year-old Romanian became a global star at
Montreal in 1976, achieving perfection and crowning a
golden era for gymnastics. The Swiss company Omega
had responsibility for the timing and scoring of
Olympic events. They were replacing the traditional
boards, which had room for three digits such as 9.50,
or 9.85, but wanted to know if they should produce
a four digits display, such as 10.00? “I was told, ‘a 10.00
is not possible,’ ” recalls Daniel Baumat, “So we only
did three digits.”
Antoni Gaudí is one of the outstanding figures of
Catalan culture and international architecture.
He was primarily an architect, but also designed
furniture and landscapes. Gaudí’s career was
established with the Sagrada Família.
The work started in 1882 and continues to be built to
this day. When Gaudí died in 1926, he commented,
“My client is not in a hurry.” His building strives to
compress all of earth and heaven into its structure –
endless saints, biblical scenes, symbols, inscriptions,
But on Sunday 18 July, the second day of the Montreal seashells, birds, flowers and fruit. With its avoidance
Games, a 14-year-old gymnast called Nadia Comaneci of straight lines and its tree-like columns, it embodies
made her first appearance and created the unique
Gaudí’s belief that he should follow nature.
problem. “I said that they could either put up 1.00
or .100 but that there was no possibility for a 10.00.”
Time Magazine called it ‘sensual, spiritual, whimsical,
Comaneci received a perfect 1.00. It is easy to see why exuberant’, George Orwell called it “one of the most
the IOC considered 10.00, a score never previously
hideous buildings in the world”. The church is now a
achieved in Olympic competition, to be unachievable. UNESCO World Heritage Site, as testifying “to Gaudí’s
By the time she left Montreal the tiny Romanian had
exceptional creative contribution to the development
done it seven times.
of architecture and building technology.”
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