Canadian video biography

It all began with bird seed. James Nicholson, an English immigrant who arrived in Canada in 1891 and made his fortune as a bird seed manufacturer, wanted to give something back to his adopted country.

His passion was reading, and he became fascinated by Canadian history ­– so much so that in his youth he would sometimes go without food to buy books.

Canadian video biography

In the course of his reading, he was struck by the fact that Canada lacked something that the United Kingdom possessed – a dictionary of national biography. He set out to give Canada a dictionary of its own and in 1952 bequeathed $3 million to the University of Toronto for the project, the equivalent of more than $30 million today.

Nicholson was nothing if not ambitious: the Canadian dictionary, he wrote, should aim “to equal or even surpass” its counterparts elsewhere in the world. And unlike other dictionaries of national biography, it should include not only individuals well known in their field