Streetsville School c1900
Toronto. The second book in Douglas Adams‘ five volume “trilogy” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – is titled “The Restaurant at the end of the Universe“. It clarifies the difference between physical distance and temporal distance.
Similarly, while we in west Toronto are physically just next door to the photographs, time-wise we are over a century away from them. Their graininess is due entirely to the halftone process of the day that ‘transformed’ black (ink) and white (no ink) into shades of grey so photographs could be reproduced. I have books from the 1950s and earlier whose photos have a similar lack of resolution thanks to the halftone process once used.
The photographs for this post are on the Insauga [In Mississauga] web site. Take a look (caution: you will be bombarded with ads and solicitations). Once again we owe a debt to good friend and fellow photo-historian, George Dunbar, for finding and sharing this site with us. Along with the above link, George writes, “An extensive site here with hundreds of historic images of Mississauga and surrounding towns and villages”.
