On April 24, 1925, all of the residents of the city of Alma gathered on the shores of the Saguenay. On Île Maligne, in the middle of the river, engineers and labourers had built an immense dam and hydroelectric station.

Today, every Québec household has at least one colour television. Often more. We can thank Joseph-Alphonse Ouimet for that.

The Second World War mobilized Québec engineers to produce the materials needed by the Canada’s allies until 1945.

They needed airplanes, ships and weapons, which in turn needed aluminum, steel and a lot of electricity.

On June 26, 1959, Queen Elisabeth, U.S. President Eisenhower and the Prime Minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker, inaugurated the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

Because of its rapids, the river was difficult to navigate between Montreal and the Great Lakes. 3,700 km long, the new seaway allowed ships from the Atlantic to penetrate the heart of our continent.

Every day, 120,000 vehicles use the Louis-Hippolyte–La Fontaine bridge-tunnel, which is occasionally closed for repairs or servicing. Opened on March 11, 1967, the bridge-tunnel is now 42 years old and the repair and servicing work is necessary if it is going to continue to hold the record for… the longest underwater tunnel in Canada!

On October 27, 1979, a rumble rose above James Bay. René Lévesque, then Premier of Québec, had just activated the first of the 22 turbines of the LG-2 hydroelectric station. Former Premier, Robert Bourassa, who was behind the creation of this station, was also present.

Surfing the Internet, sharing MP3s, sending text messages, watching videos, getting directions from a GPS are all things that we could not live without and now seem like they have always existed. Think again!

The wartime efforts of engineers allowed the greater region of Montreal to develop an aircraft industry that is now one of the best in the world.

In 1991, more than half of the 700 engineers at Bombardier would conceive the Global Express. This airplane for business professionals could fly nonstop at a speed of Mach 0.8 from New York to Tokyo or from Chicago to Dubai.

On April 19, 2001, at 6:40 p.m., Chris Hadfield took off from Cape Canaveral. Aboard the shuttle Endeavor, he headed toward the International Space Station with six other astronauts and five tons of material. His mission? Install Canadarm2, the new arm manufactured by the Canadian Space Agency.

Secondary 3 students at the Saint-Jean-Eudes day school in Quebec City, Jade Chénard-Roy and Myriam Laforest-Routhier, won this year’s first prize at a science exhibition for “The Bionic Man Comes to Life!” Their project concerned prosthetics that are solely thought-activated and may soon become a reality.