While transcribing Frank Fairchild Wesbrook’s diary entrance for 12 Oct 1916 onto Twitter (@Pres_FFWesbrook), UBC Archives staff were reminded of an critical anniversary:
۸:۱۵ Vancouver Institute *
Hill Tout in chair.
Lecture Archibald – “Atom”
Fine.
With this rather succinct note, starred and underlined in red pencil, UBC’s initial boss remarkable a initial harangue presented by a Vancouver Institute.
The Institute had been strictly determined on 25 Feb of that year. Its initial aim was to coordinate and move underneath one classification a several open harangue array that until afterwards had delivered exclusively by opposite groups, mostly on opposing schedules. Many of these, including a Art, Historical and Scientific Association, a Academy of Science, a Architectural Institute of British Columbia, a Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, and a Women’s University Club, quick dependent themselves with a Institute. They represented a far-reaching operation of interests within a egghead and veteran village of Vancouver and British Columbia.
The Institute also boasted estimable links to a University. Wesbrook had been instrumental in a initial organization, and was portion as a initial President. Several UBC expertise members had also been concerned with a Institute from a unequivocally beginnings, and some-more than half of a lectures during a initial year were scheduled to be delivered by UBC staff. Finally, lectures were being presented in a newly-completed Assembly Hall during UBC’s Fairview campus during a dilemma of Tenth Avenue and Willow Streets – after a University changed to a Point Grey campus, a Institute would follow it there. For that reason a Vancouver Institute would come to be seen as a relationship between “town and gown” – a couple between a University and a wider community.
In Wesbrook’s diary entry, “Hill Tout” refered to Charles Hill-Tout, remarkable teacher and pledge anthropologist, who was a Honorary President of a Institute. That initial lecture, sponsored by a Academy of Science, was presented by E.H. Archibald, Assistant Professor in a UBC Department of Chemistry – a initial in a prolonged line of Institute speakers drawn from a University. The pretension of his harangue was “The Atom of a Chemist”.
No full twin of Archibald’s speak survives, though Vancouver journal clippings recorded in a Archives’ scrapbook collection during slightest yield something some-more than Wesbrook’s understated “Fine”. The subsequent day a Daily News-Advertiser epitomised a common opinion of Charles Hill-Tout and a audience, “that such a systematic harangue as Prof. Archibald had given lengthened immensely a margin of believe and quickened a imagination…”.
By comparing and resisting a complicated views of a star formed on systematic facts, with a aged theories of truth it was shown how delayed was a growth of believe in a past and how quick it would be when we had a pivotal to nature’s mysteries granted by a believe of healthy laws.
A follow-up News-Advertiser essay went into some-more fact about Archibald’s contention of how a newly-discovered judgment of radioactivity authorised scientists to establish a loyal age of a earth. Apparently geologists of a day were “troubled” by estimates that a universe was “only” one hundred million years old. Archibald “gave declaration to a uneasy geologists” that a earth’s age was most larger than formerly supposed, permitting copiousness of time for a arrangement of sedimentary deposits and other geological changes in a past.
At a finish of his lecture, a audience, that filled one of a categorical harangue bedrooms in UBC’s Chemistry building, peppered Archibald with some-more questions:
… either radium caused a feverishness of a sun, and if so how prolonged it competence be approaching to keep hot; either a doctrine of Christian Science, that there was no such thing as matter, was sound; either a mill building was unequivocally plain or stoical of particles relocating so quick that they seemed to be solid, like a spokes of a relocating wheel; either radium marinated cancer; how a universe and a planets got started in a initial place. These and some-more hackneyed questions poured in as quick as they could be answered or avoided, and constructed a rarely interesting half-hour.
It is apparent from such accounts that a Vancouver Institute had found an audience. The rest of a 1916/17 tenure would underline lectures on such diverse topics as Renaissance architecture, English literature, germ (presented by President Wesbrook, a remarkable bacteriologist), “the high cost of living”, changed metals and banking, and a early allotment of British Columbia, among others. Citizens from all backgrounds – professionals and workers, academics and laypersons – would positively find something of seductiveness in a Institute’s programme. This would sojourn loyal for a subsequent one hundred years.
