cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of our other sponsors,
including Wisconsin Public Television,
the Division of Continuing Studies, and the
Wisconsin Alumni Association, thanks for coming to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I get to have the
distinct pleasure of getting to introduce two people
to you, Joe Kapler and Dave Driscoll.
They're both from the Wisconsin Historical Society.
They are going to be talking to us about their exhibit called
Wisconsin Innovations. Joe is the curator of domestic
life at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
He received a BA in history from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa,
a master's in American History from Marquette University, and a
master's in Museum Studies from Eastern Illinois University.
Joe began as an intern in Minnesota, in Missouri, and in
Iowa before spending three years at the Public Museum
of Grand Rapids in Michigan. He then joined the staff of the
Wisconsin Historical Society in 2001 as a curator for the
Division of Museums and Historic Sites.
He has curated five major exhibitions and numerous
smaller displays. His other major responsibilities
include developing museum collections, assisting
researchers and producing articles and online content.
Dave Driscoll is curator of business and technology at the
Historical Society. He holds a BA in American
Civilization from Brown University, I'm glad to hear
that we have one to study, and a master's in the history of
technology and museum studies from the University of Delaware
where he was a Hagley Fellow. He worked as a curator at the
Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and
at the Detroit Historical Museum before joining the Wisconsin
Historical Museum staff in 1992. His projects at the museum have
covered such diverse topics as mail order shipping, excuse me,
mail order shopping, I guess they both go together, organized
labor in Milwaukee, peaceful uses of the atom, farm implement
advertising posters, and baseball.
I think Dave will speak second, Joe will speak first.
Please join me in welcoming the two of them to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Joe Kapler: Thanks, Tom. Thank you.
Good evening. I am Joe Kapler.
On behalf of Dave and myself, I'd like to say thank you to the
Wisconsin Alumni Association for inviting us to Wednesday Nite at
the Lab. It's nice to get out of the
building sometimes. When you work in a museum, you
work where there's no windows and often in basements.
So even on a cold, crisp night it's good to get out and we're
pleased to be here. We're going to talk a little bit
tonight, for the whole show here, about the exhibit
Wisconsin Innovations: From the Iconic to the Unexpected.
We both worked on that project. It opened last September and
will be up at least through August of 2012.
I will introduce the subject, the project, our roles in it as
well, and then turn things over to Dave who was the primary
curator in the whole research and writing and presentation of
the exhibition. And we'll have time for some
question and answer following about an hour presentation or
so. So just a little bit of brief
introduction. Where we come from, I mentioned
we often work in basements. This building here on the left
is the Wisconsin Historical Society's headquarters building.
And you're probably more familiar with that building in
terms of our organization's identity of world class North
American history library and archives, But it also has things
like the museum collections that are not on exhibition, historic
preservation offices, administrative offices, Office
of School Services, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre
Research. So a lot goes on in that
building. I see a few familiar faces here
from, I believe, work with us and sometimes volunteer with us
at the Historical Society. And then down here on the right
is our museum building. That is where we do public
exhibitions and programs. And that is, of course, up on
Capitol Square. And then you see, essentially,
here on the left hand corner, our mission statement in a
nutshell: collecting, preserving, and sharing stories
since 1846. This is the museum's
neighborhood. A little building you may have
seen before. And, of course, the Capitol.
We're right on Capitol Square, and that's symbolically
appropriate as we charged with documenting and interpreting the
history of all peoples who have once claimed Wisconsin home or
still do or currently do or may in the future.
It's also practically a good neighbor to have because in
partnership with them we hosts tens of thousands of
fourth-grade Wisconsin students when they come to here to get
their dose of Wisconsin history. That's a very important core
constituency for our museum and its programs.
The Capitol and the Square, of course, draw hundreds of
thousands of diverse visitors every year.
And some of those people come through our door, and they may
be local Madisonians, Wisconsin residents, people in town for
the state basketball tournament, coming here to bring guests,
out of state guests to show them a little bit of Madison
or Wisconsin, international visitors.
So that's great and that's a wonderful opportunity, but also
it presents really kind of a challenge when we want to
connect with each and every visitor that comes in there, our
visitorship is very, very broad. This is our exhibition logo here
as a way to introduce. And you see Wisconsin
innovations from the iconic to the unexpected.
And that's the tag line, but that really also really helps
sum up the contents of the show. These are, essentially,
inventions and ideas that originated in one way or another
in Wisconsin. We'll look at how we researched
the content, chose what to include or not to include, and
how we wrangled this complex and unwieldy topic into a gallery
presentation. Not a book or something like
that, a gallery presentation. And then at the end, we'll offer
some tentative conclusions about the culture of innovation in
Wisconsin. Lastly, our exhibits or this
exhibit here, Wisconsin Innovations, is one of our what
we call major temporary exhibits.
It's up for at least a year, and that is a core platform from
which we do events and programs and special events or special
tours, even product merchandise in the museum store and also
including this event here tonight.
This is another way for us to share with maybe a different
audience, a different and higher level of interpretation that
we're finding would possibly not be successful to do in a gallery
exhibit. This is also what we call in the
museum field outreach. So this is what we consider a
real great supplemental thing that we do stemming from a major
exhibition on our fourth floor Radell Gallery.
So how are the exhibitions created?
So what you'll kind of get in this presentation is essentially
a behind the scenes look at the development process at the
museum for doing exhibitions. And in another nutshell, we tell
stories through the display and interpretation of artifacts and
images and other original content in a museum.
So you'll see the opportunities and challenges that that
presents in a subject like Wisconsin Innovations.
The origins of this project. Are you familiar with this
poster here? You see it for sale around.
This is a poster put together by our Office of School Services.
Wisconsin first, is what that says at the top.
And it's kind of a bullet point listing of some interesting
firsts in Wisconsin. So that is the inspiration for
this exhibition. We're going to talk tonight
about how we use this poster and supplemental research, how to
develop this exhibit, and then we're also going to, if we have
some time here, we're going to squeeze in as many of the
interesting stories and compelling stories about some of
these certain innovations. This poster here, though, is a
very good starting point, and it enumerates many things.
However, upon research, and that was mostly done by Dave
Driscoll, certainly a good starting point, an impressive
list, but perhaps not academically rigorous.
That is a job of a museum exhibition is to flesh out some
things at a higher level and at a greater level, and that's what
Dave spent a good year and a half in preparation for and
produced a very good show. So I'm going to turn over the
podium now to David who's going to work through much of the
content. I'll probably spell him in a
little bit. >> David Driscoll: Thanks, Joe.
We're going to be trading off a couple of times as we go
through. Joe worked more heavily on some
certain areas than others, and I'm going to let him speak to
those particular topics. This is a screen capture of this
same information from the Wisconsin Firsts poster.
And it's pretty straightforward and direct.
The JI Case Company of Racine produced the first gas-powered
tractor. It's a simple, clear, direct
statement. Well, here's the real story.
In 1892, or possibly 1894, we don't really know, an inventor
from California came to Racine to build a gasoline tractor for
the JI Case Company. This machine ran but not well
enough to be produced. Case decided to abandon the
project because they were doing an excellent business
building steam traction engines. They were the leading
manufacturer of traction engines in the country, and I guess they
didn't see a need to fool around with this kind of new idea.
Twenty years later, they were getting crushed in the
marketplace. Peak production of steam
traction engines happened in 1911, and five years later the
company had lost two-thirds of its business to smaller,
cheaper, lighter, more powerful gasoline tractors.
So in desperation, the company finally purchased another
tractor design, rushed it into production, and then for
marketing purposes claimed the pedigree of being the first one
to develop gasoline tractors. So what I concluded from this is
that simple statement is maybe literally true, but it certainly
isn't true in a really meaningful way.
And as frustrating as this kind of information was, and there
was a lot of it, these kind of questions and distinctions
raised by a lot of the poster innovations actually became
important in formulating our initial outline, and I'll get
back and go through that outline shortly.
Initial task was research, of course, finding out what was, in
fact, invented in Wisconsin. We cobbled together a list from
various sources, starting with the School Services poster, the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation website, various
articles, top 10 lists, things we knew somehow already,
conversations with friends and acquaintances, and we put them
together in sort of worksheets like this.
And we tried to track the inventor, the date, the place,
and what the invention, the significance was.
When these lists got too unwieldy, we broke them into
sublists grouped by topic, architectural, political,
scientific, so on. And in some ways this was
actually a pretty difficult project to do.
Museums use authentic artifacts to communicate historical
information. As Joe mentioned, we tell
stories using objects, images and words.
And what many of these invention stories had in common was that
they were not represented in our collections.
And this was a crucial issue. The first question we always
asked is, do we have the objects, and if not, can we get
them? Many of the objects were quite
scarce. And there's a number of
different reasons why the objects may not have been in our
collections. First and foremost is the museum
may never have cared about the topic previously.
It's interesting that in generations of museums, kind of
like in politics and other cultures, certain issues become
most meaningful at certain times and then sort of fade away.
So if you look at museum collections, you can discern
very distinct collecting eras. And this apparently was just not
a way that we addressed this kind of material previously.
Another standard explanation might be the usual neglect,
fire, theft, and so on. And a final reason, which I
think applies particularly to this topic, is that the
originators failed to consider that the work they were doing
might be of historical interest some day.
They were really engaged in solving a particular problem,
not self-consciously preserving how they solved that problem.
Joe mentioned also that we spent the better part of a year trying
to track down these objects. It can be a little scary to
commit to a project, put it on the schedule, start advertising
it, when you don't know if you're going to have the stuff
to fill the gallery. That's kind of the limb we went
out on for this project. But we kind of thought it was a
compelling enough topic and there was a large enough
selection of things that we could probably at least get a
gallery's worth. So I'll come back to that topic
a little bit later. In fact, the way it worked was
we kind of triangulated back and forth through a good story,
objects we could find, and relevance.
We were constantly asking ourselves what do we want?
What can we find? Is what we can find important or
interesting? Does it tell a good story?
So there was not a clean, efficient way to sort through
all that. We just kind of hashed through
as we went. And we'll talk a little bit more
about some of the collecting shortly.
And one of the things which maybe wasn't a plan initially
but turned out, I think, to be a good side effect of the project
was we borrowed a bunch of stuff which allowed us to establish
relationships with many historical societies and
institutions throughout the state.
And I'm hoping that we can build on those kinds of relationships,
and I'm not sure how this would work, but share some of our
resources to help those other institutions out as well.
And that's kind of an ongoing issue that we're working
on off and on. In the final exhibition, about
half of what's on display there we wound up borrowing from other
institutions. The criteria we used to make the
final selection was covered pretty much by the list here.
Overall, we wanted to have a diverse experience.
We wanted people for come in and, regardless of what their
background or interest was, find something interesting and
engaging in the gallery. And we sort of broke that down
in a couple of different ways. The first was we wanted to
include some familiar items. That's where the from the iconic
part of the subtitle is. We wanted to take advantage of
people's personal experiences, something they were new and
familiar with so they kind of felt at home and maybe learned
something new about it but also kind of felt comfortable with
the material. At the same time, we wanted to
throw in a certain number of unfamiliar sort of little known
stories. We, after all, are an
educational institution, and we want to convey new information
to people. I mentioned the diversity.
That applies to the physical objects as well.
We were hoping to find big things, small things, colorful
things, drab things, unassuming things, impressive things and
kind of have a mix in the galleries.
And I think we did a fairly decent job of that.
But you'll have to go to the museum to really know the answer
to that. We also wanted to include
some surprises and elicit the, "Wow, I didn't know that,"
experience in our visitors. And I hope we have accomplished
that. We wanted a wide geographical
representation. You might imagine that a lot of
the stories are weighted toward Madison or Milwaukee.
We made a conscious effort to include other stories from all
over the state. We managed to cover Racine,
Chippewa Falls, Bayfield County, and I think we did a pretty good
job in that respect. And finally, we hope to find
objects of significance. Innovations that have had an
important impact or an ongoing influence.
So that's kind of what we were keeping in the back of our mind.
So this is the first section of the original outline.
Stories like the Case gasoline engine
left one overall impression. One of them is that many of the
supposed firsts are firsts if you apply enough qualifications
and equivocations. The research didn't provide
as many answers as it did questions, at least initially.
And maybe the basic question that we had to tangle with was,
what makes something a Wisconsin invention?
I'll give you some different stories to sort of illustrate
that question. Most of you probably know who
this is. Stephen Babcock, who is the
inventor of possibly the quintessential Wisconsin
invention: the Babcock butterfat tester.
This was a cheap, reliable, quick method of measuring the
butterfat content of milk. It allowed the dairy industry to
detect watering and skimming. It allowed good farmers to be
paid appropriate to the quality of their milk and provide a firm
standard for the economic development of the dairy
industry. Babcock gave away the invention
free with the idea of sort of benefiting the whole industry
and community. What could be more Wisconsin?
But consider this: Babcock grew up in New York.
He studied at Tufts in Boston, Cornell, the Rochester
Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Gottingen
in Germany. He came to Wisconsin in 1887 and
was kind of pressured into working on the Babcock test
which got his name even though the basic concept had been
published by one of the colleagues at the UW
experimental station a couple years prior to this.
So, really, how Wisconsin is this?
You may notice I'm asking a lot of questions rather than
providing answers. You probably also recognize this
guy. Les Paul,
the Wizard of Waukesha. He was a pioneer in developing
the solid body electric guitar, and he was responsible for the
invention of multi track recording which has become the
standard professional technique of sound recording for the last
50 years. It's no exaggeration to say that
Les Paul has profoundly shaped the sound of popular music.
But although he began his early sonic experiments as a kid in
Waukesha, he did his most influential work in California,
in Los Angeles, and then in New Jersey when he lived in
sort of the New York City area. So, was the Wizard of Waukesha
really Wisconsin? Anybody know who the guy in the
center is? This is Tom Blake.
In the year 2000, Surfing Magazine named Milwaukee native
Tom Blake the second most influential person in the
history of 20th century surfing. He was an outstanding distance
swimmer who spent his first 17 years in Wisconsin and began
surfing in California in 1921, eventually developing a passion
for the sport which led him to embark on a tide of
experimentation that transformed the sport of surfing.
Among his other accomplishments, Blake invented the hollow core
surfboard, there's a patent for it, the waterproof camera
housing, the first surfboard with a fin on the bottom.
He designed rescue paddle boards credited with saving thousands
of lives and wrote the first full length book devoted to
surfing. He also pioneered what became
the surfing lifestyle. He was a vegetarian, a fitness
enthusiast who worked just enough as a lifeguard and
a movie stuntman to live simply amidst beautiful tropical
landscapes and travel to surf ever more remote and challenging
shores. Blake retired from regular
surfing at age 55, eventually returned to northern Wisconsin.
He died there in 1994 and was buried in Washburn, overlooking
Chequamegon Bay. So like Les Paul, he was born
and grew up in Wisconsin, did his influential work elsewhere.
If we claim Les Paul, why not Tom Blake?
It does seem rare that there's a person who was born, raised and
did ground-breaking work here in Wisconsin.
This is Seymour Cray, posing with the Cray-1 supercomputer
which he introduced in 1975. Cray was the supercomputer's
architect. And compared to personal
computers and other sort of applications, supercomputers are
essentially blazing fast machines that do massive
scientific calculations and nothing else.
The Cray-1 and its successors have been crucial in weather
forecasting and climate simulations, petroleum
exploration, aircraft design, nuclear and molecular modeling.
Cray was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, and he liked the
area so much that he finagled his employer at the time,
Controlled Data Corporation in Minneapolis, to build a research
lab for him in Chippewa Falls. And in 1972 when he left to form
his own company, Cray Research Corporation, he also established
it in Chippewa Falls. And actually the successor to
that company still as a research facility based up in Chippewa
Falls. So there's also another murky
question of who comes up with what part of a new invention and
who gets credit for it. And this led to kind of the
second grouping in the original outline.
What constitutes an invention? Is it priority?
Superior documentation? Commercial success?
Propaganda? Luck?
It could be any or all of these things.
And this section of the exhibit was designed to explore how many
successful innovations really were the first of their kind.
Take, for example, the Republican party, which everyone
knows was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854.
Of course, it all depends on what you mean by founded.
There are a number of other places that claim the honor of
the birth of the Republican party.
One is Exeter, New Hampshire, where on October 1853 they
proposed to establish a new party called the Republican
party. After the Wisconsin meeting,
Jackson, Michigan, hosted the first so-called convention of
the Republican party that had 10,000 attendees.
If you want to be more official, in 1856 the first Republican
National Committee was established in Pittsburgh to try
and organize a national party, and in 1856 in June in
Philadelphia, they held their first presidential nominating
convention. So depending on how you define
founding, any of those cities have a claim.
Ripon's claim is based on sort of formal party membership.
And in the words of Allen Bovay, who is one of the organizers
of the meeting in Ripon, "We went into the little meeting
held in the schoolhouse as Whigs, Free Soilers
and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans,
and we were the first Republicans in the Union."
That's what the historical marker says, too.
That's right. This unwieldy contraption
is an answering machine. [LAUGHTER]
The telephone answering machine was actually invented
by Valdemar Poulsen of Denmark who patented it in 1898.
And Poulsen's device was common in Europe by the 1920s
but rarely used in the United States, essentially
due to a legal quirk. The American telephone answering
machine was developed by Joseph Zimmerman of Milwaukee in 1949.
The reason this machine has precedence in the US is that
since about 1820, AT&T had owned almost all of the telephone
lines in the United States and refused to allow any, what they
called foreign equipment, ie. things they did not
manufacture, to be attached directly to its lines.
And this kind of technical or legal barrier kind of stymied
things until Zimmerman found a work-around for it.
His electronic secretary, which is pictured on the right, had no
electrical attachments to AT&T's circuits at all.
Instead, a mechanical arm physically lifted the receiver
from the cradle, and a 78-RPM phonograph played a recorded
greeting and the caller's message was recorded
on a wire recorded. This was the first successful
American version, which became obsolete as soon as the legal
barriers to foreign devices started crumbling in the 1950s.
Another very familiar story to many of you is probably the
typewriter. But did you know there were
already more than a hundred previous patents for typing
machines issued when Christopher Sholes of Milwaukee received his
in 1868? Did you also know it was another
20 years before the typewriter achieved any sort of commercial
success? So why do we remember this
particular one? I think there's two reasons.
The first is that it was the first machine that you could
actually type words faster than you could write them, which was
kind of a landmark. And maybe more memorable is the
fact that this features the QWERTY keyboard which he
developed as kind of a technical way to keep keys from jamming
because the most frequently used letters tended to be next to
each other. So he kind of split them all up
in a kind of arbitrary way, which has basically been
grandfathered into keyboards ever since.
At this point, I'll let Joe talk about the next couple of
sections, and we'll take it from there.
Kapler: Just do understand that that's not Christopher
Sholes' original typewriter. Again, the alpha artifact
pretty rarely ever exists. And so this is an early...
Remington. After he sold Remington the
rights. >> So essentially an early
production model of kind of what we now know, or in some cases
knew, of as the typewriter. I'll talk a little bit about our
section called local culture. And you see the question there
that research on this subject matter kind of brings to mind.
Geography in distinct regional cultures influence innovation.
I suppose that could be a book. So it's hard to definitively
answer but in a word, yes. Another iconic guy.
You've probably seen his photo around before.
You may have seen some of his work, too.
Of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, and architectural historians and
scholars, as an innovator of one of the first distinct American
architectural style, the Prairie School style.
Architectural historians would maybe claim, or certainly make
good case, that his growing up in the prairie, rolling prairie
hills around Spring Green, Wisconsin, would influence his
later work as an architect to create something that really
no one had seen much of really in this country or around the
world previous to that. How do you tell the story of
Frank Lloyd Wright in a museum gallery?
Wouldn't you really want to go to the buildings?
Go to Taliesin? Go to a wonderfully restored or
preserved Frank Lloyd Wright house?
Yes, that would probably be a great way to do it, but we tell
stories through artifacts and this is something that we have
in our collection, and turned out to be a really great
way here to tell the story and to get the idea.
So this is a cardboard house model.
The design here was done by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938 as
part of a Life magazine program where they picked four
significant American architects to design a home that could be
affordable for the average American family, and people
could send in to get plans and it was a participatory program
like that. Frank Lloyd Wright, you look at
that 1938 Life magazine, Frank Lloyd Wright's design is very
different than all the others, and of course, here's the
hallmarks of the Prairie School as you see in this model here.
So you could buy this model via mail order, cardboard, cut it
out, take it home, assemble it, and that's kind of a neat story
but it doesn't end there at all. Frank Lloyd Wright later turned
this design into an actual to be built.
And this is, has anyone ever been to Two Rivers, Wisconsin?
This is the Bernard Schwartz house up right along one of the
two rivers in the town there. And so what a great story.
This was a model that was purchased by a Wisconsin person.
It was later, the design was actually built in a home.
It happened to be in Wisconsin. So what a wonderful artifact
here to kind of tell the story of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie
style architecture. It works good for school kids
because it's displayed about three or four feet high, and
kind of down there at that level they can kind of see that.
Little things like that, if that's kind of how we can make a
connection to a visitor, that's great.
Snowmobile. That's one that you have seen.
That sounds about right. You may never have heard that.
You may not know who this man is.
Carl Eliason, Sayner, Wisconsin. And he's standing next to what
he called the motor toboggan. And this is kind of, again,
where local geography really did influence an innovation.
He had a slight physical ailment on one of his legs, and he had a
difficult time navigating the north woods deep snow,
north woods forest in the deep snow.
Snowshoes did not work so well for him.
This is a photo from some time after 1924 when he first created
that motor toboggan. At that time and prior to that,
people were slapping skis on Model Ts and things like that
and that could go down the road and the trails and all that, but
he needed something more nimble to get through the forest.
And this is essentially a toboggan with a motor, cobbled
together with some pieces, I think, from a radiator.
There's an automobile radiator on there.
In all of the show, this is the only example where the alpha
artifact exists. This exists almost like this
today. It is in the Vilas County
Museum, Vilas County Historical Society Museum, and it's there
during the summer season and it's back at the Eliason
Hardware and Lumber Company in Sayner.
So you can see that alpha artifact, hardly changed since
1924. Still a great story, looks cool.
If you have gone by our front window display at the museum
recently, you'll see another early, a 1940s Wisconsin-built
Eliason motor toboggan. And it's big and massive, and it
looks like it would be very scary to ride on today.
We have that out in our front window, and it's restored and
it's a great way to, we thought it was a great artifact to get
people to stop, look in, what in the world is that.
There's some nice images behind it and gets some great reactions
from people who see that thing. And immediately you go, that's
something early and there's our Wisconsin innovations, so in a
quick way, via artifact, we're pitching the exhibit to all the
thousands of people who walk past our building every day.
Lastly, another local cultural innovation.
If you've ever enjoyed the fine dining experience
of a Door County fish boil. And these are some folks early
on in, is this '62? I want to say 1962.
The photograph is 1963. >> 1963.
And if you've been to a Door County fish boil,
of course we all know fish fry is kind of upper Midwestern,
certainly statewide heavy in the state of Wisconsin,
but the fish boil. So there's a lot of good history
behind that. Lake Michigan surrounding Door
County there, always celebrated the harvest of the lake.
Essentially, a white fish cook at the end of the season.
Church groups started picking up on this type of thing as a way
to build community through food. But really tourists were driving
the development of this innovation, and as they began in
larger and larger numbers following World War II,
traveling to the Door County peninsula, these churches then
used these fish boil events as fundraisers.
They were on to something there certainly, getting money from
folks visiting Door County. And they did this through the
fish boil, and, of course, there's lots of, if you've seen
one of these, there's lots of drama in the process and flames
and some fire and lighting when the oil is lit.
But to really commercialize it and make it indelible and almost
synonymous with Door County, Annette and Lawrence Wickman,
that's Lawrence on the right there, owners of the Viking
Grill, if anybody knows the Viking Grill, added a weekly
fish boil, maybe not necessarily to the Lenten season but
year-round weekly and results were great.
Other restaurants followed suit, and fast forward a few decades
and this event is known really around the country
as the Door County fish boil. So those are a few things where
you see local culture and geography influencing the nature
of innovation in some fun creative manners, too.
I'm going to turn it back over to Dave who's going to go
through some more of the exhibition content here.
Driscoll: Thanks, Joe. I'll mention a little bit later
about some of the collecting we did for this project.
One of the things we collected was a fish boil kettle from the
Viking Grill. And the cool thing about that is
they were made out of the central agitator compartment of
Speed Queen washing machines. [LAUGHTER]
Made in Ripon. They were just the right size,
and they were cheap at the time. The current owner told me he's
not doing that anymore because you have to order them
for $150 from their parts warehouse now.
[LAUGHTER] But at the time,
they were just the ticket. The list of potential
innovations that we developed was kind of long on things like
the first laminated steel padlock made by Master Lock in
Milwaukee. Or the polyethylene automobile
battery houses made by Globe Union in Milwaukee.
Not exactly sort of steam engine or light bulb type of
inventions. So this kind of raised the
question: can small innovations have large impacts?
And we did find a number of examples of exactly that case.
These two guys are James Southard, on the left, and
Folkert Belzer, on the right, who were medical researchers at
the UW working on ways to prolong the viability of organs
for transplantation. Over more than a decade they
developed and refined a preservation fluid that
quadrupled the viability of organs for transplant.
Introduced clinically in 1986, the fluid was licensed to
different manufacturers and sold under different trade names, but
it's almost universally referred to these days as UW Solution,
and it's still kind of the standard fluid used for this
field. The UW Solution didn't just
increase the success rate of transplants, but it transformed
the entire organ transplant system in this country.
Before the solution, when organs were viable only for a few
hours, there were sort of two problems or there were
two issues with that short viability.
The first one was that the donor and the recipient had to live
very close together. If you happened to need a new
kidney and lived in the prairies of North Dakota, your odds of
getting them were a lot less than if you lived in Chicago
where there were a lot more people nearby.
Another serious issue, particularly for the physicians,
was that any transplant surgery had to be emergency surgery.
You couldn't plan it or schedule it, you just had to go when an
organ became available. And at this time when UW fluid
was introduced in the mid-'80s, there was kind of a theory of a
national organ procurement system where the recipients most
in need were matched with donors from anywhere in the country,
but they couldn't actually make it happen because they couldn't
keep the organs viable for a long enough period.
And once UW Solution was introduced, that happened, and
it basically made the current national organ transplant
procurement system possible. So that's kind of the small
development but has had very far reaching effects.
This fellow is a guy named Chester Beach, whose name you
might be familiar from Hamilton Beach appliances.
In the first decade of the 20th century he developed
a high speed fractional horsepower motor.
These are small motors that you can run on AC or DC power, and
they had very high RPMs. It was kind of a handy thing to
have. Initially, they just sold them
individually as household motors, and you could sort of
attach them to your sewing machine or your silver polisher
or something like that. And then eventually people
realized that, geez, you can use these for a lot of other things.
Here's a shot of the exhibit case in the gallery.
You could use them for drink mixers and vacuum cleaners and
massagers and so on and so forth.
There were a number of companies, Hamilton Beach being
one, I think that was one of three different companies that
Beach founded, all of them headquartered in Racine, and
they kind of developed this electric appliance industry
there that kind of burgeoned. And for probably 50-60 years,
until maybe the '60s or '70s, Racine, Wisconsin, was known as
the small appliance capital of the world.
So this kind of small motor actually blossomed into sort of
the economic base of one of Wisconsin's cities.
A couple of times we've alluded to the collecting that we did
as part of this process. Identifying, tracking down,
acquiring objects that clearly and vividly communicate
historically important ideas is, arguably, the most fundamental
job of a curator. And to most of us, it's also the
most fun part of the job. So for more than a year, Joe and
I got to run down leads and talk to lots of interesting folks.
The leads didn't always pan out, but we did gather quite a bit of
new material for the exhibit. And we're still hoping that a
few of the leads we've established will eventually turn
into good acquisitions. One of the organizations that we
wanted to pursue was Growing Power in Milwaukee.
This is Will Allen, who founded Growing Power in 1995, to
address a food crisis in urban America.
Too many poor neighborhoods with little access to fresh, healthy,
affordable food amidst diet related illnesses like diabetes
and obesity kind of getting out of control.
And Growing Power's farms in Milwaukee and Chicago have
developed into a national and international models for
creating innovative, sustainable, urban food systems.
In 2008 the MacArthur Foundation awarded Allen a genius grant,
and in 2010 Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most
influential people. We knew we wanted to document
Growing Power for several reasons.
One is it's have very interesting sort of modern take
on the state's long agricultural history.
And secondly, it would build our weak African American
collections. The folks at Growing Power were
extremely welcoming, and Allen eventually gave us the shirt off
his back. [LAUGHTER]
And the pitch fork off his truck.
[LAUGHTER] And a bunch of other stuff
including a makeshift compost sifter that was
constructed out of an old electric clothes dryer which
kind of illustrates the kind of do-it-yourself ethos that
underlies a lot of Growing Power's operations.
And at this point I'll hand it back to Joe for a project that
he did the leg work on. >> Kapler: And these two pieces
here are another great example also of contemporary collecting.
Not everything we take in at a museum, a historical museum,
has to be old. A lot of it isn't.
It will be old some day. And part of our job is actually
looking forward. What would be significant
down the road. And so these were used up until
a year ago, and fortunately Mr. Allen was generous enough to
donate these things that he actually used, wore and used in
the pursuit of his endeavor. These are real authentic
materials that bring that story home.
Here's another interesting Wisconsin story that we'd hope
to include in this exhibition of Wisconsin innovations, and this
guy here is Max G. Nohl, who is in that diving suit.
And that looks like something off the coast of California,
perhaps off the east coast, but that is off the lake shore
of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee and 37.
Set a deep water diving, 120 feet was the record
that he set. >> 420.
Excuse me, 420 feet. Yes, thank you, Dave.
And, of course, there's lots of publicity.
But you wouldn't think Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or
Wisconsin for deep sea diving, but certainly that was the case.
That's a great story, and then, again, we always thinking about
artifacts and objects, that just looks cool as well.
And so we went on the hunt for Max Nohl's diving equipment and
working with folks in Wisconsin and kind of Great Lakes diving
community and other diving historians.
Everybody is looking for Max Nohl's diving equipment, and as
far as we know it is probably long gone.
But you never know. Someday somebody will maybe
stumble across it in their attic or something like that.
This guy also then, he did a number of things, but he
co-founded a company in Milwaukee called Diving Equipment
& Salvage Company. DESCO for short.
That name is important. He founded the company right
about the same time he's doing that.
So that company is still around, and we went also to them in
pursuit of, again, anything related to this dive or what the
other endeavor that put DESCO on the map, and that was as a
wartime supplier to the United States for the Mark V diving
helmet, kind of that classic round diving helmet.
Every little figure in a fish tank has one of those on.
They were the largest supplier. But we learned it really wasn't
a Wisconsin design originally. DESCO did not make any major
changes or upgrades, and so it didn't really have a Wisconsin
story. But then this is where
serendipity sometimes works for us and so we went over there, we
toured the place and met with the owner and employees and had
really nice conversations and they have lots of history on
their walls and in their little seating area.
So we were looking for Max Nohl materials, we were looking for
maybe something to Mark V, and they said what do you know about
the Air Hat? I'm sure we were a little bit
embarrassed, but we did not know about the Air Hat.
This exhibition presents a great opportunity to talk about
something that actually has world class importance.
So this is a diver wearing the DESCO Air Hat, introduced in
1967, and it quickly became the preferred helmet for hazardous
underwater environments where safety and mobility are crucial.
The watertight construction and the positive air pressure to
keep the nasty outside liquids from touching the diver is
crucial. Say you're working in chemical
storage tanks, nuclear containment pools or the vats,
which is what you're probably thinking, sewage treatment
facility work. And that is a DESCO Air Hat in
operation, invented the then owner of the company Tom Fifield
in 1967. And there he is on the left.
Another innovative individual who just always had ideas
churning, and he learned in about this time in the mid, late
'60s of commercial divers down in the Gulf modifying motorcycle
helmets to do some underwater work.
Motorcycle helmet with, I would imagine, duct tape was employed
and garden tubing. And, though resourceful, I think
he saw a great opportunity as well as a great new market.
And if you look to the image on the right there of the two
items, this is a shot taken from the exhibition.
This helmet here is one of the four prototypes that they have
from 1967. So it's pretty close to the
alpha artifact, which is pretty neat.
And then over here is essentially a 2011 helmet right
off the shop floor. So this was an nice example
where we have, you see the evolution of the innovation, but
in this case isn't that much. It speaks to his original design
and the quality of it. We were able to borrow both of
these items from DESCO. It was great to get the
prototype, but then this here we weren't thinking we were going
to be able to get one. Of course, the tsunami in Japan
and then the subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima put,
essentially, a worldwide crunch on the availability
of DESCO Air Hats. And you wouldn't think this
little shop in old Third World Milwaukee is producing these
materials that have genuine worldwide significance and
importance and, fortunately, we were able to obtain one right
off the shop floor for exhibition as well.
So Dave's going to talk now about some of the stories that
didn't make the gallery presentation.
Driscoll: Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, we had
a long list of possible topics to explore, and I thought
I'd just give you a bit of a taste of some of the things
we didn't include. Top left is a wooden model of
the Appleby twine knotter which was the essential mechanism that
tied a knot in string to bind sheaves of wheat in harvesting
machines. We decided not to include that
because the real object is only a couple inches long, and I
think we couldn't display that without people wondering why
there's a lobster claw in the exhibit.
[LAUGHTER] The American Water Spaniel
was a breed of dog that was developed in the Fox River
Valley as a waterfowl hunting Doug.
It was recognized as a distinct breed in 1926, I believe.
And we didn't include that because the exhibition crew
continually refused to allow me to put puppies in the front
window. [LAUGHTER]
Go figure. Wisconsin was the first state to
designate the state highway system with numbers.
And we did some checking and the state DOT, no one has any idea
whether any of these early 1917 highway numbering signs
survived. So a good idea but no artifacts.
The lower left is a working metal micromotor which you can
see on the forehead of an ant. These were developed in 1991 by
the UW engineering professor Henry Guckel, and I didn't even
bother asking for one of those because even if they had them
and they gave them to us, we couldn't display them so that
people could see them. And on the bottom right is a
surviving example of a Wadham's oil gas station, which is
possibly the earliest example of architecture used as branding,
and the first ones of these pagoda type structures were
built in the late teens. So this is all stuff
we didn't do. But as we were making our final
selections, we also reexamined the outline that I've just
discussed, the sort of once a Badger, always a Badger, first,
not first kind of categories, and essentially we scrapped it.
We eventually concluded that the outline, which is almost based
on a kind of Socratic method of asking thematic questions and
provoking answers that cause you to think about them, this
probably was a little too academic and would probably be
too complicated for the types of audiences we have that Joe
talked about at the beginning. We were always struggling to
make our ideas simpler and clearer.
And I think our first version of the script just didn't, I think,
meet that criteria. Rule of thumb in museums is to
right labels at a sixth grade reading level.
And I don't think this is exactly dumbing down, the labels
we hope are still worthwhile and engaging, but it does make them
accessible to more people. And since the exhibition format
is fundamentally about storytelling, we decided to drop
the more abstract organizing categories and just group the
stories by broad themes: food, recreation, popular culture,
technology, and a section we called big ideas, for lack of a
better kind of theme. And the picture, by the way, is
the first purpose built garbage truck.
The refuse getter was introduced by the Leach Company of Oshkosh
in 1932. Exhibitions are a visual medium.
Research is really only the first part, and to communicate
the ideas we want to, we need to arrange the objects and stories
in an engaging and informative way.
Doug Griffin, who is our exhibition designer, did that.
And I can't take any credit at all for the look of the
displays. Although, I am responsible for
the mediocre gallery photos you'll be seeing.
Visual presentation is a kind of complicated craft, and it
includes all the topics you see on the screen.
And I certainly can't speak with the authority that Doug could,
but I'll try to convey some of the challenges involved and how
Doug chose to meet them. The most fundamental graphic
issue for exhibits is labels. When we simplified the outline,
we didn't have the same kind of organizing hierarchy that we
intended. So the individual labels had to
carry more weight really. And this is actually a pretty
complex document. It's kind of a draft, the early
version that Doug worked out, which is why it's kind of
boilerplate Latin in the middle. But it's got a bunch of
different features that are supposed to accomplish different
things. We have a, let's see if I can
get the mouse to work, there we go, we have sort of a title.
Who are we talking about? It's the equivalent of the,
orients your eye and kind of tells you where you're starting.
We then included on each label a sort of introductory question
that is supposed to provoke you and draw you into the topic and
make you wonder what's going on here and read the label to find
out. We also thought it was important
to have the equivalent of sort of bullet points on the left
side. Complete names of the inventors,
the years of the invention. In this case, Les Paul did
a bunch of interesting work over a number of decades.
Where the invention occurred, which happens here.
That's important in the sort of geographical issues that Joe
talked about earlier. And then finally we wanted to
kind of do a really quick summary of what the impact was.
In this case, we kind of went out on a limb and didn't say the
solid body electronic guitar. We said modern popular music is
really what Les Paul invented. And finally, along the bottom,
there's kind of a take home message tag line.
If you remember nothing else but Les Paul and an iconic name,
you'll have learned something from the exhibit.
We also tried, wherever possible, to include a
photograph of the inventor. In some cases, there are sort of
cultural things like the Brandy Old Fashioned that don't have a
single inventor, but we wanted to kind of emphasize individual
creativity in this exhibit. And I think in sort of
academic circles, the idea of a lone genius
has been kind of discredited. In fact, there are some folks
who believe that with a certain set of precedence, cultural
demands and available resources, that most innovations are,
essentially, inevitable, and if it's not person A, person B
will invent it. We chose not to address that
particular issue. So that's kind of all the
complicated things that we hope the labels can accomplish.
Why is it in Latin? >> That's a kind of graphic
design technique that just fills up space and says this is what's
going to be here, we don't have time to actually write it yet,
but here's what it's going to look like.
So that wasn't actually used in the final?
No, that was a prototype. Here's a part of the exhibition
that I'm calling the Harvestore deck for the large Harvestore
silo sheet that's in the far corner.
And I picked this slide to illustrate a couple of things.
One is the diversity of artifacts that I mentioned
earlier. We've got sort of big things,
the Harvestore sheet. Hanging above, we've got a 1903
Cadillac automobile frame made by AO Smith Company in
Milwaukee. That sort of whitish box in the
middle is a kidney profusion machine that was used with UW
fluid to preserve kidneys for transplant, and the Air Hat is
there. So we've got sort of a diversity
of things arranged, and also note the use of color.
We use different colors to denote different sections.
This is sort of the blue invention section.
This is also the red recreation section.
And that includes a Tom Blake paddle board from the 1940s
which we really hoped we could find.
We were on the verge of dropping this because we couldn't find
the artifacts. These boards are pretty rare and
pretty collectible, and they cost about $15,000 each.
So we couldn't afford to buy one even if one turned up.
And then kind of at the last minute we found that in the
basement of the Washburn Area Historical Museum they had one
of these. I guess they're working on their
own Tom Blake exhibit. Somehow they found this in a
barn in North Dakota or something.
But they were gracious enough to share it with us, and we sort of
put it on display. And the earlier slide, I
mentioned that technology is something that designers have to
be aware of. Notice the sort of wall paper on
the back. That's all one kind of adhesive
graphic material. It's got the patent drawings,
it's got a Popular Mechanics illustration, it's got a
photograph from National Geographic all kind of printed
on the self-adhesive stuff that just goes up on the wall.
And that's something that Doug figured out is a fairly cheap,
affordable, bang for the buck application.
And I also use the term sort of visual pop.
Just make things interesting and engaging.
I included this slide because on the bottom right, on the bottom
of that case, it includes patent drawings.
The case includes something called Harken blocks which is a
fabulous piece of tackle for sailing boats.
And I won't go into the details of it, but you'll see they're
pretty small sort of artifacts. The cases we had in them had
gray Formica around the bottom, and I think that was a way to
lose the artifact if it was surrounded by all this neutral
stuff. And Doug figured out a way to
blow up the patent drawings and apply them to the cases to just
make the cases more integrated with the artifacts.
And also, we had a lot of support from Harken, Inc.
of Pewaukee, which built an interactive for visitors to use.
There are different pulleys you can pull on there using Harken
blocks to get across the concept of more pulleys equals less work
to do. So that was kind of explaining
what a nautical block is. It was actually a really
complicated thing to do in a label and used up all the space
I had. It was a lot easier to just
shove that off to here, pull on these things, you'll figure it
out. We're historians.
We generally look backward, not forward.
The goal of the exhibition was to explore the relationship
between place and creativity which leads to a kind of crucial
question: where does innovation come from?
And its practical corollary: how can we encourage more of it?
So this is the part of the presentation where we'll offer
some tentative lessons, historical lessons.
And the lessons are going to surround these three topics:
resources, community, and education.
All of them, I think, are crucial in fostering innovation.
Resources can come in various forms.
Increase Lapham, on the left, is often called the father of
the Weather Bureau. In this case, it wasn't his
innovation, it was not the initial concept.
What he added to the Weather Bureau was a way of making it
work. The phenomenon of weather moving
from west to east was well-known to meteorologists by about 1835,
and the idea of wiring weather observations from west to east
occurred shortly after the invention of the telegraph.
So the idea of sort of observing weather in the west and telling
people in the east what was coming was pretty
well established by 1850. But nobody could figure out who
would organize and pay for that until Increase Lapham managed
that. The chart on the right kind of
deals with that phenomenon. That's a chart that he drew
based on observations that he took simultaneously in Milwaukee
and a colleague in Dubuque. And it shows the barometric
readings separated by about eight hours.
And they follow a very close curve.
So he's sort of using this chart to demonstrate the feasibility
of this technique. Lapham's opportunity came in
1869 when a very severe storm season on the Great Lakes caused
an usually high loss of life and property, shipwrecks and so on.
Lapham assembled copious documentation about all the
losses and, again, proposed that the government operate a system
of storm warnings. And his crucial decision was
getting it to the right guy. The guy on the lower right there
is a Wisconsin Congressman named Halbert Paine, who was a former
army general in the Civil War. And Paine knew that the Army
Signal Corps maintained its own nationwide telegraph system.
So once Paine got the information from Lapham, he
drafted a resolution directing the army to take regular
meteorological readings at military stations throughout the
country and then gather the results and telegraph them to
Washington. This proposal was quickly
approved. The infrastructure was
essentially in place already, and in less than a year what
eventual became the Weather Bureau was up and running with
Lapham the chief of the Great Lakes Bureau in Chicago.
These days, kind of resources I think we mostly consider venture
capital, that's what you need. But I think regardless of what
the resources are, you need to have them in place.
Another crucial question is how important is the presence of a
like-minded community? And I think it's absolutely
essential, short answer. One of the first things most
people think of when they think of Wisconsin history is the
progressive era, the progressive movement, which generated just a
heap of innovative social legislation starting about a
hundred years ago. The ideas that were pioneered in
Wisconsin include the direct primary election, government
regulation of utilities, workers' compensation, an income
tax, old age system which is the precursor to the social security
system, and unemployment insurance.
And this kind of package of legislation couldn't have
happened without many like-minded people all working
on new approaches and persuading their legislative colleagues and
the public to accept them. I guess for time, I'll sort of
slow down on who these folks are, but they're all Wisconsin
progressives. Unfortunately, this is a crucial
idea but would make a great book.
There's no artifacts. We kind of dropped it.
Wisconsin also has a great history of environmental
innovation, which is way too extensive to go into here, but I
really wanted to engage that in the exhibit somehow.
You may or may not know that Curtis Prairie at the UW
Arboretum is it the oldest restored prairie in the world.
It was the work of many hands. It took at least 10 years to
even kind of decide what they were about there.
The project has been revised, elaborated, improved ever since.
Here are some of the people crucial in its development.
Aldo Leopold is the kind of guy in the white suit in the lower
left who had the idea that the Arboretum ought to be a
laboratory for restoring landscapes rather than kind of a
plant zoo. Upper left is John Curtis, a
botany professor who helped develop the burning techniques
in the 1940s who was so crucial in overseeing the prairie that
they eventually named it after him.
On the lower right is Norman Fassett, another botany
professor who undertook the first prairie sod transplanting
in 1935 that kind of helped establish the prairie.
And the guy in the snow is Ted Sperry, a prairie ecologist who
was hired in 1936, and he really kind of made the thing happen.
He supervised the Civilian Conservation Corps crews that
restored the prairies. So it was the work of many
hands, and it's continued well after these folks
were not around anymore. There were two big problems with
dealing with this in a museum context.
One is the story isn't quite punchy enough.
It's kind of a complicated story.
It's diffuse. It carries on over many decades,
and there aren't many artifacts. The most interesting thing about
this is kind of daunting understandings and sort of
changing perspectives of things and not the sort of standard
hardware which is shovels and tape measures and stuff.
What we wound up doing is a much tighter, narrower kind of take
on it. And we were talking about a
specific ecological restoration technique that was developed at
the Arboretum which is the use of fire to promote native plants
and discourage invasive species. We managed to acquire some
1980s, 1990s tools for the collection.
These are not the alpha artifacts, but they're
functionally identical. In some cases, the same design
has been in production for 50 years.
I think this made a pretty good display in the museum, but
perhaps my major disappointment with the whole exhibition is
that we couldn't really deal with this whole communities idea
in a more comprehensive way. Most of you are probably aware
that the UW has acted as the innovation engine for at least a
hundred years. These are some examples of
things, topics that are dealt with in the exhibit that have a
Wisconsin origin. And we really had to consciously
limit the quantity that we included.
We could have done the whole exhibit on UW materials.
But there are a couple of others that I want to go through fairly
quickly here. One of them is the hugely
productive multigenerational research enterprise of vitamin
studies. The field was established at the
UW by Elmer McCollum in the upper left, who identified
vitamin A in 1913 in butterfat and cod liver oil and then a
couple years later identified vitamin B in whey.
One of his students was Harry Steenbock, who is in the lower
left, who discovered that ultraviolet radiation boosted
the vitamin D content of certain foods.
This discovery effectively eliminated rickets as a common
disease, and his vitamin D patents led to the creation of
the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation which was another
idea that was first developed in Wisconsin.
Conrad Elvehjem, in the upper right, is best known for
discovering niacin, or vitamin B3, which is a cure for a skin
disease called pellagra. He's known for his philanthropic
activities throughout the city. And this tradition continues
down to today. And the guy in the lower right
is Hector DeLuca, who studied under Steenbock, continued to
work on vitamin D, and his research has led to a number of
successful of vitamin D drugs to treat conditions from kidney
failure to psoriasis. And finally, probably the best
known example of a research community at the UW
is the stem cell research. Another topic well beyond the
scope of this talk. And the idea of a community of
investigators cross-pollinating each other to produce new
innovations is the founding concept behind the Institutes of
Discovery built right across the street.
We like to think of the field emanating from James Thomson,
on the upper left, who first propagated human embryonic stem
cells in 1998. And we do have the freezer from
his lab and the computer controlled cryogenic freezers,
which I managed to snag before they went to surplus a number of
years ago. [LAUGHTER]
A couple more weeks and we would have lost it.
But, of course, there's other folks working here at the UW
on stem cells like --, who's working on reprogramming adult
stem cells to get the same sort of medical results as
embryonic stem cells. And I think it's important to
remember that these guys have built and are continuing to
build on a long tradition of biological research here which
includes the work of Oliver Smithies, who developed some of
the basic gene splicing techniques now used the world
over. And that's a picture of him on
the upper right receiving a Nobel Prize for his work at
Wisconsin. And we, as part of the
collecting for this, discovered a liquid nitrogen tank that he
used to keep frozen mouse embryos at his labs here in
Wisconsin in the 1980s. So it's directly related to his
Nobel Prize winning work. So I think that's more than
enough time, but I would be remiss to not mention the
organizations that provided financial support to the
exhibition. The lead gift was from the
Madison Community Foundation, and we had additional money
from the Evjue Foundation, the American Family Insurance and
the Sentry Equipment Corporation and yet other support from the
Promega Corporation and Koski, Wisconsin Public Radio, US Bank,
and the Madison Gas & Electric Foundation.
I want to leave you with a final image of Ed "Strangler" Lewis
of Nekoosa, Wisconsin. We claim that Wisconsin is
responsible for the birth of modern professional wrestling.
Visit the museum and find out why.
[LAUGHTER] Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]