Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  David Driscoll and Joe Kapler Wisconsin Innovations  January 18, 2012 UP671     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]