A childless bachelor lawyer with a taste for practical jokes wrote one last prank into his will: a fortune for the Toronto woman who could produce the most babies in ten years. Then the Depression arrived, and what began as a joke became a desperate, decade-long race.
Toronto is YYZ, Vancouver is YVR, Ottawa is YOW – almost every Canadian airport code begins with Y. The reason is older than the airplane itself, buried in the two-letter Morse codes of a vanished railway telegraph network.
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end of Halifax simply ceased to exist — nearly 2,000 dead in the largest man-made explosion the world had yet known.
