Cool Canadian Inventions
In our July issue, Camilla Cornell tells us about 6 favourite Canadian inventions, ranging from the quirky to the crucial. Here are 5 more made-in-Canada products:

COLD fX
Meant to spur the immune system to ward off the common cold, COLD fX is the brainchild of Jacqueline Shan, an immigrant to Canada from China. Shan combined her background in traditional Chinese medicine with Western scientific methods to produce a world-beater. “It’s a unique group of natural compounds extracted from North American ginseng that helps prevent and treat colds and flu,” she says. “For years chicken soup was the cold fighter of choice. But that is changing.” Today COLD fX is a top choice of Canadians. It doesn’t hurt that hockey announcer Don Cherry counts himself a huge fan and has become the company’s spokesperson. Now, with Mark Messier as its U.S. voice, COLD fX is taking aim at sniffles south of the border.

The Step-Climbing Wheelchair
In search of inspiration for a high school physics project, Colby Mainil and Michael Ehman took note of the difficulties a wheelchair-bound person faced while navigating the streets of their hometown, Weyburn, Sask. “There was a lack of ramps for curbs,” says Ehman. “You would have to go to the end of the street, up a ramp, and then come back to a store that was potentially six feet away from [where you’d started].” With the help of Mainil’s aunt, a nursing home owner, who gave them “junker wheelchairs to play with,” they designed a simple, affordable manual chair attachment that would allow wheelchairs to climb a curb or a step in just 30 seconds. The result: The boys received a Manning Young Canadian Innovation Award last year, presented by none other than Rick Hansen. What’s next? With their first-year university finals over, they’ll be looking for a way to get the product manufactured. Says Ehman: “We want to explore our options and get a feel for the possible market.”

The Smart Spud
Charlottetown, P.E.I., inventor Wayd McNally, 36, came up with this innovative wireless device designed to monitor the processing and packaging of consumer goods. The Smart Spud journeys with a potato crop, alerting the farmer if and when his spuds are being bruised or bumped at some point on the way to market.

The Visiball Golf Ball Finder™
When Linda Penhale, 61, and Marilyn Costello, 65, won “Best New Product” at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla., in 2005, it was like receiving “the golf equivalent of an Oscar,” says Penhale. The two Toronto women gambled their retirement savings to buy the Canadian rights to the Golf Ball Finder—basically a pair of high-tech sunglasses that uses filters to block out all colours except white. When Penhale and Costello first tried the product, developed by a nuclear scientist and an engineer from New Brunswick—they found nine golf balls in the space of two minutes. “I was sold immediately,” says Penhale. She’s not the only one. At $39.95 to $59.95 the glasses have been flying off store shelves—so much so that Visiball recently released two new models, the V800 (which fits over prescription glasses) and the V200 (a deluxe version with oversized lenses and a cushy nose pad to prevent slippage).

The Caulk-Rite Tool
In the middle of renovating their first home, Andrew Dewberry and Jayne Seagrave, of Vancouver, were stymied by the fact that there was no effective caulking tool. “You had to use your finger to apply it,” says Seagrave. In response, architect Dewberry designed the Caulk-Rite Tool to create the perfect bead of caulking. Once you’ve squeezed out the latex, the 11.5-centimetre implement, which has a rubber blade at one end, smoothes it, compresses it into the joint and collects the excess. Unable to find financial backers for the product, Dewberry and Seagrave paid for the first batch of tools out of their own pocket and assembled them themselves. “I came home one day and there were boxes containing 3,000 plastic handles, 3,000 rubber blades, 5,000 backing cards and 5,000 plastic covers on my living room floor,” says Seagrave. “We can put them together after dinner,” Dewberry told her casually. As it turns out, the gamble paid off. In the last ten years, the couple has expanded into ten different countries and sold more than 15 million Caulk-Rite and other companion tools.