Wisconsin Public Television University Place History Sandwiched In  Joe Kapler David Driscoll What's the Big Idea?  June 21, 2011 UP597   cc >> Caitlin Brazner: Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum's lunchtime lecture series, History Sandwiched In. Today we'll be hearing from Dave Driscoll and Joe Kapler as they present "What's the Big Idea?" a lecture on our new major exhibit covering great ideas and innovations from Wisconsin opening this fall. So without further ado, Dave Driscoll and Joe Kapler. [APPLAUSE] >> Joe Kapler: Thank you, Kaitlyn. My name is Joe Kapler, museum curator with the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum. I know on the promotional materials it said that I would be speaking to you today, but actually we have Dave Driscoll as well who is here in Madison. Dave is the lead curator on the next major exhibit. I'm kind of helping him out as part of the team. We do our projects here and our exhibits here by team. And Dave is fortunate to be in Madison this week. 

He's been out in the field an awful lot gathering stories, ideas, artifacts to borrow, artifacts new for the collection, but he was able to make it here today and can share with you our stories and basically talk about here, "What is the big idea?" So there's kind of two parts to this presentation. The first is, you're lucky, it's a sneak peak preview to the next major exhibition, as Kaitlyn mentioned, covering great ideas and innovations that have originated, one way or another, in Wisconsin. And then secondly, Dave will talk about something that's in response from what we hear from you. People often ask we want to know more about the behind the scenes. How is it that you come up with the stories that you do or the items that you selected? What goes into putting on a major gallery exhibition in a public museum? So part of the presentation will cover some of those stories as well. So what's the story behind these great ideas and innovations? Borrowing a little bit from the Odd Wisconsin exhibition, which we found very successful, people come here and have an expectation to cover the basic things they know about Wisconsin history, kind of those iconic things, but you then also like to be surprised and unexpected. There's more to the story than what you can get in a simple article or even more than you can find in a great big textbook. And that's kind of our role. Because we tell these stories through the display and interpretation of authentic artifacts and images. We do that with the writing that accompanies exhibitions in a label format and through all those guided programs and school tour programs. 

So that's a little bit different than writing an article or doing a documentary. And with something like this next major exhibition about great ideas and innovation, it really lends itself well to the gallery exhibition format, and we are really excited about and I can't wait until September when this opens. So please then welcome Dave Driscoll to the stage, please. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> Dave Driscoll: Thanks, Joe. I'll give you some background about where the idea came from and how we got to the point that we're at today, and then I'll take you through some sample of the stories and artifacts that we'll be featuring. Joe mentioned Odd Wisconsin, that was an inspiration for this project. It was a different sort of exhibit than we'd done in the past. It wasn't a single story line followed through a whole gallery. It was much more modular with many different kinds of things, different stories, different themes. 

And that was surprisingly popular. And as curators, we sort of learned from that and decided that that's an idea that's worth pursuing, but we didn't want to do just the same thing with different artifacts. So we wanted to try and do what was successful upstairs and then kind of do a different version of it so it didn't become formulaic. So that's one thing that was kind of in the back of our mind. The other thing was Wisconsin firsts is kind of an idea that's been kicking around the society for a while. Some of you may have seen a poster that the Office of School Services put out in 2006 that listed 100 things that were invented here. And we thought that was kind of an idea that could translate well into objects and the gallery. I started looking at that, though, and realized that that list was kind of misleading in places. And I'll give you an example. One of the things they include there is the first gasoline tractor invented by JI Case in 1892, which is technically true. 

However, they couldn't make that tractor work. They shelved it. They went on making gigantic steam traction engines for another 20 years or so until someone else perfected a gas tractor and started to put them out of business. And they desperately came to market with a gasoline tractor and then marketed it as, well, we've been leading the field for longer than anyone else. It's true, but their invention in 1892 did nothing to kind of change the history of agricultural technology. So that got me thinking that, well, there's a lot of interesting stories here behind the story that people understand. And I decided we needed to examine the nature of invention, who gets credit for things, the phenomenon of simultaneous invention, what is an invention, what's new, what's kind of a tweak of an old idea, what makes something a Wisconsin invention. And I had sort of a very, in retrospect, complicated system in mind. And Joe and others called me on that, and they said this is really inside baseball. No one's really going to care that much. 

So we backed off quite a bit from that, and we've simplified the structure and in the course of this we've come up with the current title, Wisconsin Innovations, and the tag line that we're using is: "This exhibit will explore a diverse array of inventions, concepts, and traditions that originated in one way or another in Wisconsin." So, a couple things to keep in mind that we try to keep in mind. One is visitors arrive with knowledge. They're going to expect to see certain things and that's where the iconic, and we'll start out the examples in a minute or two with some familiar things to most people. But we also wanted to surprise people which required a bunch of additional research, new stories, things that were not represented in the collection. And this was actually a pretty risky show to schedule because we knew going in that we did not have the collections in house to support it. We had some but we didn't have enough to do a whole gallery which meant that we put it on the schedule and we knew we would have to either borrow them from somewhere or do some new collecting, new acquisitions. And you can't always predict that. You don't know what stories will pan out. There are a number of really great stories that we could find no artifacts for so we dropped those. So that's kind of the background, and we will start with a familiar story. 

Christopher Sholes and the typewriter. One of the most famous Wisconsin inventions. His 1868 patent became the first successful typewriter 20 years later. There were 112 typewriter patents before his, which I think is kind of an interesting thing. It's not really about that stroke of genius, it's about working it and developing it and the context being right. This is an example of a Sholes model. It's relatively late. It's from the early 1870s, early to mid-1870s. This is a Remington No. 1 typewriter. Pretty elaborate. 

And you can kind of see there it's the Sholes and Glidden, Glidden was his kind of co-inventor, and it's manufactured by Remington in New York outside of Buffalo. The story behind this is that it took a good decade of testing, redesigning prototypes, improving them, one of the improvements was developing the QWERTY keyboard which is sort of a lasting legacy even though typewriters are pretty much obsolete. They tried to market on their own, it didn't work. They eventually went to Remington to produce this, and it was still pretty much of a dog for about 10 years. And it wasn't until about the mid-1880s that Remington started to sell a lot of typewriters. It was the first machine that was actually faster than handwriting. But what it took was the world of American business getting large and complex enough that speed, accuracy, and multiple copies became important. Sholes himself thought of this as something that writers would use for correspondence or articles, not a business machine. And it wasn't until the business community took it up in the mid-1880s that it became a success. Problem was we didn't have any examples of that early sort of experimental creative period if what we're talking about is innovation. 

This is the best we could do. This is a replica of an 1870 version. And it was actually built by the staff of the Milwaukee Public Museum. So there are none of the early prototypes, experimental ones, and records indicate there may have been up to 25 different machines, none of them survived. But we will be borrowing this from the Milwaukee Public Museum and displaying it with the sort of first commercial Remington there. Another iconic Wisconsin invention is the Babcock tester. Stephen Babcock was an agricultural chemist at the UW who developed the technique for measuring the butterfat content of milk. Babcock, himself, was a New Yorker. This is a picture of him kind of late in his career. That's an electric version from 1926. 

The significance of the Babcock tester is it's often credited with creating the modern dairy industry. Before there was a quick, easy, inexpensive way to measure the butterfat content of milk, farmers were paid by volume, which encouraged people to water their milk and get more money that way or to skim the cream off, sell that separately and you'd get skim milk and you wouldn't really know. So there was not the incentive for farmers to produce high quality milk, investigate their herds, keep records, improve their products, and it was hard for creameries and cheesemakers, too, to know what kind of product they were getting and to increase their quality. So essentially, by creating this test, it opened the door by paying more money for better milk, it opened the door for quality improvements throughout the industry. Our problem was all of our Babcock testers are either already on display or out on loan. And I happened to mention this to Beth who said do you know about the one in the education collection? And no I didn't. And there it was. And I really like this one because it's very old and very rudimentary. It's almost entirely made of wood. And that relates, I think, to one of the important parts of the Babcock story which is Babcock gave away the invention. 

He decided this was so important that all farmers, all creameries should use it and he didn't want to limit the access, he didn't want to profit from it. He sort of gave it away as a public good. And all kinds of people jumped into the market, including people with no capital, no machine shop, just sort of standard woodworking technologies could produce these things. So I think this is a pretty early example and it kind of shows that sort of, I guess, Wisconsin Idea that sort of university research should be shared with the public for the general good. And I think this particular example makes that point quite well. Here's another late example of Babcock. This photograph is from 1928 and there's a sort of giant award ceremony going on on Bascom Hill for him. Certainly by the '20s his test had transformed the industry. A third familiar Wisconsin story is the founding of the republican party. Founded in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, by disaffected members of the democratic and Whig parties which were splitting at the time over the question of slavery. 

And to my mind, what was interesting about this is how we defined what is the first. There are five different places that sort of claim to be the first republicans. Exeter, New Hampshire, is one where they first proposed forming a party called the republican party. Jackson, Michigan, is another. In the summer of 1854 there was a 10,000-person gathering which they call the first convention. Pittsburgh in 1856 created the first national organizing committee. Philadelphia, 1856, the first presidential nominating committee. What's important about Ripon is, and I'll quote Alvan Bovay who organized the meeting, "We went into the little meeting held in the schoolhouse as Whigs, free soilers, and democrats, and we came out of it republicans. We were the first republicans in the Union." Essentially, they dissolved their old parties and formally created a new one. So that's one of the sort of inside baseball things that it depends on how you define first. 

And in this case, I think it's fairly well agreed upon that Ripon is the first foundation of the republican party. This is a 75th anniversary celebration there in 1929. All of which is well and good but what are the artifacts? What can we put in the gallery? We searched our collections and found this campaign drum which is made by a guy named Azariah Smith West and Frances Henry West. It was made in Waupaca, Wisconsin, 1859, pretty soon after the party was founded. And it was used in campaign rallies, speeches, celebrations, and so on, until about 1881 or so. So it probably wasn't used in the first republican presidential campaign in 1856 but certainly in the second one, Lincoln's first presidential campaign. And it turns out that Waupaca was a hot bed of republican activity in the '50s and '60s. It happens to be just down the road from Fremont, Wisconsin, named after John C. Fremont, the first republican candidate for president, which I thought that connection was kind of nice. We also wanted some less familiar stories. The fellow inside the diving suit is a guy named Max Gene Nohl of Milwaukee who was a diver and an MIT graduate. 

This was a picture of him in December 1937 setting a record for deep diving in Lake Michigan. He was investigating a ship wreck, and it was well over 400 feet down. Nohl was a pioneer in mixed gas diving, which is a combination of oxygen and nitrogen to kind of prevent the bends. And the company that he co-founded called Diving Equipment and Salvage Company is still in business in Milwaukee. So I thought, oh, there's some great invention stuff available here. Sadly, all of the stuff from the '30s, all his pioneering stuff, has kind of disappeared. And there are various theories and claims about what happened to it, but the bottom line is nobody has it or they're not saying. The company is most famous for making the Mark V diving helmet during World War II. And this is kind of your classic figure in the fish tank, round, porthole type copper helmet. And I thought, okay, that's kind of a nice thing. 

DESCO made more of those in World War II than anybody else. But Joe and I visited the current owner of the company who told us that well the Mark V was a US Navy design from well before the war and they gave it to several different companies and there's no invention story there. So that was a disappointment. But they did tell us another story. And that is a prototype of what's called the Air Hat which is sort of a lighter, more maneuverable version of the Mark V. And the story behind that is that in 1967, the owner of DESCO, a guy named Tom Fifield, heard about some kind of wildcat divers in Louisiana who were working in sort of shallow water, air only, no sort of nitrogen or other kind of pressurized tanks, who were making their own diving gear out of motorcycle helmets. And they were siliconing the face shield down and running hoses down and sort of diving. And he thought that was a little dangerous but an interesting approach. So he decided to make kind of a safe professional version of this. This is one of four prototypes that the company has which they will be lending for the exhibition. 

The resulting helmet was light, certainly compared to the Mark V, maneuverable, had good visibility, that big giant face shield there, and it's become so robust, reliable, simple, solid, fool proof design that has been state of the art for the last 40 years for diving in hazardous conditions. This is a picture from Queensland, Australia, of someone using an Air Hat in waste water treatment plant. [AUDIENCE GROANS] And these are used in any kind of diving environment when you absolutely do not want the  surrounding liquids to come in to contact with you. >> Why? [LAUGHTER] >> Here's another picture of someone doing sort of a storm sewer investigation. You don't know what kind of hazards might be down there. And it's interesting, last time I checked their website there was a current shortage of these helmets because all the available ones have been sent over the to Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. So diving in nuclear containment pools is another use of helmet. So this is a story I'd never heard of before. I think it's really fascinating and worth being in our exhibit. Fish boil, I heard someone say that. 

We wanted the exhibit to include sort of cultural innovations, not just inventions in hardware. What's more Wisconsin than a Door County fish boil? This wasn't actually invented. It was a tradition that existed there but it was kind of adopted, promoted, transformed. This is a picture of Lawrence Wickman on the right and his chef Helmer Erickson. Wickman owned The Viking Grill in Ellison Bay. And he's credited with making the fish boil what it is today. People had been cooking outdoors, fish dinners in big pots, for years on the shores of Lake Michigan. Often it done by fishing companies at the end of the July whitefish run. And then after World War II some Door County churches began doing it as kind of a church supper a couple times a summer fundraising thing. And Lawrence Wickman and his wife Annette thought maybe this is something our restaurant ought to do. 

So they started offering this in 1962, and it almost literally became an overnight success. Here's different restaurant in 1967 doing it. I think its success was due to its appeal to tourists. Most tourists, I think, want to travel to experience unusual things, place-based things, local regional traditions that aren't like at home. And this is certainly true of fish boils. I think there's also an important performance element involved. [LAUGHTER] You can kind of see the kids in the background there sort of running away. [LAUGHTER] So it's a story that we wanted to tell, but we didn't have anything in the collections. And he with figured what are the artifacts? Well, one of those kettles would be kind of cool. And there one is. 

We searched for something like this. We started with The Viking Grill and talked to Dan Peterson, the current owner, who showed us these ones. They're not the original ones, but they're made on the same pattern of the same materials as the original ones. This is made out of the drum of a Speed Queen washing machine. [LAUGHTER] And that's, if you kind of crank back, you can kind of see that's what's being used actually in 1962. They sort of weld the plate over the bottom where the agitator comes through. And Peterson explained that this particular washing machine component was the right size, high quality, stainless steel, light weight, distributes heat evenly, and it's got that kind of curly rim that rests in the stand really easily. So Dan Peterson gave us a set. It consists of the stand, the Speed Queen drum, and there's two basks inside, one for the fish and one for the onions and potatoes that kind of nest inside each other and you can kind of lift them all out at once. So that was a new collecting opportunity that we actually got lucky on. 

Another kind of popular culture topic that we're going to deal with is Strangler Lewis. And you can see from the historical marker he's a legitimate historical figure. He was born Robert Herman Julius Friedrich in Nekoosa in 1890 and became one of the most prominent sports celebrities of the 1920s. What did he invent? Modern professional wrestling. When Lewis began his career, wrestling was more or less legitimate. There were some scandals, but that was true in baseball and football and basketball in the same time period. But it was much closer to collegiate or Olympic wrestling than modern sort of show wrestling. And one of the difficulties is it could be really boring to watch. And in 1916 there was a match between Strangler Lewis and his arch rival Joe Stecher which ended in a no-falls draw after five hours of wrestling. And the bottom line is no spectators, no money. 

 Lewis became one of three preeminent wrestling promoters who worked as a team. These three guys became known as the Gold Dust Trio in the 1920s. And they were the folks that really created scripted wrestling entertainment with heels and baby faces, with signature holds, story lines and scripted sequences of wins, losses, rematches, grudges, and so on. Lewis' role was the enforcer. He was a formidable wrestler. His signature hold was the headlock, as you can see there. And this is a headlock training machine that Lewis developed. It's sort of a split piece of wood with like an industrial like railroad spring or something in between it that he used to practice on. There's a close up of that. [LAUGHTER] This is at the Dan Gable International Wrestling Institute and Museum in Waterloo, Iowa, which has agreed to lend this to us. 

 And Lewis' role in this trio was the enforcer, that anyone who decided they weren't going to follow the script and decided they were actually going to win the champion match would face Lewis in the next match and Lewis could and would hurt him. [LAUGHTER] What about contemporary innovations? We wanted to make the point that this is still going on. It's not just old stuff. Wisconsinites are still coming up with big ideas. One person we wanted to document was Will Allen so the founder and president of Growing Power, Inc., in Milwaukee. Allen was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. Probably has some good ideas. And he was also named one of the hundred most influential people by Time Magazine in 2010. Growing Power is an urban agriculture organization which is dedicated to bringing fresh healthy organic food to under-served, often poor, city residents. It has lots of interrelated goals trying to address issues of obesity and diabetes, bring jobs to poor communities, and deal with issues of agricultural sustainability. 

Here's a picture of Will working on one of his favorite things, a compost pile. Growing Power runs, there we go, projects both nationally and internationally. And their kind of signature work is these kind of integrated systems. This is one of the greenhouses and kind of on the bottom level under that rack is an in-ground tank with fish in it. The water is cycled up to those two upper layers that have plants growing on it. The fish waste fertilizes the plants, the water flows back into the tank, the plants clean the water, and you can sell both the plants and the fish. So it's kind of an integrated system. In terms of museums and collecting, that's really hard to do to sort of extract a component of that without putting pumps into the galleries and so on. And the artifacts that are available are pretty unexciting like plastic pots, which, in fact, we have collected. So it's kind of an issue. 

I was lucky enough to make several visits down there, and we did come up with a range of Growing Power artifacts, including work boots and gloves, pots and flats like we've just seen, some hand tools, and if you remember the photograph from a little while ago of Will Allens, we have his personal pitch fork and one of his signature sleeveless sweatshirts. So those are kind of nice. Here's another kind of cool thing we got. This is a compost sifter made out of an old clothes dryer where they took the door off and they chopped some holes in the drum inside and covered it with hardware clothe and put a hole in the back. and they just turned it on, shoveled compost in, and the drum would roll around and it would sift things out the back. And I really liked that because it's kind of this like low cost, do it yourself kind of approach that characterizes a lot of what they're doing. Another angle that we've taken to this is communities. One of the things that Growing Power does a lot is build relationships with other organizations in Milwaukee, in particular. And Lakefront Brewery, which makes the Local Acre beer, gives their spent grains from the brewing process to Growing Power to be made into compost. And Alterra Coffee does the same thing with their mounds of coffee grounds that their restaurants generate. 

So that kind of connection networks throughout the city is something else we wanted to try and document. And finally, where do you think modern surfing comes from? Wisconsin, of course. The guy on the left there is Tom Blake who was born in Milwaukee in 1902 and is buried and Washburn, Wisconsin. Surfing Magazine named him the second most influential person in the history of the sport. He was a champion long distance swimmer and moved to California in the 1920s, then made his way to Hawaii. He got his start surfing from some Hawaiians there. And he got very interested in surfboards when he finagled a job restoring some ancient surfboards at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Those were gigantic things, four-inch thick planks, 10 or 12 or 14 feet long, and he decided that was kind of unwieldy. So he published articles, this is a National Geographic article in 1935. One of the things he did was invent the hollow core surfboard. 

He was the first person to put a fin on the bottom of the surfboard. He invented a water proof camera housing which he used to take surfing pictures. He published the first book on surfing.  And the reason we wanted to include him is to get at the idea of what is a Wisconsin invention. I'll give you another example. Someone who I'm sure you've all heard about is Les Paul. The wizard of Waukesha, inventor of electric guitars, multi-track recording, and so on. He's a local treasure claimed by Waukesha and Wisconsin. He did almost all of his work in California and New York. He was inventing things elsewhere. 

So what makes his inventions Wisconsin? And I saw a real parallel between Tom Blake and Les Paul. Someone who grew up here, had their formative years here, went somewhere else, did significant things, and then kind of returned late in life. Which is all a good story but Blake's surfboards are really hard to find. I've seen a couple for auction about the $15,000 range. So this was a story that we were going to drop because we didn't have the objects. Until I heard about a contact of a contact of a contact who said I think they have something up there in Washburn. And so I got hold of them eventually and lo and behold they had this original Blake surfboard in their basement. And they're planning to put together an exhibition. Blake retired to Washburn and lived like the last 10 years of his life up there. And Washburn Historical Museum was happy to lend it, delighted to get it some more exposure down here. 

We were more than happy to have it. So you'll be seeing surfing upstairs. So all of these and more will be featured this fall in Wisconsin Innovations: From the Iconic to the Unexpected, opening in September. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]