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Dates of creation area
Date(s)
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1908 - 1967 (Creation)
- Creator
- Matthews, Robertson, 1880 - 1972
Physical description area
Physical description
41 cm of textual records
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Biographical history
Robertson Matthews was born in 1880 in Yorkville, son of Reverend Matthew Henry Matthews and his second wife Naomi Dodds. Mechanically inclined as a young man, Matthews trained at the Williams Machinery Plant, where he developed a lifelong interest in engines and mechanical inventions. Matthews travelled extensively in his youth in British Columbia, Australia, and England. After attending Allegeny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania (1902-1903), he continued on to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to complete his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering. In 1908, Matthews joined the Faculty of Engineering at Cornell, later becoming a full Professor. In 1913, he married Ethel Dodds. He left Cornell in 1917 to join the U.S. Government at Wilmington, Delaware, until 1921 when he became an advisor on the internal combustion engine at Langley Field, Virginia. In 1924, Matthews joined the Edison Company in Detroit to work on developments in electric heating. Matthews returned to Bolton in 1931 to care for his mother and to convalesce following a serious automobile accident. During the next forty years, Matthews experimented with hydroponics, kept daily diaries, and wrote regularly to local and American newspapers and contributed essays on technical aspects to periodicals. He published a work of short fiction entitled "His Lost Chord: glimpses of man's deepest emotion in restraint" in 1959. After Ethel's death in 1958, Matthews lived alone until 1967 when he moved into Peel Manor Home for the Aged, where he died on March 3, 1972 at the age of 92.
Custodial history
Scope and content
Series consists of daily diaries kept by Robertson Matthews. Note that the diary for 1945 is included in the volume marked 1925. Diaries from 1911, 1912, and 1913 were typed by Robertson Matthews.
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Associated materials
The Archives of Ontario holds three of Robertson Matthews' original diaries (1912, 1913, and 1958) in MU 1365, Series F 9-2, the George S. Henry family fonds, Margaret Dodds Snell Henry files.