Extracting Alberta

Hello, I'm Frits Pannekoek. Welcome to Episode 6 of Alberta's Past: A New Lens. So far in this series, we've looked at innovation through writing and memory, Indigenous histories, politics and institutions, and cultural life. In this episode, we turn to resource development, the industries and working environments that reshaped Alberta's economy, its communities, and the province's relationship with the land and water. Resorts development is often reduced to one story: oil and gas. This episode widens that frame. We look at agriculture, mechanization, at industrial safety and regulation, and at coal mining where risk, labour, and community organization shape daily life and force changes in practice. To do that, we visit the Reynolds Alberta Museum with Randy Quill, Curator Emeritus, and Jovan Quill and Brian Manning, both curators at the museum. Their collections let us see how agricultural technology was adapted to prairie conditions, how machines changed with scale, and how resource work depended on practical solutions that could be repeated and maintained. We also go underground at the Bellevue Underground Mine with Diane Peterson, mining historian and interpreter, and Terry Barlow, a miner and interpreter. There we look at what coal work demanded: ventilation, safety practices, equipment, and the lived knowledge that developed around dangerous labour. This episode is about how resource development actually worked, how people solved problems on farms, in industrial settings, and in underground mines, and how those solutions shaped the province that emerged. We are encouraged. Resource economies in this province did not begin with the drill bit or the plough. They began With the buffalo. For generations, indigenous peoples managed the herds to sustain themselves, but in the 19th century, the production of pemmican, a staple fuel for the fur trade, became the first major export economy of the plains. The processing of pemmican was a sophisticated manufacturing task controlled by women who adapted their product to the specific needs of buyers and the changing availability of supplies. That ability to adapt a resource to a market set a pattern for everything that followed. Unlike previous episodes, we were going on site to the Reynolds Alberta Museum to examine the machinery of agriculture and deep into the Bellevue underground mine to see the realities of extraction. To start, we see how agriculture demanded new tools. In

Eastern Canada, innovation was built upon something that already existed. So they were trying to find innovation that fit within that box. When they got to Alberta, things were different. The farms were larger. The soil was different. The expectations of what could be done with one person was different. So the innovation had to follow suit. With a horse and two bottoms or one bottom, you're not getting a large farm turned over and ready. You needed something with the power and the size to move that earth and get it ready. Now, to store a large piece of machinery and care for a large piece of machinery is a lot more difficult than, say, for the small tractor. And you see this massive machine suddenly shrink right after World War I. Now, the small machines were easier for the farmer to adapt and use. Now that they've broken the earth, they just had to care for the soil. And that doesn't take as much effort as turning the soil over. When

The Buffalo economy collapsed, the land remained. The Surveying of Alberta into a rigid grid was a first step in a new era of colonial resource management designed to organize agriculture, timber and minerals for distant markets. It is no accident that one of the first programs at the University of Alberta was land surveying. Railways and roads followed the survey lines, creating the transportation network that allowed immigrants to reach this last best west. They came looking for land, but often found their footing in the resource economy.

Transportation is a key part of how our culture develops in Western Canada. The railways bring the first settlers to Come and do the farming. The biggest industry until the oil industry is agriculture. It's still one of the largest industries in this province. It's maybe not as many people because of the technology and the innovations that occur. And the changing in demographics as a result of the technology that comes to this province is actually mind-boggling. Because between 1911 and 1971, there's an ever-increasing amount of land that they call improved land in the Canadian census. Which is referencing that we are now using it for agricultural production. And how can you increase when the labour force diminishes to the point that you think, how can they do it? Well, it's only done because of the technology that's available to them. And some of that technology develops because of the pressures of farmers wanting to do more or having to do more. Like during World War II, they find that all of our good hired help has to go off to war. So how do we get our crops off? Well, the companies are suddenly coming up with ideas of better combines, bigger combines, better planting equipment, more efficient planting equipment. All that kind of stuff that makes it easier for the agricultural farmer to grow his operation, but also keep his operation going. In Alberta,

Disruption is often the engine of innovation. When the workforce disappears, machinery had to evolve. However, simply importing solutions from the United States or Central Canada rarely worked. The scale was different. The soil was different. Alberta needed tools adapted to its own conditions. In

Medicine Hat, right after World War I, the Medicine Hat Alberta Boundary and Machine Company developed their own tractor. That was quite unique. It had a wooden frame and a wooden spokes in the rear wheels. So it was kind of a bizarre idea in the Bald Prairies to put a giant 10 by 10 beam into a tractor. But they were moderately successful. A couple of large companies, the Pioneer Tractor Company out of Winona, thought they would start a factory in Calgary, Alberta. They designed a whole community. They did all the street drawings. They did all the plans. They had that whole community designed. Based off, they were going to put a factory in the middle of it. So their workers didn't have too far to travel. They would have a home to live in. And then Holt Manufacturing, which was the founding parent of the Caterpillar Company, actually looked at assembling tractors in Calgary. They actually based their Canadian headquarters in Calgary and came very close to putting a factory in. So you're looking at big international companies that were even considering Alberta as the base to expand their empire. In the early

20th century, a lack of stable financing crippled many promising manufacturing attempts. Even the most successful innovators struggled with the direction of change. Innovation wasn't

Always viewed with a kind eye either. Charles Noble was a very advanced farmer. He was one of the most mechanically advanced farmers by the time you get to the end of World War I. Far exceeding the number of machines of anybody in the province. Huge operation, probably the largest in the British Commonwealth. We're talking dozens of tractors and steam engines on one farm. And yet in 1918, he's still debating that the horse is the right way to go when you're farming. And you kind of wonder why he would do that. He still had some doubts about innovation and technology. And yet he becomes a great innovator in terms of dry land farming. He designed and developed that noble blade that can be used in the dry land. And he was really prompted with this in the Dirty 30s in Southern Alberta to learn how to do minimum till, zero till stuff that would protect your land. And he's a promoter of soil conservation before it becomes popular. At the Reynolds Alberta

Museum, the history of that hesitation and breakthrough is preserved in steel. Here the team brings us down to the field to look at the noble blade itself. We also get a glimpse of Another Alberta invention, the Spike Tooth Rotary Harrow created by Alex Elmer Carlson of Wetasquin, nicknamed the Crazy Harrow for its oscillating ring design. The genuine Alberta piece, this one.

I mean, not a very big tractor. You could pull this one easy. But it's not the kind of machine you could hitch a horse or a team of horses to? No. It'd be a long day doing a quarter section with that. So this tractor is just on the edge of too small. The ordinary Harrow's, if you go fast with them, they'll get plugged up with straw. Oh, okay. And this one here just distributes the straw. Oh, okay. So that

Was a problem. She solved it. Yep.

They're hooking up the Noble Blade now, I think he said. He manufactured for quite a number of years that blade, and it was a real part of that community in Nobleford. That innovation and that drive is picked up by so many in the years following. They Wanted to work the soil less. The more you work the soil, the harder it is on the soil, the more soil you can lose to wind and all that kind of stuff going on. And today, there's very few farms that don't do what we call zero or minimum till farming because of the way it conserves the soil and protects the soil. Machines all the way up to present day, they're developing that concept. So generally Most people would have to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he made thousands of them. Yeah, he does. Cockshutt tiller combine developed in the 30s and 40s for that similar idea that minimum disturbance of the soil once and done. Cultivate it and you plant it and be done all in one pass. So

You're not disking and harrowing and everything else. You just take the seed blocks off and use it as a disc block. Oh, that's an Ingenious piece. As the labor moved away, they had to develop the technology to go along with that. The new Holland TR-70 that came out had two twin rotas. Before that technology, combines were essentially a threshing machine that could cut.

You can do some threshing if you want. Yeah, yeah. I'll get a couple of guys to pitch. Very labor intensive. You need at least one on the engine, maybe two. You need one hauling wood. Traditionally, they would have had two wagons with two teams hauling water. Thrasherman stands on top and you would have two or three guys pitching bundles and one guy shoveling grain. You would have two or three families together. They would bring out fields to the field for all the guys on the seam edges and the crew. The wives of the different thrashing crew, they would try to outdo each other with the pies and the supper. And they were known for who had the best food and who didn't. Well, I can't think of anything you want less to have a spark in as a thrashing engine. That's one of the reasons why the belt is as long as it is. So if the straw file or the machine caught on fire, then they could come ahead, pull the belt off and back it out of the way. At the front of the machine, you've got those knives. Those are called band cutters. They'll cut the line and when it goes down into the concave and the thrashing cylinder, it just gets thrown out with the straw. You're going to have as much or maybe even a little bit more wastage, but this is a 28 inch machine. So that Sawyer Massey steam engine is paired up nicely with the right size for it. You can run it at the right speed. Here's a firebox. We're burning wood. So we're burning wood to boil the water to make the steam and it's being redirected into the cylinder. And it's timed perfectly so that when the piston is about here and going this way, it lets a little bit of steam into the cylinder to push the piston out. It goes about that point there and then cuts the steam off. The steam expands to push the piston the rest of the way. The valve booms and it lets steam come in this end to push the piston back. So you're getting steam pushing the piston to create motion, to turn the flywheel. There's a big long endless belt that goes back to the thrashing machine that's running that.

In the dry belt around Medicine Hat and Hanna, crop failure followed crop failure. Desperate communities turned to water diviners and rainmakers, instruments of hope that failed to deliver. The result was a mass exodus of farmers greater than that seen in Saskatchewan during the Depression. When faced with failure, Albertans did not always invent something entirely new. Often they innovated by adapting what they had.

I think of one of the earliest restorations we did here, and that's the 1918 Rumely oil pole. And that tractor was built in actually La Porte, Indiana, brought to Alberta. Alberta's climate conditions are different than Indiana, so it raises questions for the owner-operator. How do I keep it safe? The oil cooling system was a great idea, it wouldn't freeze. But this particular tractor had doors put on the front of the exhaust stack, and the exhaust stack was designed in a way that it drew the air through the radiator to create the draft that cooled the engine. You think about it, if you're doing that in late fall, early winter, and it's getting to be minus 10, minus 20, you're reducing the temperature of your engine, that it won't burn the kerosene as efficiently. And that's the whole idea with a kerosene engine, is to keep it warm. So they put these doors on it they could open up, which would reduce the drafts through the radiator, which would keep their temperatures warmer. And that's the farmers and the owners of that tractor realizing we can make it better for our conditions by a simple modification.

When we think of resource technology, we tend to focus on the tractor and the combine. We often forget that transportation itself was a field of intense experimentation. In the early 20th century, the internal combustion engine was not the inevitable winner. Steam and electric vehicles were serious competitors, even though some of these ideas are still waiting for mass production. Even today, we

Don't have one of those technologies, and that's the steam-powered automobile. But the electric cars come back. A lot of people don't realize that some of the earliest form of automobile energy was an electric car. The challenges were the electrical systems within the province were only limited to the cities mostly, so you couldn't have it out on the farm, didn't need it on the farm, because that wasn't the kind of power you wanted. The steam cars didn't have a lot of favor with a lot of people because they were time-consuming. It took 40 minutes to get your car to go. They found their most favor in railroad towns, and that was because the people that lived and worked there were familiar with steam power, so it wasn't a foreign thing to them. The

Electric car eventually faded from the prairie landscape, not because the idea was flawed, but because the battery technology could not bridge the vast distances between Alberta communities. However, electricity found a different foothold that fundamentally changed rural society, the electric starter. So suddenly,

Parts of the society, and at that time it was the women, they could drive a car into town, or they could go to visit the neighbours, or Junior could take a car and go visit the next town and meet a fine young lady, because you're not trapped to your own tiny space. With a horse and wagons, you're looking at 8-10 miles a day, you know, as far as you could go. Alberta

Was not just an agricultural province. It was a powerhouse of steam. By 1910, Alberta was driving the interprovincial standards for boiler construction.

There was a lot of innovation, mainly because in the beginning, a lot of the smaller engines, a lot of the boilers coming in were so small, they were for belt work, they were for grinding grain, maybe a song. But when CPR started opening up the west, the farms got bigger, well, you needed something bigger to break the land with. So Alberta boilers said at that time, you have to have thicker side sheets, you have to have thicker boilers, you have to have rivets made of specified material. And that was a lot of the reason why even today, boilers that were built for Alberta, called Alberta Specials, they're in demand. People are still looking for them. We have some in the collection now that are as good as the day they were built 112 years ago. Before Alberta was Alberta, before we're still in the territories, they passed a Boiler Ordinance Act, which basically gave them the authority to issue licenses, certificates and inspections of boilers. And all the provinces got together and they came up with new inspection regime for the construction and inspection of mainly steam track, what they were looking at at that time. And Alberta was the leader even today. The regulations that they set out are still being followed in North America, really. That leadership

In containing high pressure steam did not just make farms safer. It created a regulatory culture that would become crucial when the province turns its attention to a much more volatile resource. For companies

Manufacturing in the U.S., they had to meet those regulations. If they didn't meet those regulations, they couldn't sell it here. And that just changed the way companies did business. Some of them made their engineering departments, send your drawings to Alberta first to get approval from them. Because if we pass them, we pass everywhere. And that was that powerful. And today, Alberta has more pressure vessels than any other jurisdiction in the world. Our oil industry, we have the processes that are used in the oil sands. There's quite a number of different pressure vessels. There's technologies that were developed very early that are still being used today in the design and construction of pressure vessels that are mind-boggling. That concept, because some engineer figured it out in 1905, was a concept that today is still maybe one of the safest ways to build pressure vessels. The most

Defining resource in Alberta's modern history is undoubtedly oil. The first discovery of oil in Turner Valley in 1914 became a catalyst, leading to the discovery of 17 fields before the Leduc boom in 1947. It was a local researcher, Carl Clark at the University of Alberta, who perfected the hot water extraction method, while federal researchers failed in their endeavors. The expertise Alberta gained in steam boilers transferred directly to the high pressure vessels needed for bitumen extraction. It's so prominent and

Prevalent there that it's taken over. Maybe before it was just a means to get power and then once the differential was invented we can put this on wheels. Now that we are on wheels we can go to a field. Once we're in a field we can put the power to the ground. And then that just kind of keeps walking its way forward and I think Alberta's done a really good job of that even from the get-go of just saying there's new ways to look at something and new ways to approach a problem. While

Agriculture and oil drove the macro economy, coal was the lifeblood of regions like Drumheller and the Crow's Nest Pass. It fueled the railways and

Heated the homes that made settlement possible. We travel now to the Bellevue Underground Mine to understand something that could provide safety and danger for the miners: water. You got water running, if it stops running, you're in trouble. The water's running, everything's cool. But if the water quits, there's problems. Because if you think where the water goes, it goes underground and that's where you are. So in the case of the Bellevue Mine, we went in today on level number six, but seven, eight, and nine are underneath us and those are all filled naturally with water. So you can't go down there anymore because there's no availability. But the water in the tunnels is actually preserving the coal or holding it in place. So it's very useful. What you see coming out of the mine comes out about 240 gallons a minute. And if the water stops, you know you've got a big problem in the mine. So something has plugged it up back there and it's going to be accumulating and when it lets go, there could be a

Lot of devastation. Water in the mine is one part of a larger safety story because underground, every system is connected. Miners like Terry Barlow may not have called themselves innovators, but their survival depended on a highly developed intuition, a sensory technology of hearing and feeling the rock. Noises, you know, you just, you'd

Mine the coal out and check the ground and whatever the ground tells you. Like when the roof bolts, if it's going to cave, that roof bolt will start singing. Because as it's tightening, it's crunching the metal. And like we called it singing, because you, and then they start popping. Once they start popping, you know, you better not be in there yet. But you get lots of warning, like in any place I worked with, tons of warning. And

So we go back down with that in mind, listening for what the

Mine tells you and how miners learn to read the signs. Determine if there's any methane gas. So they would put the flame down very low on their safety lamp, hold the lamp up really high. And if ever there was a blue cap on the top of the flame, that meant there was methane gas. So if I was a fire boss, I would come in in the morning and if I could, because I can get it in, right? Yeah. So if I come in tomorrow and I can't get it in, that means there's a whole bunch of pressure coming down. So that's how they check their sets all the time. Always had to be able to put a pencil on it, otherwise everything's coming down. Often they would put a big piece of wood on top of every timber, because if ever there's a change in the rock pressure up above or underneath, it's going to crack that flat piece even before it cracks the timber. So it's another early warning sign. You would get very dirty as you were mining, and so what they were eating for their lunch or their supper would also get pretty dirty. So the dirty parts of their sandwich, they would maybe put it into a special area by their room or maybe save it in their lunchbox. And that's how they fed the pack rats and the mice to keep them in the mine, because that was going to be their early warning sign. They valued them and appreciated what they could tell them. But as mines grew deeper and more complex, intuition had to be supplemented by engineered safety. Every man had to take a little box In with them, and that was going to be their safety. If they ever lost their air, they would be able to use that for maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and that would give them enough air to be able to get back to a fresh air source. They must have learned that the hard way. First you put it in your mouth, your lips get really hot and start to burn, and then your lungs get really hot. So you want to take it out, but if you do, you won't live. And so some of the folks have said that they've seen pictures where the miners actually strapped it to their head so that they couldn't take it out because it was so uncomfortable. And that's why they made the tunnel so close, so that if you did lose your air in one area, you had to go back to the next area to get another fresh air

Source. And that's one of the safety things that, you know, when the Union comes in, like the mines I worked in, you had called the refuge rooms, they were called. So you would have cement walls on both sides, and like the airlock system where you'd have a wall, not space in a wall, and then you'd have a room, and then you'd have two cement walls on the other side, and you'd have breathing apparatuses in there, water, food. The history

Of Alberta mining is scarred by disaster. The failure of safety systems often had catastrophic results, forcing the industry to confront the cost of its operations. One of the things that I think of most often is the Hillcrest mine disaster, and the Murray family. And Mr. Murray was there with four of his adult sons. At the time of the explosion, none of his sons were able to come out of the mine. He was, he came out, but when he saw that none of his sons had survived, he ran back in two. That left Mrs. Murray Senior to look after all the wives and all the children. They didn't always have undertakers. It was the miners themselves that would clean the bodies and make them ready for their families. And I can't imagine how hard that would have been on every person in there. They would tell a story about a little girl that was only nine years old that was looking for her dad to come out of the mine. And every time one of the carts would come out with a body in it, she would run up to see if maybe that was going to be her

Dad. But I don't think she saw him. But the unions did step up after that and came in and looked after the bodies and got them ready for burial for their families. And made them presentable for their families as much as possible. The Hillcrest

Disaster stands as a terrible example of disruption forcing change. It was not government policy, but the sheer

Scale of loss that empowered the unions. And Alberta unions were not just bargaining units for wages. They were early innovators in the fight for basic human safety and the right to return home at the end of a shift. A lot of times when the men needed to bring out more coal, maybe today I could take a little bit more. And I think often it was the union that would come in and support them and say, "Don't risk your life on it. It's not worth that." And I think that's how the union would help them as well, to make sure that they didn't have to risk their life to get a little bit more money. In the beginning, I don't think a lot of people wanted the union. They didn't want an overarching body that was going to tell them what to do. And at first glance, they might have thought, "I don't see how that will be helpful." But I think in the end, it really was. The union would fight for the men to be sure that everything was equal. And in some of the reading that I've done, I realized that when the carts would go out to the tipple, and the tipple is where they would tip out the coal, they would have a company man and a union man standing side by side, making sure that each wrote down the right number. And the union would come in and do that for you, so that you might be in the mine working hard, but they were going to keep an eye on things for

You and make sure it was fair. Drumheller became one site of key labor unrest during the First World War era. And the Krosnitz Pass became known as the Red Belt, with public displays like the 1930 May Day Parade, showing the scale of labor power in these communities. As a result, in 1933, after a brutal eight-month strike, Blairmore elected Canada's first Communist Town Council, naming a street after Tim Buck, the imprisoned leader of the Communist Party at the time. Remarkably, the provincial government mostly left them alone, as the town brought in new political structures to survive the harshness of industrial capitalism. The Communist Party was looking to make sure that it was equal for all, and a lot of people did change their views from that. Maybe they didn't start off believing that the Communist Party had anything for them, but they really did mean great things for the miners. That solidarity was practical, as well as political. Underground, it dictated how men

Were paid and how they tracked one another in the dark. So every miner had his own number, and they had a tag. So at the beginning of the day, you're going to give your tag to the lamp man, he's going to give you your lamp, and you're going to head underground. And at the end of the day, reverse that process, because if there's any tag still on the board, somebody didn't come back out of the mine. They would also put one way down deep in their pocket,

Because heaven forbid, if anything happened to them in work, that might be how their mother knows who they are. This is different than the miners' tag. Like, Terry would have had his very own number. This would be his contract number. So if you were down here loading up the coal cars, you would put Terry's contract number on every car that his coal fills up. Do you think they ever took your

Tag off and put their tag on? Yes. Exactly. But what they did then is they would take Chuck and write this number on the bottom of the coal car. There would be two guys working in the threes. So they put their tag there and then somewhere in this cart, they put another tag. But in the early days, this is the only light they would have had in the mine. So how do you even know what you're working on? Is it coal or is it rock? What is it? And you want to have both hands free. So you know where they would carry this? In their mouth. And remember how you gave the tag to the lamp man? If ever you accidentally had your light go out, you have no way to relight it. The only way to light this is back at the lamp house because it's magnetically sealed. So unless you've... That's how dark it will

Be. The mining towns of the past brought together workers from Italy, Britain, Eastern Europe and beyond. Survival required relying on the man next to you, regardless of his language or origin. In 1975,

I think, we brought a bunch of English miners to the mines. Yeah. For the first couple of months it was a little tense. Yes. You know, and the way they worked was way different to the way we worked. They learned stuff and we learned stuff. And in the end, we worked together. The miners felt that using the pit and the explosives would give them more coal. But the mines said, "This will be more efficient." But I wanted you to see how

Heavy this is. Well, yeah, these are. Isn't that something? Yeah. This is going to pulverize the coal finer than tobacco cement. So you can't hold it close to your body. You've got to hold it at the

End of your arms. I've worked with people in the mine that could pick up two airbags that weighed around 50 pounds, but they could have one in each arm and just give her.

Hardship in the mining towns was not limited to these men underground. The women of the past faced the isolation and hardship of the camps with equal resolve. The women would try and figure out what it is that was needed to live in that community, in churches and things like that. It was a really hard life and a lot of isolation, especially if you didn't have family there. In the early days, women were never allowed underground. We were considered very bad luck, just like they were on the ship. So a lot of women weren't invited into the mine. But sometimes when the men would go on strike, if they really were needed in the mine to make money, the women would take their place and go on strike for them. And I think that's very admirable. It must have been a very scary situation because during a strike everyone was quite angry. And I think that would be very hard on the

Women. We have looked at the struggles of coal and the trials of agriculture. In both Sectors, we see a common thread. Hardship breeds innovation. Failure is rarely the end of the story. Instead, it is often the necessary precursor to a breakthrough. The museum

Here, it's basically based off of failure. There's so many artifacts that you don't see now because they didn't work. But people tried, right? So the museum is just full of just examples of people that tried to innovate and they weren't able to just quite get over that hump. Innovation requires a lot of things and one of those things is timing. And that's something that Alberta got quite lucky with, really. It was the perfect time and the perfect storm of technology coming up to a point where they were figuring some things out. And because Alberta was so different from some of the areas even within Canada, they had to figure out what it was and what worked for Alberta. One such experiment

Is the walking tractor. It is easy to dismiss it as a curiosity, but it represents a serious mechanical response to the province's most stubborn constraint: geography. The

Walking tractor was something that was designed not necessarily for agriculture, but it was trying to look at a soft soil, a Muskegee soil, and tried to solve that issue. And it may not have worked at the time, but as they developed that technology and technology, figured it out, it now became something that's working on a large scale. You can see it on a lot of modern machinery.

Edward Snell designed it. He was more into the logging industry, so he wanted to create a tractor that could haul logs out of the forest. He came up with this concept of a walking tractor, because the idea, a big long pad can walk on top of the soft ground better than a wheel. The concept was there, and he failed miserably, but people invested in his company, bought shares and stocks in his company. He was going someplace. When you only build one, that's not success. But today, some of the largest machinery in the world uses a walking system based on hydraulics to move the machines around over wheels or tracks. We often

Judge technology only by its immediate success, but value can be recovered decades later. Whether it's a steam boiler repurposed for a sawmill, or a traction concept that returns in modern forestry, Alberta's history is filled with ideas that were discarded, only to be picked up again when the timing was right. Some

Farmers would sell it back, sell it to somebody else that thought that technology was better than the one that's up and coming. Some of them just let it sit there. Here at the museum, we had a benefactor that looked at that and saw the value in the innovation and the technology, and he wanted to collect it, and he preserved a lot of it. We have in our collection a boiler that during World War II was part of the scrap drive for iron. It disappears from the record, and part of Alberta's standards is they have A numbers that they can trace. It disappears, but then it reappears in a sawmill after World War II. Somebody saw the value in it and said, "Hey, I can use this for this purpose." And the technology, though it may have been outdated, was still useful to somebody. And part of what makes a lot of innovators moving forward is seeing the new ways in which the technology can be used, even if it wasn't intended for that. Innovation is something that's never going to stop, and I think that's the beautiful thing about the Reynolds. We have such a unique collection and mandate that we get to look at things through a lens of what it's going to become. We

Study history to understand where we have been, but also to see the trajectory of where we are going. As we look at these machines and mines, we see that innovation is not a destination. It is a continuous process of solving the problem in front of you. In this episode, we've treated resource development as a set of connected stories, not a single industry and not a single turning point. At the Reynolds-Liberto Museum, Randy Quill, Joven Quill and Brian Manning showed how agricultural work drove technological change. Machinery scaled up for large farms, adapted to the prairie conditions and modified again and again as needs and realities shifted. At the Bellevue underground mine, Diane Peterson and Terry Barlow showed what innovation looked like in a coal mine. The equipment and procedures and hard learned practices built around ventilation, roof support, gas, dust and the constant effort to reduce risk underground. Taken together, these stories show resource development as practical work over time as adaptation, maintenance and problem solving in places where failure had real consequences for livelihoods and safety. In our final episode, we turn to medicine and information technology, two areas where innovation has become visible in everyday life and where Alberta's institutions, its funding choices and research ambitions shape outcomes far beyond the resource industries themselves.