Innovation in Cambridge

Researched and written by Katie MacDonald, 2012

Introduction

It’s nearly impossible to get through a single day without using something born right here in Cambridge. Think about it: from the childhood vaccines that protected you to the software powering your computer, the ice cooling your drink, or the screen displaying this very text – Cambridge’s ingenuity touches countless aspects of our lives.

Consider BBN’s groundbreaking ARPA-Net project, the very genesis of the internet as we know it. Or John Clark Sheehan’s dedicated nine years at MIT, culminating in the synthesis of penicillin and ushering in the era of targeted antibiotics. Edwin Land’s Polaroid Camera might be iconic, but his creation of the first polarizing lens was even more transformative, revolutionizing optics and paving the way for everything from night vision to anti-glare technology and military surveillance.

Beyond these giants, Cambridge also gave the world the sewing machine, fire hoses, frozen orange juice, addressing machines, Zipcars, and even the concept of venture capital. From pioneering the first legal same-sex marriage to manufacturing the magnetrons essential for radar, Cambridge stands as an unparalleled hub of innovation.

We recognize that this is just a glimpse of the remarkable contributions originating from Cambridge and we warmly invite you to share any innovations we may have overlooked. As we continue to expand our collection of local breakthroughs, we hope you enjoy exploring the innovations we’ve highlighted so far.

ARPA Net or Networked Computers, 50 Moulton Street

It is hard to say that the Internet was ever really invented in any one place or time. In essence it is the result of a combination of several different technological advancements. Nevertheless, a major, maybe the most major, advancement in developing the Internet, basically the first iteration of what became the Internet, was developed in Cambridge.

The start of America’s shift towards today’s technology is often linked to the United States government’s response to the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in October 1957. After Sputnik, a distinct change in attitude occurred, different from the history of prolific American scientists and inventors who had marked the entrepreneurial America of earlier years. The year following the launch of Sputnik saw the Eisenhower administration create two major government agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). In 1972, ARPA was renamed DARPA when “Defense” was added to the agency’s title.

Along with the institutional support for the advancement of technology, computers were rapidly growing as major elements of all technological development throughout the 20th century. In Cambridge, Vannevar Bush had created the first analog computer at MIT, and Howard Aiken later developed the first digital computer at Harvard. At its most basic definition, a computer is a tool which takes instructions (programs) and executes them. The potential of this, as we are still learning, ranges from compiling millions of pages of text into readable formats to the mapping of the entire human genome.

Once computer scientists had created reliable computers the next step in the evolution of technology was to create a way to link the computers together on a “network” in order to share information between them. An agency of ARPA called the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was at the head of networking research. Bob Taylor, who became the third director of IPTO, first considered networking computers together and requested funding in order to explore the idea further.

Bob Taylor set up his networking research team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As discussions progressed for how to implement the networking idea, a major problem was revealed: every computer in existence was essentially speaking its own language. Early ideas of networking involved a main host connecting every computer, but the multiple languages problem would have to be reconciled. Wes Clark realized that instead of a main host, each computer could instead have its own host, called an Interface Message Processor (IMP), which would unify the languages being sent through the network. This idea has developed into the current concept of routers. The goal became to create four IMPs, send them to four universities (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara) and send information between the computers through the IMPs.

At a conference in 1967, Larry Roberts, head of the ARPA team, met two other men who had simultaneously been working on the same idea. Paul Baran and Donald Davies had each been working to create networks. Davies’ word “packet” was incorporated into Roberts’ project to describe the language-independent information being sent between computers.

In July 1968 ARPA/IPTO sent out a proposal for building the IMPs to over 140 companies, and just before Christmas the contract was awarded to BBN in Cambridge. BBN Technologies (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, now part of the Raytheon Company), was started as an acoustical consulting company in Cambridge, Mass in 1948, by MIT professors Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, along with Bolt’s former student Robert Newman. 1 Since its inception the company had grown and purchased a number of computers, advancing its work into the realm of computer science and technology.

Frank Heart, a former computer systems engineer at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, working at BBN at the time they were awarded the contract, was the head of the IMP team, which included Ben Barker, Bernie Cosell, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, and Dave Walden. In 1969, Frank Heart’s team began work on the software that would run the IMPs, while at each of the four sites a team worked on the software to enable their computer to communicate with the IMP. By September installation of the software from all of the groups was complete. The first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, was attempted in October 1969. The first ‘Log-In’ crashed the IMPs, but the next one worked. The characters “L, G and O ” were transferred making the ARPAnet a reality.

Each month for the next year, “nodes” of the ARPAnet were added to the network at various institutions. At MIT, Bob Metcalfe built the first high-speed (100 Kbps) network interface between the MIT IMP and a PDP-6 computer to the ARPAnet in 1971. BBN modified and streamlined the ARPAnet for the next several years as microprocessing and increasing speeds enhanced the network. By 1972, ARPAnet was ready to go public. A public demonstration took place at the International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC) in Washington, DC. In continuing efforts to achieve the goal of a universal, public network, BBN developed software to enable mail to be sent electronically on the ARPAnet. Ray Tomlinson randomly chose the @ sign from the non-alphabet symbols on the keyboard and started the ‘user@host’ convention for e-mails. Other idea continued to be used for about a decade, but by the late 1980s Tomlinson’s @ symbol became a worldwide standard for e-mails.

Throughout the 1970s, various research groups and institutions developed networks based on ARPA/BBN’s IMP-computer network foundation. In 1977 a major demonstration was held internationally ‘internetting’ between the most advanced systems: the Packet Radio net, SATNET, and the ARPAnet. The following year, Vint Cerf at the now-named DARPA , formed an International Cooperation Board chaired by Peter Kirstein of University College London, and an Internet Configuration Control Board, chaired by Dave Clark of MIT, to plan for the future of “internetting.”

As the ARPAnet project formally came to completion, a variety of boards, task forces, and people who worked on the team work for the next few years, worked to ensure the original vision of a free, public, and open Internet—this idea being perhaps the most innovative of them all. January 1, 1983 marks the date for the start of the Internet when all of the old hosts of the ARPAnet officially switched over to the newly-developed TCP/IP protocol. The culmination of years of work, much of the work and innovation that began in Cambridge, became one of the world’s most important innovations.

Sources
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/cismaf/mf4.htm
http://www.cambridge-usa.org/media/press/press2.php?id=15
http://www.securenet.net/members/shartley/history/packet.htm
http://www.bbn.com/about/
http://www.bbn.com/about/timeline/arpanet
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_imp.htm
http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/

1 After their success with ARPAnet, BBN would again gain attention for their work on the Nixon Oval Office tapes with 18 minutes missing during in the Watergate scandal as well as Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Commercial use of ice, Fresh Pond

Frederick Tudor “The Ice King of New England” was one of the most prominent Boston merchants in the early 19th century. Beginning in 1805, Tudor harvested ice from across Massachusetts at places including Haggett’s Pond in Andover, Spy Pond in Arlington, Sandy Pond in Ayer, Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Walden Pond in Concord, Suntaug Lake in Lynnfield, Spot Pond and Doleful Pond in Stoneham, Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield, Horn Pond in Woburn, and Wenham Lake in Wenham. The ice was then shipped to cities in the United States, as far south as Charleston and New Orleans, and even as far as the West Indies.

Ice that was cut from the ponds of New England in January and February reached the furthest destinations a few months later, but in only very small amounts. Haphazardly cut with only rudimentary storage, most of all ice shipped melted before it reached its final destination. Despite the expense and the failures, people around the world wanted Frederick Tudor’s ice because it was a rare luxury in the pre-industrialized world. It was the only means of keeping foods cool and drinks refreshing in the summer months. Clients from restaurants, markets, dairies, breweries, and meat packing businesses all needed Frederick Tudor’s ice. Without ice, food spoiled rapidly and bacterial infections were common. Perhaps even more importantly, hospitals relied on ice to cool both patients and medications.

As reigning ice king, Tudor had an established business, but he soon was able to make his ice company into an empire with help from a little-known employee. Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth was the son of the proprietor of the Fresh Pond Hotel in Cambridge. He was born in 1802 and grew up learning the management of his father’s hotel. During the winters, the hotel’s off season, Wyeth worked for Frederick Tudor, stocking the ice houses with the ice from Fresh Pond and insulating it for travel with sawdust.

In his first winter as manager of the Fresh Pond ice fields in 1825, Wyeth developed a horse-drawn ice cutter which allowed for the previously haphazard blocks of ice to be cut, and then stored, with uniform precision. It has been estimated that this device reduced the cost of harvesting winter ice from thirty cents per ton to ten cents per ton. His invention as well and the increased efficiency it afforded the ice company, made both Tudor and Wyeth wealthy men. It was not only his ice cutter, but his experiments with insulating materials and new ice houses which decreased melting losses from 66 percent to less than 8 percent that make Wyeth such an important innovator. He made ice harvesting faster, storage more effective, and shipping easier, all while reducing waste. The improvements allowed Tudor to successfully ship ice around the world to Cuba, the West Indies, Calcutta, India, South America, China, and England. Records indicate that even Queen Victoria purchased ice from Tudor in the 1840s.

Tudor, however, was a successful businessman, and not one to allow too much freedom to his star employee. In a few years time, Wyeth felt restrained by the Tudor ice fields, inspired by his friend Hall Kelley, organized a joint-stock company, to trade for furs on the Columbia River. Plagued by inexperience and bad luck, his two attempts met with failure. Wyeth returned to Massachusetts in 1836, and reentered the ice shipping business, in which he was successful until his death in 1856.

The impact of Nathaniel Wyeth’s contributions to the commercial ice industry are astounding. During his lifetime, he held fourteen patents relating to the cutting and transportation of ice. His innovations were not limited to the the business of Frederick Tudor, however. Between 1847 and 1862, Boston’s ice consumption increased from 27,000 to 105,000 tons, and by 1879 there were 35 commercial ice plants in America. Ice boxes, often filled with Massachusetts ice, sat in most American homes until the 1920s when electric refrigeration eliminated the need for the ice harvesting industry. For posterity’s sake, the Dictionary of American Biography makes it clear just how monumental Nathaniel Wyeth’s achievements were, explaining:, “[I]t was said at his death that practically every implement and device used in the ice business had been invented by Nat Wyeth.”

Sources
http://www.rogersrefrig.com/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Jarvis_Wyeth
http://www.mman.us/wyethnathaniel.htm
Gosnell, Mariana. Ice: The Nature, The History, and The Uses of an Astonishing Substance. New York: Random House, 2005.
http://www.history-magazine.com/refrig.html
http://www.theheartofnewengland.com/LifeInNewEngland-Ice-Harvesting.html
Cambridge on the Cutting Edge, pamphlet
Seaburg, Carl and Stanley Paterson. Alan Seaburg, editor. The Ice King: Frederic Tudor and His Circle. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003.

Home Movies and Electronic Games, 77 Huron Avenue

In the 1970s, Kodak Super 8 mm film (known as Super 8) was the most popular home film on the market. The film was released in 1965 as an improvement to “Double” or “Regular” 8 mm film. Super8 film was relatively inexpensive, very popular, and allowed for amateur home movie-making, used in much the same way that the characters of the 2011 American science fiction film Super 8 use it to film their own Super 8 home movie.

The popularity and proliferation of the Super 8 movie-making format is in large part thanks to Bob Doyle, a Fall River native living and working in Cambridge in the 1970s. Bob Doyle’s innovative career makes him one of Cambridge’s creative thinkers. Doyle graduated from Brown University with a degree in Physics and then earned his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Harvard. From 1968 to 1973, he was the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, and then worked for NASA. While making a name for himself in the field of astrophysics, Doyle kept alive his dream of creating products that are usable because they are affordable, if not free. It was with this mindset that Doyle founded Super8 Sound.

Super8 Sound started in 1973 in Doyle’s third-floor apartment at 77 Huron Street in Cambridge. Working with partners Jay Kirsch and Wendl Thomis, the team spent three months creating a method for synching affordable Super8 film with a Sony tape recorder, to created the Super8 Sound Recorder. The trio, now the founders of Super8 Sound, was awarded U.S. Patent Number 3,900,251 for their creation, which, as Doyle explains, “provides professional cinematography production and post-production tools for the Super8 film format.”# Furthermore, the Super8 Sound Recorder created a revolutionary double system for editing. Instead of having picture and audio united on film, and therefore necessarily edited together, the double system separated sound from picture and allowed for audio and video to be edited separately.

Within their first year Super8 Sound shipped more than 70 Super8 Sound Recorders from their third-floor apartment headquarters. Two years later, the improved Super8 Sound Recorder II was released and earned the trip $560,000 in sales in 1975. That same year Super8 Sound became a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

While the Super8 Sound Recorder was an important innovation for allow amateurs to create increasingly complex productions, Bob Doyle continued to invent new products with a similar goal in mind. Together with his wife Holly Thomis Doyle, and now-brother in law Wendl Thomis, Bob Doyle created 25 electronic games, six of which were published by the toy and game manufacturer Parker Brothers. Doyle is credited with the games Code Name Sector, Wildfire, and Stop Thief. In 1978, Newsweek magazine featured Doyle’s most famous game, Merlin, on its cover which led to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and landed Merlin on top of the Toy Manufacturer’s of America’s 1980 best selling game of the year with 2.2 million sold. Many children who grew up in the 1980s played Bob Doyle’s games.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Doyle_(inventor)
http://theelectronicwizard.com/
http://dtvgroup.com/Super8Sound/
http://bobdoyleblog.com/

Baking Powder, 27 Craigie Street

It does not immediately come to mind that making things “as easy as sliced bread” has not always meant what it means today. In fact, making any kind of bread used to be a real hassle. For most of history bread-making was an arduous struggle. It was not until the 1830s that bakers universally realized that they could add a few supplies to bread dough to ease the process. Adding sodium bicarbonate and sour milk to dough bonds certain chemicals together which creates carbon dioxide. When the carbon dioxide is heated up and expands in the dough, the bread rises. This concept made bread-baking easier, but worked better in cakes than bread and was somewhat unpredictable. Just how sour the milk was would alter the chemical reaction. Always intuitive, break bakers began to use cream of tartar (a by-product of wine fermentation) to standardize the process because of its more predictable reactions.

Mixing sodium bicarbonate and cream of tartar was, essentially, the first use of baking powder. The two chemicals began to be sold together in separate packets, so that they would not start mixing until they were activated by the moistened dough. This new solution worked well, but was at times hampered due to the fact that cream of tartar was imported from the wine-producing regions of France and Italy, and supply depended on yearly grape harvest. People knew that this baking powder was the solution they had been looking for, but needed a more reliable way to achieve the desired results.

A German-educated Harvard professor and chemist was able to provide the solution for an ideal baking powder. Eben Norton Horsford discovered that he could replace the pricey and hard-to-find cream of tartar with calcium acid phosphate. He received a patent on April 26, 1856, for his procedure to manufacture this chemical, and began to manufacture the calcium acid phosphate at the Rumford Chemical Works, a plant that he managed with his partner George Wilson in Rhode Island. The Rumford Chemical Works began to sell Horsford’s Bread Preparation, a packaged amount of calcium acid phosphate and sodium bicarbonate perfect for baking. Horsford realized that he had replaced the cream of tartar but not the extra struggle of having to mix the two chemicals together.

Horsford’s next innovation was adding corn starch to his two other ingredients, which ensured that they remained dry enough to be combined before entering the baker’s bowl. Finely ground calcium acid phosphate and sodium bicarbonate mixed with corn starch prevented any chemical reactions before baking began, and baking powder as we know it was created.

Horsford’s baking powder was first sold under his name, but was soon changed to Rumford Baking Powder, which is a staple in almost every American household to this day. The same key ingredients — calcium acid phosphate, sodium bicarbonate, and corn starch — remain in the same proportions as Horsford himself determined. The only real change to his original recipe came in the late 1880s, when the introduction of calcium phosphate mining eliminated the need for the ground up beef bones which were previously necessary.

Horsford remained interested in chemistry and nutrition until about the time of the Civil War. After the war, he largely abandoned science and took up other pursuits. One of his most empassioned endeavors was trying to prove that the Vikings had reached Cambridge during their time of exploration. The Viking longboat prows on the base of the Longfellow bridge are an homage to Horsford’s efforts. Eben Horsford remained in Cambridge until his death on January 1, 1893.

Today, Rumford Baking Powder remains the leading orthophosphate baking powder in the United States. Hulman & Co. acquired the Rumford brand when it purchased the Rumford Chemical Works of East Providence, RI in 1950, but Horsford’s innovation is still sold to this day.

Sources:
https ://www .usaemergencysupply .com /food _storage /rumford _baking _powder .htm
http ://www .littlerhodybottleclub .org /research /rumford .html
http ://en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Baking _powder
http ://portal .acs .org /portal /acs /corg /content ?_nfpb =true &_pageLabel =PP _ARTICLEMAIN &node _
id =929&content _id =CTP _004462&use _sec =true &sec _url _var =region 1&__uuid =aff 13 cde –f 81 f –
406 f –bbaa –a 1 a 91 bed 683 c
http ://acswebcontent .acs .org /landmarks /bakingpowder /development .html
http ://acswebcontent .acs .org /landmarks /bakingpowder /horsford .html

Public Relations, 7 Lowell Street

Edward L. Bernays is known as “the father of spin.” Most people have never heard of him, yet Life magazine named him one of the most influential people of the twentieth century. His client list included the major corporations of his era, including American Tobacco, General Electric, CBS, Dodge Motor Company, and United Fruit, as well as three presidential administrations. He created an entire genre combining business, marketing, and psychology and fought until the end of his life trying to professionalize, standardize, and perhaps control his creation for the future. Edward Bernays was the inventor of public relations.

Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was born in Vienna, Austria, but grew up in New York City. A bright student, he enrolled in Cornell University at the age of 16 to study agriculture. His first job, however, was in journalism and after the outbreak of World War I he volunteered to work for the the government’s Committee on Public Information. He was put in charge of a number of “propaganda projects” centered on generating support for America’s involvement in the war. His contribution was so influential, he was invited to accompany Woodrow Wilson to the Paris peace conference in 1918. 1

Intrigued by what he saw, and no doubt influenced by the work of his uncle, Bernays developed his own “science” of what he termed “public relations.” Applying what he had learned in politics to the public sphere, he believed that he could link mass-produced goods to people’s unconscious desires. In essence, he worked to shift public perception from the “wanting” of goods to the “needing” of goods, and associating those goods (those ones he was hired to promote) with deep, powerful, emotional responses that encouraged their consumption. Bernays opened his own firm in New York in 1919, quickly attracting a large number of major clients and proving that his new ideas were exactly what major companies were looking for. Bernays had a long and storied career, including some of the following well-known campaigns:

In 1923 Bernays was hired to promote Ivory soap. He did a study that found that people were most likely to choose a white unscented soap, of which Ivory was the only product on the market. He promoted Ivory in a number of ways, including holding a soap yacht race in Central Park, and encouraging citizens to do their civic duty by washing their town statues and municipal buildings with Ivory soap. He then turned to children, and decided he needed to make kids, the enemy of soap, love Ivory soap. He offered the National Soap Sculpture Competition in White Soap to schools, with the winning sculptures were sent to exhibitions in New York and to museums around the country. The contest became so popular it entered the curriculum in many school districts, and was held for a quarter of a century. Bernays did all of this while working for Proctor & Gamble.
In 1929 Bernays hired suffragettes to march in the Easter Parade in New York City, and forewarned the press that they would be lighting “Torches of Freedom” as they marched. With the photographers in place, and at Bernays’s signal, the women lit cigarettes, and smoked them as they marched. The next day, newspapers around the world had front page headlines reading “Group of Girls Puff as a Gesture of ‘Freedom,’” associating the cigarettes with freedom and thereby breaking the taboo against women smoking in public. He was working for the American Tobacco Company. 2
The campaign for which Bernays gained the most fame was his promotion of the electric industry in 1929, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the light bulb. Showing the powerful positive impact that public relations can have, Bernays organized “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” which lasted for six months, culminating with President Hoover dedicating the Edison Institute of Technology, in Dearborn, Michigan. Attending the event were not only members of 15 of the nation’s most important newspapers, but important people such as Henry Ford, Orville Wright, John D, Rockefeller, Jr., and Madame Curie. He was working for General Electric.
Additionally Bernays is credited with making bacon and eggs the All-American breakfast, promoting Russian ballet, selling the idea of fluoride in drinking water to be healthy, promoting disposable paper cups as more sanitary than reusable cups, turning the American people against the Guatemalan government in the 1950s , 3 and campaigning against smoking in the 1960s. 4

Bernays wrote his first of four books, Crystallizing Public Opinion, in 1923, the same year he became the first instructor on the subject when he taught a course at New York University. By the time of the publication of his second book, Propaganda (1928), he had established the philosophy of public relations, helping to establish a consumer-based culture which continues to affect the world today. In the 1940s and 50s Bernays shifted to the uses of mass media, and how visual symbols could become instruments for a new concept he had developed, also the title of his next book, The Engineering of Consent, (1955). His final book, written in 1965 was a reflection on his career: Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel.

Bernays was not an egalitarian thinker and some of his principles show a strong point of view. In Crystalling Public Opinion he wrote, “This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.” In his next book, Bernays goes on to say, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” 5 In The Engineering of Consent, he wrote, “the engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.” Perhaps this is not what people want to hear, but this is the way Bernays influenced the world to operate.

Bernays’ career, and later his legacy, have not been shielded from the criticisms of those who have likened his work to, most innocently, mind-controlling businessmen, and, at worst, to the propaganda of the National Socialist regime in Germany. It his memoirs Bernays wrote that he was shocked to discovered that Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, kept some of Bernays’ work in his personal library.

While there are clearly some controversial elements to Bernays’ work, Bernays claimed that he was working with propaganda before it obtained its negative connotation during the Second World War, due to its Nazi association. While his thinking may not be palatable to some, Bernays saw public relations as more an understanding of the facts of human nature rather than a manipulation of it. Nevertheless, Bernays’ legacy remains controversial. The most notable recent assault came from the BBC documentary The Century of the Self, in 2002, in which he is described as “undemocratic.”

After nominally retiring from his work in the 1960s, Bernays and his wife, who served as his public relations partner during their careers, decided to look for a place to retire to. After researching several cities, they decided on Cambridge because of its “cultural and educational possibilities with a tradition of intellectual stimulation, and a feeling of Europe.” 6 The innovative nature of Cambridge lured them to 7 Lowell Street, but Bernays did not stop working. He was an integral member of the group which fought to save the Sycamore trees on Memorial Drive from being sacrificed to a highway underpass.

Various other PR projects gained his attention, but Bernays’ major effort during his final years was to professionalize the field that he had created. Speaking on the future of public relations to a Journalism and Mass Communication Convention Bernays explained that “public relations has suffered from the public’s distrust,” and that “I believe that licensing and registration is mandatory if we are to aspire to transform public relations into a respected profession.” 7 He championed Massachusetts Senate Bill #374 in 1992, at the age of 100. This bill was intended to improve the field of public relations through voluntary registration, elevating the practitioners of PR to the professional status of doctors, lawyers, architects and others in specialized fields. A licensing exam would allow those who passed to used a specialized legal title to denote mastery and certain body of knowledge of their craft, as well as adherence to a code of ethics. On a practical level, the legislation would force public relations curricula at universities to adhere to certain criteria set by a state board and examiners. 8

In the same speech in support of the bill Bernays explains, “Because the words ‘public relations’ are presently in the public domain, anyone, regardless of education, experience, character or conscience can call him or herself a public relations practitioner. This is the primary reason that PR suffers from an unfortunate number of charlatans and incompetents within its ranks.” 9 Despite his best efforts, the bill was voted down, and his goals have yet to be met.

During his life, Bernays was an engaging, important, and often controversial figure. He is considered one of the most influential people of the 20th century, though, he remains largely unknown. He chose to spend his final days in Cambridge—still working, writing his life story in his memoir, and fighting for the field to which he devoted his 103-year long life. Perhaps it is best to leave the conclusions on Edward Bernays to his biographer, Larry Tye: “He was the profession’s first philosopher and intellectual. He saw the big picture when few others did. He demonstrated for future generations of PR people how powerful their profession could be in shaping America’s economic, political, and cultural life. At work, he thought bigger and bolder than anyone had before.”10

1 http ://www .nndb .com /people /802/000113463/

2 http ://www .prmuseum .com /bernays /bernays _1929.html

3 “Trends in Journalism” http ://history .journalism .ku .edu /1950/1950.shtml

4 http ://www .prmuseum .com /bernays /bernays _1915.html

5 http://www.granddistraction.com/people/edward-l-bernays/

6 ht tp://www.wickedlocal.com/melrose/news/lifestyle/columnists/x1887283768/Dancing-with-a-legend-Edward-Bernays-the-father-of-public-relations

7 http://www.prmuseum.com/bernays/bernays_1990.html

8 http ://www .prmuseum .com /bernays /bernays _1990.html

9 http ://www .prmuseum .com /bernays /bernays _1990.html

10 http ://www .wickedlocal .com /melrose /news /lifestyle /columnists /x 1887283768/Dancing –with –a –legend –Edward –Bernays –the –father –of –public –relations #axzz 1 UO 5 pkuJp

Small Pox Vaccine, 7 Waterhouse Street

Since the days of ancient Egypt smallpox had been one of the most deadly human diseases. It existed in two strains, the more dangerous of the two resulting in death for 30% of its sufferers. For those who survived the fever, aching, rash, and skin lesions they were distinguished for the rest of their lives by blindness and scarring. In the 20th century alone 300-500 million people died from the disease.

While smallpox had been a known danger in Europe longer it was particularly virulent in colonial America. Europeans had struggled in early settlements and European diseases had nearly eliminated the Native American population. The city of Boston, alone, lost 5,980 of 11,000 residents in an epidemic in 1721.

The first successful smallpox vaccination was the work of Dr. Edward Jenner, of Gloucestershire, England. Though people around the world and for centuries had been experimenting with various smallpox inoculations it was Jenner who discovered, in 1796, that one would become immune to smallpox if inoculated with cowpox germs. His discovery quickly spread around Europe and the world because of the visiting doctors who came to London for medical training.

One of these visiting doctors was Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse. Waterhouse was one of the original three faculty members of the newly-opened Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. Waterhouses’s particular role was as professor of anatomy and surgery. Arriving in Cambridge in 1782 when the medical school opened and staying for the rest of his life, Waterhouse had received his training in hospitals and at universities in Europe. Because of his connections he continued to receive a variety of publications from Europe while in America. In 1799 he received one such publications which had been written by Dr. Jenner regarding smallpox inoculations.

Dr. Waterhouse quickly realized the importance of Jenner’s work and knew that he needed to expand the discovery to America. Fear of the dreaded disease was so strong, however, that the only subjects available to test the cowpox inoculation idea were four of his own children. Dr. Waterhouse’s experiments were publicized and the doctor worked tirelessly to support the importance of his work. When he successfully inoculated 19 young boys, with the approval of the Boston Board of Health, the ideas of inoculation grew throughout the United States. Upon taking office in 1801, President Jefferson remained the longtime supporter of smallpox inoculations he had always been. Jefferson himself was inoculated as a young man. Jefferson worked with Dr. Waterhouse on the promotion of his new cowpox vaccine (called kinepox at the time) and during the summer of 1801 he demanded the inoculation of approximately 200 people at his home, Monticello, including slaves, his sons-in-law, and his neighbors. Later, at the outset of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jefferson instructed Lewis to be sure that inoculate himself with Waterhouse’s kinepox vaccine.

After a successful medical career, Dr. Waterhouse retired and led a relatively quiet life. He died at his home in Cambridge in 1846. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery along with a small monument erected in his honor by his surviving wife, Louisa. His home in Cambridge still stands and displays a plaque honoring the important contribution Dr. Waterhouse made to the world with his introduction of the smallpox vaccine to the United States.

Sources
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/05.20/waterhouse.html
http://hms.harvard.edu/public/history/history.html
Cash, Philip. Benjamin Waterhouse: A Life in Medicine and Public Service (1754—1846). Boston Medical Library & Science History Publications (a division of Watson Publishing International), USA, 2006

Commercial Varnish, 54 Brattle Street

The Valspar Corporation, maker of some of the most well-known paints and varnishes on the shelves of home improvement stores today, was not founded in Cambridge. However, the origins of Valspar are from Boston and the innovation that ultimately made Valspar a successful company is from Cambridge.

Varnish, by definition, is a coating which dries to form a protective, yet transparent film, generally used for wood products. It is a product which has been around for centuries. The term originates from the name of Berenice, who was Queen of Cyrene and wife of the King of Egypt, Ptolemy Euergetes, around 250 B.C. Her legend holds that Berenice sacrificed her beautiful hair to Venus as an offering for her husband’s safe return from war. The beauty of her hair became associated with the beauty of amber to the Greeks, which is the basis of the Latin vernix, which then became vernice, in Italian, which is the derivative of the English word varnish. Early varnishes were made from linseed oils, gums, egg yolks, and many other things, and often did leave an amber-colored residue when they dried.

In 1806, Samuel Tuck opened a paint store on Broad Street in Boston, Mass which he named Paint and Color. Around the same time, two businessmen from Cambridge, Franklin Houghton and David McClure, were experimenting with ways to produce a reliable varnish. When they had created a good formula, they focused on commercializing and selling their product, instead of remaining small-time neighborhood dealers. They were so good at selling the merit of their wares, that Houghton and McClure’s personal varnish formula is the same basic formula still used today.

Houghton and McClure’s shop was at first the back part of Dexter Pratt’s blacksmith shop near Mount Auburn Street. By 1820 the pair were commercially producing varnishes for the first time in the United States. They eventually opened a bigger shop, closer to Boston, and never had trouble finding customers. By 1827 both had retired, quite possibly from the health problems they acquired due to inhaling the fumes in their shop.

Without Houghton or McClure, their business stalled for a few years, but was essentially picked up in stride in 1832 when Lawson Valentine opened Valentine and Company. He used the Houghton & McClure formula and expanded what they had started. In the meantime Samuel Tuck’s Boston Paint and Color had been acquired by Augustine Stimson. Around 1852 the Valentine and Company merged with the former Paint and Color, to create Stimson & Valentine, a company focused on varnish, but also selling paints, oils, glass, and beeswax. This merger was the cornerstone of the future Valspar Corporation.

The new business enterprise did not remain in Cambridge, changing hands among family members a few times, and moving to New York City in 1870. It was not until the early 20th century, however, that the mid-size varnish company formed from the work of two original Cambridge men became the varnish giant it is today. In 1903, Lawson Valentine’s grandson, L. Valentine Pulsifer, a Harvard-educated chemist joined the company. It took him only three years to develop a revolutionary product, which he named Valspar. In 1906, Pulsifer unveiled a new kind of varnish which was the first coating for wood that retained its clear finish when exposed to water. Varnish super-stardom was achieved and the company has never looked back, changing their name to match their biggest product, and marketing that product for the next 100 years. Today, with more than two centuries of experience, Valspar is the world’s sixth largest manufacturer of paints and coatings. Now headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, its origins date back to the early days of a paint and color shop in Boston, and two men making varnish in the back of a blacksmith shop in Cambridge.

Sources
Glass, Paints, Varnishes, and Brushes: Their Manufacture, History, and Use. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, 1923.
http://arts.jrank.org/pages/9948/Varnish.html
http://valsparglobal.com/about/ourhistory.jsp
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-Valspar-Corporation-Company-History.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valspar
http://www.timepassagesnostalgia.com/&searchkeywords=1820+two+businessmen+cambridge+massachusett+
began+first+ commercial+production+varnishe+united+state&sis=-1&rdir=1
http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/george-l-gould/historical-sketch-of-the-paint-oil-varnish-and-allied-trades-
of-boston– since-ala/page-7-historical-sketch-of-the-paint-oil-varnish-and-allied-trades-of-boston–since-ala.shtml

Architects Collaborative, 42 Brattle Street

Cambridge, after the Second World War, developed as the transplanted center of the modernist movement in architecture. The Harvard Graduate School of Design became a haven for architects fleeing the increasingly precarious political climate of Europe. The newly-arrived generation of professors replaced the Beaux-Arts tradition with the modernist ideas of sleek form, ultimate function, and elegant design. David Fixler has titled the unique culture that soon developed as “Cambridge Modern.” Fixler identifies the presence and work of important modernist architects and thinkers such as Benjamin Thompson, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Josep Lluis Sert, to name only a small few, who created an atmosphere of modernism in Cambridge unlike any other. Perhaps the biggest of the modernist celebrities who came to Cambridge was Walter Gropius, the founder of the famed Bauhaus in Germany. Gropius arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 30, 1937 as the Chairmen of the Department of Architecture.

While much of the innovation of the new architectural style originated in Europe, Cambridge was home to an innovation in the nature of the architectural practice. Gropius built his personal home in Lincoln, Massachusetts (now a national historic site and museum) but his architecture career remained firmly centered on Cambridge. His innovation in the field of architecture came in 1945, as Gropius became a founding member of The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC).

The TAC united Gropius with seven other younger, but leading architects of his era: Benjamin Thompson, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, Robert S. McMillan, and Louis A. McMillan. John and Sarah Harkness would remain with the TAC for its entire 50-year existence. Together, they designed a number of buildings, with public schools and hospitals becoming a specialty.

The innovation that the TAC embraced and expounded was the idea of collaboration over individualism in design to produce the best product. The structure of the TAC was a partner-in-charge as the leader of individual projects, but the entire group would to discuss all of the projects they were working on. As the firm grew, it became inefficient for all of the architects to meet together, but smaller teams of architects preserved the collaborative nature of the original approach.

The TAC’s unique method of architectural practice reflects a new philosophy of design as embodied by its architects. Norman and Jean Fletcher wrote to Gropius when first considering joining the TAC, and reveal the true innovation behind the vision: “Thus our aims become, not architecture for architecture’s sake, but architecture for the sake of a healthy society.” (Gropius book pg. 256). Gropius himself saw the modernist movement as part of the creation of a new, and better society. He explained, “I want to make young people realize how inexhaustible the means of creation are if they make use of the innumerable modern products of our age, and to encourage these young people in finding their own solutions.”

The TAC worked around the United States and the world. They did leave their mark indelibly in Cambridge, with two important buildings.

One is their office headquarters, pictured above. The other was the new Graduate Center built at Harvard in 1949.

Gropius left the TAC in 1965 at the age of 82. The group continued on, but the firm fell into financial difficulties in the 1980s and was officially closed in 1995. While the innovative process the TAC architects believed so deeply in did not become the norm for architectural firms, they did become one of the fist to design environmentally sound buildings in the 1980s, and their message and unique approached added to the creative world of Cambridge Modern.

Important Works

Six Moon Hill; Lexington , Massachusetts; 1947-1950
Five Fields; Lexington , Massachusetts; 1951-1959
Harvard Graduate Center; Cambridge , Massachusetts; 1949
University of Baghdad; Baghdad , Iraq; 1957-1960
Pan –American World Airways Building; New York , New York; 1958-1963 (with Emery Roth & Sons)
Wayland High School; Wayland , Massachusetts; 1960, 1966 & 1972
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Office Building; Boston , Massachusetts; 1961-1966
Parkside Elementary School; Columbus , Indiana; 1962
Rosenthal Porcelien Factory; Selb , Bavaria; 1965
Tower East; Shaker Heights , Ohio; 1969
AIA Headquarters Building; Washington , D .C .; 1973
Health Sciences Expansion; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis , Minnesota; 1974
San Francisco Tower; Kansas City , Missouri; 1976
Bauhaus Archive; Berlin , Germany; 1976-1979
Corporate Headquarters for CIGNA; Bloomfield , Connecticut; 1979-1984
Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (with consulting architect Pericles A . Sakellarios)
Shirley S. Okerstrom Fine Arts Building;Traverse City,MI:United States; 1972

American Printing, Dunster Street near Mass. Ave.

Printing has long been an important industry for Cambridge as the city was home to British North America’s first printing press. Spanish America, colonized before British America, housed the first printing press in the New World. Mexico City set up a press in 1539, and the publishing houses of New Spain primarily printed religious manuals, catechisms, grammars, and dictionaries. Bibles, however, were rare, as the Church wanted to ensure the laity received the teachings of the Bible only through the sermons of the religiously-educated.

Cambridge was at the center of a wholly different religious experiment in British North America. By its very contrary and questioning nature, the Protestant coloring of New England eliminated the possibility of an overarching, supreme authority beyond one’s individual relationship with God. To facilitate this belief, Harvard College was founded in 1636 as a seminary for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Bibles were found throughout British North America. Despite being plentiful, Bibles, by law, were supposed to be entirely imported from England.

The first printing press came to British North America two years after the founding of Harvard College. The press was brought by Reverend Joseph Glover, who, when deprived of his position in the Church of England, shipped his family, his possessions, and his printing press to the colonies. Glover also paid for the passage of the man in charge of running his press, Stephen Daye, a locksmith by profession. Daye was under financial contract to work in Glover’s home in Cambridge in order to repay the cost of passage for himself, his wife, and his household—a total of around £51. Rev. Glover, however, did not survive the passage to the New World. When Daye and the press arrived, his debt was transferred to Glover’s widow, Elizabeth, now owner of the printing press.

Daye set to work almost immediately along with his son Matthew, an apprentice printer, and perhaps more skilled than his father. Within the first year in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they printed The Freeman’s Oath, a broadside, which is generally believed to be the first tract printed in British North America. This was completed around the same time as “an almanac made for New England by Mr. William Pierce.” 1 By virtue of exploiting a loophole in colonial legislation, Daye printed the first book in the New World, The Bay Psalm Book, in 1640. This book became extremely popular and influential throughout the colony for the remainder of the 17th century. It was only three years later that the first Bible published in the New World was also published in Cambridge.

Elizabeth Glover (born Harris), as an unmarried woman, was a rarity in colonial New England. Especially unique was that she was not only an eligible woman of property but also the owner of the only printing press in the British colonies. Her attractiveness as a mate was clear to the President of Harvard, Henry Dunster. On June 21, 1641 they were married, transferring all of her property to his home on the now-named Dunster Street. Elizabeth died in 1643, and her land and property, including the printing press, was passed on to Dunster and subsequently to Harvard College. During the same year Matthew Daye replaced his father as official operator of the press after the elder Daye was briefly jailed for fraud.

As Harvard grew in size and reputation, it became a logical center of printing in the American colonies. Cambridge was the location of not just the first printing press, but also the second when in 1659 a press was sent to the colonies from the British firm “The Company for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen Natives of New England and parts Adjacent in America.” Matthew Daye’s successor Samuel Green was in charge of printing at this point, but the British firm also sent over the America’s first professional printer, Marmaduke Johnson, to assist Green. The new press was set up in Harvard Yard, in a building called the Indian College, to print Reverend John Eliot’s “Indian Bible.”

Marmaduke Johnson acquired his own press in England in 1665, and planned to bring it to Boston in order to establish his own business. However, Harvard wanted a replacement for Glover’s original press, having become fragile over the years, and the Harvard leadership successfully lobbied for a state law stating that no printing could be done outside of Cambridge. Forced into staying in Cambridge, Johnson instead, without any affiliation to Harvard, opened the first independent printing press in the colonies and went on to publish 20 books between 1665 and 1674.

The generations of Daye, Green, and Johnson marked Cambridge as an established center of publishing during the 17th century, but printing was minimal for much of the 18th century. It was not until in 1802 when “University Press, Wiliam Hilliard,” appeared on the Harvard Commencement broadside that interest was reignited. By the end of the 19th century Cambridge was again a major publishing center. In 1852 Henry O. Houghton created the Riverside Press and went on to publish the works of Longfellow, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Henry James. In 1880 Houghton partnered with his friend George Mifflin and together they founded and led the Houghton-Mifflin Company, still in existence today. In 1895 the Athenaeum Press, another distinguished publisher, moved to Cambridge. In 1913, Harvard University Press, still with one of it’s offices in Harvard Square, was founded and remains a leader in academic publishing.

Today, Cambridge is again a forerunner of new innovative approaches to publishing. Google Books, the tech giant’s innovative approach of digitizing and making books available online, is based out of their Cambridge branch. A great deal advanced from Stephen Daye’s first press in 1638, Google Books is only the most recent development in Cambridge’s long history of innovation in the printing industry. Only the future can tell how influential this idea will become, but it is clear that the storied history of Cambridge has long been part of the story of printing in America.

Sources
Kimber Sidney A., The Story of an Old Press: An Account of the Hand-Press Known As the Stephen Daye Press, Upon Which Was begun in 1638 the first Printing in British North America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: University Press, 1937.
Roden, Robert F. Famous Presses. The Cambridge Press 1638-1692. A History of the First Printing Press Established in English America, together with a bibliographical list of the issues of the press. New York: Dodd & Mead, 1905.

1. According to Lucius Paige’s History of Cambridge

First Public High School to Distribute Condoms, 443 Broadway

Several Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) alumni have gone on to receive worldwide recognition. However, one of CRLS’s most innovative achievements was begun by some of its not-so-famous alumni. Cambridge Rindge and Latin School is known as an innovator because in 1990 it was the first public school in the country to distribute condoms to its students. While condom distribution was at the time, and continues to be, a controversial topic, for CRLS it was just a continuation of the school’s progressive approach to teen sex education and AIDS awareness and education. By the 1990s CRLS had already gained national attention for its stance on AIDS awareness.

The push for access to condoms at CRLS began when students in the Health Center’s AIDS Peer Leader program decided that the school’s administration was not doing enough for AIDS awareness in the schools. Taking action into their own hands, the group began making and handing out AIDS prevention packets, which consisted of a condom, directions on how to use one, and an AIDS fact sheet. Their goal was to distribute these to as many students as possible. At the same time, a different student group worked to collect 600 signatures for a petition to the School Committee asking for condoms to be made available to students at the high school. The students’ initiative was not well received by some school officials, but ultimately led the city’s School Committee to form a subcommittee to address the students concerns. In the spring of 1990, public hearings were held inviting students, faculty, parents, a medical panel, and the general public together to discuss whether condoms belonged in the city’s public schools.

Of those who attended the hearings, about 90 percent supported providing condoms in schools. Strong dissent came from religious leaders and those who worried that access to condoms would lead to increased sexual activity among the students. One attempt at a compromise was for the school to provide vouchers to nearby stores where students could pick up condoms somewhere other than school property. This plan was never implemented, however, when a majority of the Committee agreed to the original proposal to distribute condoms at the school.

The agreed-upon program went into effect in May 1990. Condoms became available at the Health Center and students were initially charged 50 cents for three condoms if they could pay. The decision was groundbreaking, Principal Edward R. Sarasin received national coverage, reference to the issue was made on the hit TV show 90210, and, most importantly for the students, their activism was a success.

The apparent success of the program satisfied those who were involved in it, and they were again unexpectedly thrust into the national spotlight, one year later, when basketball star Erving (Magic) Johnson announced he had tested positive for AIDS in November 1991. AIDS awareness and prevention were again topics of national interest, and CRLS became the focus of schools around the country. School officials from as far away as Florida and California called CRLS to learn if the condom program was working, and if similar programs could be implemented in their schools. Since the groundbreaking step taken by CRLS in 1990, schools across the country have also decided to make condoms available to their students. While sexual health issues continue to periodically reclaim national attention, both supporters and those who disagree with providing condoms in public schools look to the students and school administration of Cambridge as the innovators who took the first step towards change.

Sources
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/1/4/rindge-to-dispense-the-pill-pfollowing/
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1994/11/4/school-board-debates-offering-pill-at/
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1991/12/10/leading-the-charge-pafter-earvin-magic/?print=1
https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3006798.html
http://www.cpsd.us/crls/about/history.html

Same Sex Marriages, Cambridge City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Avenue

On May 17, 2004 Cambridge City Hall opened at 12:01 AM and began issuing marriage licenses—the culmination of one of the most important and controversial civil rights issues in the United States since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Marcia Hams and Susan Shepherd were the first same-sex couple to apply for and receive a marriage license, and later exchanged vows in the first legalized same-sex marriage in the United States.

In her opinion, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote that the “Massachusetts constitution affirms the dignity of all individuals” and “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” With this statement, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in a 4 to 3 decision on November 18, 2003 that it is unconstitutional under the Massachusetts constitution to allow only heterosexual couples to marry. In the court’s decision regarding Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the court ruled “the right to marry means little if it does not include the right to marry the person of one’s choice.”

This ruling made Massachusetts the first state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage and the sixth jurisdiction in the world (behind Belgium; British Columbia, Canada; the Netherlands; Ontario, Canada; and Quebec, Canada) to legalize same-sex marriage. It immediately created a controversy in response to the legality and morality of this decision.

After the Goodridge decision, however, it was unclear whether the Massachusetts decision deemed civil unions as a far enough step towards marriage equality. Any ambiguity was cleared up on January 4, 2004 when a majority of the justices explained that the their ruling meant that only marriage could equal equality. Civil unions would be an “unconstitutional, inferior, and discriminatory status for same-sex couples. Separate is seldom, if ever, equal,” the court explained. The original November ruling had allowed for a stayed judgment for 180 days, providing for the Massachusetts Legislature to take any action that they deemed necessary. After those 180 days had passed, Governor Mitt Romney ordered town clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses on May 17, 2004. At midnight, with the typical three-day waiting period voided for the occasion, same-sex couples entered Cambridge City Hall. About a half-hour later, every two or three minutes, cheers erupted as each couple emerged from the building, marched down an impromptu aisle between a cheering crowd of 5,000 Cantabrigians, and same-sex marriage became a reality. Residents threw roses, rice, and even handed out cupcakes to the happy couples.

While Cambridge has a reputation for progressive politics, one has to remember the context in which the Cambridge City Council and the City Clerk made the decision to open City Hall at one minute past midnight and issue the first same sex marriage license in America. At this time, U.S. President George W. Bush had just called on Congress “to pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife.” There was opposition to the idea of “non-traditional” unions from both sides of the aisle, even in Massachusetts. In this climate of fear, Cambridge, the only city in America that has had three openly-gay mayors, took the lead and claimed this issue. In the years that have followed this issue has continued to divide America. While seven other states and the District of Columbia have legalized same sex marriage, over 30 have passed laws or constitutional amendments to ban same sex marriage.

Cambridge saw 227 couples apply for marriage licenses that first night. Another 10,000 same-sex couples were married throughout Massachusetts in the first four years following Marcia and Susan’s wedding. In the eight years since Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, four other states and Washington D.C. have legalized same-sex unions. Brian Lees, one of the original sponsors of the amendment to ban same-sex marriage has since said, “Gay marriage has begun, and life has not changed for the citizens of the commonwealth, with the exception of those who can now marry.”

Polaroid, 748 Memorial Drive

Edwin Land (1909-1991) was an institution of innovation. As his biographer Victor McElheny explains, “Recounting his life is a meditation on the nature of innovation.”(1) He created internationally-known products, established two entire industries, and the company he founded became a household name. Land played a formative role in the study of optics, chemistry, physics, electronics, educational policy, and military strategy during both the Second World War and the Cold War. The impact of his work is immense, yet Edwin Land is perhaps best known for the company he created: Polaroid.

Land came to Cambridge in 1927 to attend Harvard University, and quickly distinguished himself as a brilliant thinker. After only one semester, however, he became disillusioned with the academic process. Those he saw around him did not share his passion, and his learning style was not conducive to the academic system. Land asked for a leave of absence from Harvard, and moved to New York City to try his hand at writing the next great American novel. Writing never satisfied his scientific passions, however, in New York he did meet Helen Maislen (known as Terre), the woman who was to be his wife for the next 61 years. After attending some classes at Columbia and experimenting in the field of polarized light, Land re-enrolled at Harvard, but maintaining his interest was difficult. Once Land had solved a problem in his own head, he had no interest in writing it down or explaining it to others. He was already on to the next problem. To try and ensure Land’s success his professors suggested that his wife help type his lab reports at their house at 40 Linnean Street, so that Land would earn credit for the intriguing experiments he was doing. Land was in the class of a graduate student, George Wheelwright, when Wheelwright called Land’s wife asking, “Mrs. Land can’t you do something to get him to finish [his work]?” She replied, “Oh, it’s the bane of my existence. He does the same on fixing things. He works on it as long as he doesn’t understand it, but as soon as he understands it he wants somebody else to do it.”(2) Despite the help of his wife and professors, Land dropped out of Harvard again in 1932, and never completed his degree. Later in life, Land would be awarded more than 20 honorary degrees from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Williams College, Tufts University, Washington University, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, University of Massachusetts, and Brandeis University.

When Land left Harvard he opened up the Land-Wheelright Laboratory with his physics instructor George Wheelright. The first space they rented was a garage on the corner of Mount Auburn and Dunster Streets in the summer of 1932, although he would later move his laboratory to find more seclusion in which to work. The problem that so thoroughly fascinated Land was that of polarizing light. Land had been fascinated with light since his childhood. He was fascinated by Robert S. Wood’s analysis of light in the book Physical Optics, where Wood writes, “Rays of light exist…which possess a one-sidedness and behave differently when differently oriented. For example, it is possible to obtain light which a glass or water surface refuses to reflect at a certain angle of incidence. Such light is said to be polarized.”(3) What had spurred Land back to Harvard for his second attempt was that while in New York he had successfully created inexpensive filters for polarizing light. Polarization had been possible up until this point, but crystals, and later glass plates covered in crystals, were needed to cover large surface areas in order to polarize them. Scientists were trying to make the largest crystals possible, but no one was succeeding. Land then employed one of his favorite innovative techniques and addressed his failure with large crystals with “the complete reversal of his approach to the problem.”(4) Land instead tried to make the tiniest crystals possible and disperse them over an area in a sort of lacquer, similar to spray paint. He could then use a magnetic field to orient the crystals and hold them in one direction. When Land achieved this he later explained it to be, “the most exciting single event in my life.”(5)

Land received his first of more than 500 patents for his innovation on June 13, 1933, for which he had filed jointly with Joseph S. Friedman of Brookline, Mass. Land was a great inventor, but he was also well-aware of the commercial applications of his discovery. Introducing his polarization to create glare-free car headlights was Land’s first attempt for an application of his invention. Land petitioned the car companies for more than a decade, but his glare-free headlights were never adopted. What grew his laboratory, in terms of both fame and money, were glare-free desk lamps, sunglasses, movies, and stage effects.

All of these possibilities were extremely attractive for investors if they could be commercialized successfully, and part of attracting the public was deciding on a name. Land’s friend and collaborator Clarence Kennedy, a Smith College art historian, is credited with coining the name polaroid for the product and therefore the company that formed from Land-Wheelright Laboratory in 1937. A professor had suggested that the synthetic sheet polarizing material that was being used in new glare-free products be called “epibolopole.” Land and Kennedy had thought the name, “was a little heavy…Then Kennedy suddenly said, ‘How about polaroid?’ and that took immediately.”(6)

At the onset of World War II, Land was a scientific celebrity and his company was a success. In 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Vannevar Bush, new director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, offered Polaroid the opportunity to make a wartime contribution. When the United States entered the war, Polaroid had several major defense contracts and developed products such as: scopes for guns on tanks and goggles for pilots during night bombing missions, a 3-dimensional machine gun training simulator, filters for rangefinders and periscopes, and a hand-held optical device to determine the elevation of an aircraft above the horizon. Polaroid made a fortune during the war, and Land’s personal contributions were remembered when he named to the President’s Science Advisory Committee during the Cold War era. In this role Land was a key player in the development of a number of spy satellites as well as the U2 spy plane, though land was as secretive about his involvement as he was prolific in his suggestions and contributions. Land’s personal papers were destroyed by an assistant at the time of his death, and his house at 163 Brattle Street later burned as well, destroying anything that may have remained inside.

After the war, Land and Polaroid returned to the civilian market. It is in this capacity that Land’s influence reigns strongest in memory. During the war, Land’s laboratories had developed a synthetic form of quinine. The United States had been importing natural quinine, from Cinchona trees, from Japan, but this was no longer an option during the war. Quinine, however, is needed for the treatment of malaria, essential for the U.S. troops fighting in tropical climates during the Second World War. What Land also discovered, and used to his advantage after the war, was that synthetic quinine could also be used for the production of cameras.

Land knew he would have to compete with Kodak’s low-cost camera if he wanted to enter the photography market. Instead of low-cost he went for speed. The day after Thanksgiving in 1948, Land introduced the “Model 95” at a Jordan Marsh Department Store in Downtown Crossing, Boston. He sold all 56 of his cameras that first day, at a cost of $89.75 each plus $1.75 for film, and the headlines of the Boston newspaper announced his success. This camera could develop sepia-tone film in 60 seconds and sold 4,000 in its first week of sales at Macy’s in New York. America became obsessed with Polaroid’s instant photography.

Land was adept at marketing and make “a Polaroid” synonymous with “a snapshot.” Early advertisements explain how “picture-in-a-minute photography” worked: “All you do is snap the shutter, wait a minute, and then lift the finished picture from the back of the camera—dry and ready to enjoy.” Polaroid expanded to black and white, and later color film. Always seeking perfection, Land thought he had found it in 1972 with the “SX-70” model camera, introduced to the public by Sir Lawrence Olivier. Polaroid describes this camera as “the first automatic single-reflex camera which ejects self developing, self-timing pictures.”(7)

The “SX-70” was perhaps the peak of Polaroid’s achievement. Later attempts at a Polavision instant movie system were a financial failure. Land resigned as both Chairman of Polaroid and Director on July 27, 1982 at age 72. Despite tie-in ad campaigns throughout the 80s and 90s with Sinbad, the Spice Girls, and Barbie, Polaroid failed to keep up with modernizing photography. Land was essentially asked to leave his own company “which is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard of” remarked Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 1985.(8) Land, always a scientist first, would go on to found the Rowland Institute for Science, to which he devoted the remaining year of his life.

Polaroid’s more recent history has not mirrored the innovation and success of its earlier years. In 2001 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the following year the assets of the company were acquired by the partners of Equity One. By 2008, with the proliferation of digital photography and printers for producing images Polaroid announced all instant film production to cease in 2008/2009, and at the end of the 2008 the re-organized Polaroid Corporation again filed for bankruptcy. In an attempt to regain its former glory, on January 5, 2010, Polaroid partnered with pop-singer Lady Gaga appointing her as Creative Director for the company and naming her the the “new face” of Polaroid. A new line of film and a new camera were also released in 2010 in hopes of keeping the company alive.

Edwin Land passed away in 1991. Land’s innovation was not only in his scientific laboratory but his community as well, both locally and nationally. Land is credited with playing a role in altering the educational approach at MIT. In a series of talks he gave in 1957, Land proposed more first-hand scientific research for students, and his influence is still obvious today. In 1967 he helped propose major U.S. government support for educational television broadcasting. He dedication to the process of research and innovation was second to none, and spent the later years of his life promoting the study of science. In 1963 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, in 1968 (for secret and non-secret work) he received the National Medal of Science, and in 1977 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

It was important to Land to situate his business activities in an intensely active scientific environment that included most areas of science. Whenever anyone asked him ‘Where is Polaroid?’, he replied ‘Between Harvard and MIT.’(9) The building which became the symbol and headquarters of Polaroid in Cambridge was the Polaroid Building at 784 Memorial Drive, formerly the B B Chemical Building. The building is an innovation in its own right, and was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It was designed by the Boston architectural firm Coolidge, Shepley, Bullfinch, and Abbott and completed in 1938—the year after Walter Gropius was introduced as the new head of Harvard’s Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design. This was the first modern industrial structure in Cambridge. The building is an example of the International Style of architecture, marked by clean lines, cost effectiveness, and affordable construction. It was in 1979 that the Polaroid company bought the building and added the iconic “POLAROID” name on the front of the building. Polaroid maintained operations from this site until 1996, and from October 1997 through July 1998 the complex was emptied to allow for restoration of the entire complex and the creation of a new world headquarters, though subsequent difficulties derailed these plans. Despite the recent struggles that Polaroid has faced, the company’s founder remains one of Cambridge’s most innovative thinkers and his company one of the most well-known around the globe during its prime.

Sources:
McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible.
http://www.savepolaroid.com/history/
http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/organization/land/index.php

McElheny, 1 (back to text)

Quotations taken from McElheny, p. 44 (back to text)

McElheny, 19 (back to text)

McElheny, 35 (back to text)

McElheny, 37. (back to text)

McElheny, 66 (back to text)

http://www.polaroid.com/ (back to text)

Mc Elheny, 454 (back to text)

http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/organization/land/boston.php

E Ink, 748 Memorial Drive

Expansion of the technological revolution has brought innovative new devices, not only into the mainstream, but into our very hands. One of the most recognizable of these devices to enter our daily worlds is eBook, such as a Kindle. The eBook is a wireless reading device which allows the user to store and access traditional media like books and newspapers in addition to more contemporary formats such as blogs. It has noteworthy memory capacity and lengthy battery lives, however, the most remarkable feature of today’s eBooks are the display screen.

The success of the eBook lies in the “E Ink” screen created by the E Ink Corporation of 733 Concord Avenue of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded by Joseph Jacobson of MIT’s Media Lab, the E Ink Corporation developed the technology for new electrophoretic display. This “electronic paper” is based on the multidisciplinary approach to research that characterizes MIT and combines elements of chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering. The “E Ink” screen bypasses the problems encountered by other electronic displays that function by emitting light, and instead functions more similarly to traditional ink upon paper. This new approach to electrophoretic displays not only allows screens to be visible under direct sunlight, a struggle relatable to anyone who has tried to read a text message at the beach, but also requires less energy to be stored within the device. These advancements allow the Kindle to be smaller, lighter, and easier to use: the goals of all technological innovation.

Sources
http://www.pcworld.com/article/159218/amazon_kindle_2_its_all_about_the_e_ink.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/technology/08ink.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink_Corporation

American Feminism, Margaret Fuller House, 71 Cherry Street

Margaret Fuller was one of the most influential and innovative people of the 19th century. She was the first American to write a book on women’s equality, and the first woman to be allowed access to Harvard’s Library. She was the first woman journalist at the New York Tribune and the first full-time book reviewer in journalism. She was the first female foreign war correspondent and first to serve under combat conditions. She was the first female literary critic whose work was important enough to set the literary standards of her time. While her life was tragically cut short, her impact both during her lifetime and today, makes her an undeniably important 19th-century Americans. She was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, education, prison reform, the abolition of slavery, and a model for female leadership and innovative thinking.

Sarah Margaret Fuller, known to all as Margaret, was born on May 23, 1810 in Cambridge. She was the eldest child of Margaret Fuller (nee Crane) a former schoolteacher and the well-known lawyer and future U.S. Congressman Timothy Fuller. Fuller’s parents insisted on a rigorous education for all of their children and, as a result, Margaret could read by the age of three. By the time she was seven she knew Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and the Latin historians. As an adult she would be a successful scholar in German, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin and would come to be known in her thirties as the best read person, male or female, in all of New England.

Fuller’s formal education continued at Cambridgeport Private Grammar School (known as “The Port School”), the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies, and finally the School for Young Ladies in Groton, Mass. She made her first challenge to the gender roles of mid-19th century society when she was granted access to the previously male-only library at Harvard in order to pursue her academic studies.

As a young woman, Fuller made a living writing minor contributions to various periodicals and literary reviews. After the sudden death of her father, she realized the need to take up a more permanent position to financially assist her widowed mother and younger siblings. Fuller accepted a position at the Temple School in Boston, an experimental, progressive school run by Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) which lasted only a year. From Boston she moved to Providence, Rhode Island to teach at the Green Street School. Here she met and began to interact with the developing Transcendentalist club.

Teaching fell by the wayside and was replaced with in-depth meetings and discussions with the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Bronson Alcott. Fuller moved back with her family in Massachusetts, but continued her involvement with the Transcendentalist movement. In her family home, Fuller began to host meetings of prominent Boston women, including educators, authors, the wives of politicians, and future leaders of the women’s rights movement, in what she called “Conversations.” Together, the women discussed fine arts, history, mythology, literature, nature and also addressed the major concerns of their society on subjects such as politics, morality, philosophy, and theories of social justice—topics previously excluded from women’s contemplations.

For five years Fuller continued these Conversations, for a time she did so while serving as the editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial first published in 1840 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Appointed by Emerson, Fuller served as The Dial’s editor for the first two years of publication, followed by Emerson himself in 1842. In 1843 she used The Dial as a platform from which to publish her essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” in which she called for women’s equality. When The Dial ceased publication in 1844, Fuller took a trip West which resulted in her publishing the book Summer on the Lakes. The success of this book led to two important developments in her life. First, Horace Greeley had enjoyed her writing and asked her to join his New York Tribune as a book editor. She accepted, moved to New York, and became so successful she soon wrote art and cultural reviews as well. The second opportunity was to publish her second and most famous work. Women in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, was the continuation of her earlier essay in The Dial, is considered the first major feminist work in the United States, and remains a classic text of feminist thought.

With her success at the New York Tribune Fuller became a foreign correspondent in 1846, toured England and France, and settled in Rome the following year. In Rome, she became entrenched in the revolutionary Italian Unification Movement after meeting the cause’s leader Guiseppe Mazzini. She fell in love with the revolutionary Giovanni Angelo, Marches d’Ossoli, with whom she had a son in 1848 and married in 1849. While Fuller was in Rome a Proclamation of the Roman Republic was made which led to battle with the French in April 1849. Fuller’s husband was mobilized to defend Rome and Margaret worked in the hospital during the siege. By July, the nascent Republic was overthrown and Margaret, her husband, and her son fled to Florence. From here she sought to return to writing and draft a history of the Roman revolution, but, under police surveillance, struggled to have her work published. Her family decided to move to the United States, and they set sail for New York City on May 17, 1850 on board the ship Elizabeth. The well-known family had chose a smaller sailing ship over a faster steamship to avoid attention on their journey.

The Elizabeth, carrying five passengers and fourteen crew, was doomed to a tragic fate. After only a week at sea the Captain died of smallpox. The ship anchored off of Gibraltar and was quarantined. After a week of no further signs of the disease, they again set sail for New York. Two days back out to sea, Fuller’s son came down with the disease. After more than a week of caring for him, his parents were overjoyed to be approaching the coast of America on July 18th. That night they all went to bed expecting to reach land in the morning, but, amidst a storm, the inexperienced captain ran aground on a sandbar at 3:30 A.M.

Stuck on the bar and being pummeled by waves, a crewman decided to swim the 200 yards to shore to seek help. The crewman reached shore, but the men there were unable to launch a boat during the storm to try and reach the wreck. By 3 P.M. that afternoon the wreck was breaking into pieces. Passengers and crew were thrown into the sea, and in total eight people were drowned. Among the dead were 40-year old Margaret Fuller, 31-year old Ossoli , and their two-year old son Angelo. The boy’s body was later found, but Margaret and Ossoli’s bodies and the draft of her last book were never recovered from the wreck. Local lore has it that a boatman discovered two unidentifiable bodies near where the wreck occurred. One was said to be a woman and the other had gold fillings. Margaret was the only woman who died and her husband the only man wealthy enough to have gold fillings. Everyone knew Fuller’s friend Horace Greeley had been searching for the bodies, but when he met with the boatman he thought it had been too long for any bodies to have been recovered and that the story could not possibly be true.

Today, Margaret Fuller is remembered as a seminal figure in the feminist movement and brilliant thinker and writer. A memorial to her stands in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. A plaque at the site, on Pyrola Path, reads: “”By birth a child of New England; by adoption a citizen of Rome; by genius belonging to the world. In youth an insatiable student seeking the highest culture; in riper years teacher, writer, critic of literature and art; in maturer age companion and helper of many earnest reformers in America and Europe.”

Sources
Dickenson, Donna. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Von Mehren, Joan. Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller.

Addressing Machine, 143 Albany Street

Sterling Elliot was an inventor all his life. Both his resume and legacy are prolific, but are filled more with practicality than superstar innovations. Despite being lesser known than some of his innovative Cambridge peers, Sterling Elliot’s ideas made a clear impact during his lifetime and ever since.

Born and raised in Michigan, Elliot grew up living a farmer’s life. He wanted a change, however, and as a young man packed his belongings and walked to the nearest city, Grand Rapids. He worked on the railroads, gained a knowledge of mechanics, was granted his first patent at age 22, and in 1882 decided to move to Boston and open his own machine shop.

Elliot’s shop was in Watertown and he was successful enough to also spend time on his greatest passion: bicycles. Next to his machine shop he maintained a bicycle factory, and from 1885 to 1896 Elliot focused on all things cycling. Some of his earliest patents were for a tricycle, a new type of brake for his velocipede, and different wheel tires and rims. He was even able to connect his cycling expertise to horse-racing and invent a new type of low-wheeled sulky that allowed trotting horses to race faster than ever before. Elliot rose to become the President of the League of American Wheelmen and Chairman of the committee that controlled Bicycle Racing. In his spare time, he began publishing “The Bicycling World,” which at its peak had a weekly readership of 112,000. It was this passion for cycling and his magazine publishing which allowed Sterling Elliot to develop the invention that he is perhaps most famous for: the Elliot Addressing Machine.

In 1886, Elliott sold his bicycle factory to the Stanley Brothers, themselves mechanical wizards who invented the first steam-powered automobile, but he maintained “The Bicycling World.” With so many readers, Elliot recognized the need for a more efficient means of addressing labels for mailing. He went to New York City to buy the top of the line addressing machine on the market, and after shopping, realized that he could make a better one himself. He began experimenting in 1898 and ultimately devised a machine which cut addresses onto fiber cards using a standard typewriter or a stenciling machine and then printed the labels by forcing ink through the stencil cards.

Elliot first began to market his machine in 1900, and his innovation paid off. Elliot’s addressing machine was superior to the competition, advertisements argued, in 17 ways, most notably in a more efficient overall performance and Elliot’s stencils were more durable than any other on the market. In 1909 Sterling hired his only son, Harmon, to become his partner in the Elliot Addressing Machine Company, and two years later they moved their factory to 143 Albany Street in Cambridge. Together, father and son improved upon the addressing machine for more than a decade, continued to invent new products with a variety of uses, and held nearly 200 patents. Even the United States government turned to Cambridge when in need of addressing solutions on a massive scale.

Harmon went on to run the Elliot Addressing Machine Company after his father’s death in 1922 and continued to improve and speed up the addressing business. When he retired in 1959, he sold the company to Bessemer Securities of New York. He negotiated the sale to maintain the factory in Cambridge and retain current employees, while Bessemer went on to invest millions of dollars in modernizations to the factory. The factory, however, was never again to be an productive as it was for the Elliots and Bessemer Securites sold the Elliot Addressing Machine Company to Dymo Industries which included a relocation to Randolph, Massachusetts and a name change to Elliot Business Machines. By 1973 the name Elliot was entirely erased and replaced with Dymo Business Systems. The business was to change hands several more times in its final decade, but ultimately the factory was closed in 1987.

Sterling, and later Harmon, Elliot was a prolific inventor who revolutionized a number of lesser-known industries. He held patents for tricycles, brakes, bicycle holders, sewing machines, tires, ball bearings, steam boilers, stencil cutting machines, and glue just to name a few. While his machines have since become obsolete, during their time they were the height of invention and innovation. Elliot’s creations even led to the earliest forms of some of today’s modern conveniences. For example, the first charge accounts used Elliot’s addressing system to mark the cards which registered a customer’s account. Ahead of his time and a brilliant problem-solver, Sterling Elliot is one of the innovative giants of Cambridge’s industrious past.

Sources
The American Digest of Business Machines, 1924
Elliott, Harmon. “The Story of a Father and Son or Unscrewing the Inscrutable”, The Elliott Addressing Machine Co. Massachusetts, 1941
http://www.officemuseum.com/mail_machines.htm

Automated Candy Production, 250 Massachusetts Avenue

America’s candy industry was launched in 1847 when Oliver R. Chase of Boston invented and patented the first American candy machine—a lozenge cutter. Together with his brother Silas, he founded Chase and Company. Chase and Company created a variety of candies, including their popular thin, multicolored sugar wafers known as Chase lozenges. Another Chase brother, Daniel, invented a lozenge printing press in 1866, which allowed him to create “Conversation Candies.” These candies were instantly popular at birthdays, weddings, and other occasions and are still popular today on Valentine’s Day.

In 1901, Chase and Company joined with two other candy manufacturers to form the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO). By 1927, the booming candy company was again looking to expand and moved to Cambridge, on Massachusetts Avenue near the Charles River and MIT. When it opened, this factory was the largest factory entirely devoted to candy manufacturing in the world, and remained the home of NECCO until 2003. The factory contained the most modern temperature-control and candy-manufacturing equipment of its era, making NECCO a worldwide candy leader.

From this location, innovation continued for NECCO as they became the first candy manufacturer in the country to introduce a molded chocolate bar with four distinctly different centers encased in a chocolate covering. This new candy, the Sky Bar, was introduced to the public through a skywriting campaign in 1938.

NECCO continued to gain attention in the 1930s when Admiral Byrd took 2 ½ tons of NECCO wafers with him on a South Pole exploration. The following decade, during the Second World War the U.S. Government requisitioned a major portion of the production of the wafers because they are “practically indestructible,” making NECCO wafers ideal to ship overseas to the troops.

NECCO has grown from its small origins in Oliver Chase’s invention to incorporate many other candy companies throughout its 150+ year history. As recently as 2004, NECCO obtained the license for Squirrel Nut Candies, another Cambridge favorite since 1914. One thing that has remained the same for NECCO in Cambridge is the process of creating the famed NECCO wafers. The ingredients, sugar, gelatin, and flavoring, are the same as they were in 1847 and much of the machinery used to mix, roll, and press the wafers is pre-World War II technology. Workers still judge by hand the right number of wafers for the perfect roll, and NECCO has no desire to mechanize this process.

Though the company moved from Cambridge to Revere in 2003, the 76-year tenure in Cambridge saw NECCO became one of the leading candy manufacturing companies in the world and a leader of candy innovation.

Sources
http://www.necco.com/aboutus/history.asp
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/MA/200003102.html
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/New-England-Confectionery-Co-Company-History.html

Elias Howe’s Sewing Machine, Main Street near Windsor

Few inventions have changed everyday life as radically as the sewing machine. Altering an important element of daily life, the sewing machine was an innovation on a personal yet universal level. The creation process of the sewing machine was the work of several men over a number of years, however, Elias Howe, Jr. is ultimately considered the inventor of the sewing machine. Four patents were actually issued prior to Howe’s, but none of those inventors made any money.1 Elias Howe’s innovation, in addition to the mechanical improvements to his machine, was in putting together all of the work of his predecessors, and producing a sewing machine used around the globe. Through this he was able to gain fame and fortune as one of the great innovators of his era.

Elias Howe, Jr. was born on a farm near Spencer, Massachusetts in 1819. He left the farm at age 16 and traveled to Lowell, Massachusetts seeking to apprentice in a machine shop. After the financial panic of 1837 he lost his job in Lowell and moved to Boston, finding work in the shop of Ari Davis making mariner’s tools and scientific equipment. Due, perhaps, to the inquisitive-minded nature of the clientele, inventing dreams and gossip were often discussed in Davis’ shop. Local legend has it that this is how Howe gained the inspiration for his sewing machine. When an inspiring inventor brought in a knitting machine seeking encouragement, Davis replied to the man, “Why are you wasting your time over a knitting machine? Take my advice, try something that will pay. Make a sewing machine.” The customer replied, “It can’t be done,” but Howe wasn’t so sure.

There were additional factors in Howe’s life which contributed to his interest in making a sewing machine. He was born with a physical disability–a type of a lameness–which increasingly made his work as a laborer more difficult and more painful. In 1843, when he was forced from work for a time due to his disability, his wife took up odd-job sewing to pay the family bills. Watching her work, he realized that the elusive sewing machine could solve all of his family’s financial and physical difficulties and dedicated himself to the project.

Financial limitations were Howe’s greatest obstacle—where to work, how to buy to supplies, and how to support his family without a paying job. Cambridge came to his rescue. His father had recently opened a factory in the city, and so Howe was free to set up shop in the factory for his own work. Sadly, however, the factory burned down not long after it opened. Howe was saved by a generous and business-minded Cantabrigian named George Fisher. A friend of Howe’s, Fisher saw merit in Howe’s idea. Fisher agreed to house Howe and his family as well invest $500 into the project in return for a half interest in the patent if one was obtained. Howe began full time work on it, and the project lived on.

Within two years, by May 1845, Howe had a machine that was sewing seams. By July he finished his first two suits of wool clothes—one for George Fisher and one for himself. But to do more than his predecessors had been able to do, Howe had to interest the public in his machine. He put on a display, a race against five seamstresses, and his machine finished five entire seams before any of the seamstresses finished one. The crowds remained wary, however, and the protests of the local tailors proved effective—Howe did not receive a single order for his machine.

Undaunted, Howe continued on. He finished a second machine and was awarded U.S. patent #4750 on September 10, 1846. George Fisher, his loyal investor, was growing frustrated after funding the project for more than two years without any returns. Howe sent his brother Amasa Howe to England, hoping to find a more willing potential market. Amasa met William Thomas, a manufacturer of umbrellas, corsets, and leather goods, and struck a deal in which Elias went to England to work on a new machine specifically adapted for corset making, and he sold one of his original machines to Thomas for 250 pounds sterling.

England quickly proved no better for Howe, and his troubles continued. He was never able to finis hthe adapted machine, and he sold what little he had managed to accomplish to Thomas for five pounds. Broke and unemployed in a foreign country, he got word from America that his wife was gravely ill. In order to earn enough money to travel back home, Howe pawned his remaining original machine and his patent papers. Once back in America, he suffered a terrible personal blow with the death of his wife, but in time realized that sewing machines had become popular in his absence. Even more shocking was that the machines being sold were based on his design. He quickly repurchased his machine and patent papers from the London pawnshop, and then began to send letters to the suspected patent-infringers. This ultimately forced Howe into court, which was expensive but his family and friends again came to his aid. His two major cases were against Walter Hunt and Issac Singer, and he won both times. In the case between Howe and Hunt in the 1850s, the Patent Commissioner explained why Howe was deemed the rightful king of sewing machines despite Hunt having created a machine first:

When the first inventor allows his discovery to slumber for eighteen years, with no probability of its ever being brought into useful activity, and when its only resurrected to supplant and strangle and invention which has been given to the public, and which has been made practically useful, all reasonable presumption should be in favor of the inventor who has been the means of conferring the real benefit upon the world.

Howe won the case, but as the sewing machine grew in popularity, all of the major manufacturers began to make increasingly similar machines. To avoid continual lawsuits over every new model, an agreement forming a business “Combination,” was reached in 1856. Four major patent holders all agreed that their parts could be used by the others. Additionally Howe was to receive royalties equaling $5 for every machine sold in the United States and $1 for every machine exported. Between 1856 and 1867, when the patent expired, this meant that Howe earned at least $2,000,000 in license fees.

Howe, as well as the other sewing machine manufacturers, gained popularity in Cambridge, then Boston, and then around the country and the world. The sewing machine gained popularity amid the industrial boom in America. Howe’s machine sped up the production of everything with stitching—from umbrellas to tents—and most especially the clothing industry was monumentally transformed. Ready-made clothing replaced and outnumbered the idea of owning only a few items of clothing. Increased efficiency meant cheaper costs of production, and along with a rise in fashion, people began to own more, mechanically-stitched clothes. As evidenced by the dramatic increase in production and decrease in time it took to make articles of clothing, the sewing machine revolutionized the modern world:

Number of Stitches Per Minute	By Hand	By Machine
Patent leather, fine stitching	7	175
Binding hats	33	374
Stitching vamped shoes	10	210
Stitching fine linen	23	640
Stitching fine silk	30	550

Time For Garments Stitched	By Hand	By Machine
Frock coats	16 hrs. 35 min.	2 hrs. 38 min.
Satin vests	7 hrs. 19 min.	1 hr. 14 min.
Summer pants	2 hrs. 50 min.	0 hr. 38 min.
Calico dress	6 hrs. 37 min.	0 hr. 57 min.
Plain apron	1 hr. 26 min.	0 hr. 9 min.
Gentleman’s shirts	14 hrs. 26 min.	1 hr. 16 min.

By 1900, sewing machines were making not only clothing, but awnings, tents, sails, cloth bags, book bindings and book manufacture, flags and banners, pocketbooks, trunks, valises, saddlery, harnesses, mattresses, umbrellas, linens, rubber belting and hose for an aggregate sum of $979,988,413 for that year alone.

Elias Howe died at age 48 in 1867, the same year that his patent expired. Upon his death, his two sons-in-law carried on his business, but in the mid 1880s, however, the Howe Machine Company went out of business. The company of one of Howe’s earliest competitors, Isaac Singer, went on to dominate the sewing machine industry, and remains a household name today. Singer’s earliest machines owed much to Elias Howe. The success and influence of Howe’s machine cannot be understated, and much of his success and early innovation took place in, and with the help of, Cambridge.

For example, on February 4, 1804, Thomas Stone and James Henderson received a French patent for a “new mechanical principle designed to replace handiwork in joining the edges of all kinds of flexible material, and particularly applicable to the manufacture of clothing,” Sewing Machine News (1880), vol. 1, no.8, p.2. And pg. 6 French tailor Barthelemy Thimonnier came close to making money, receiving in 1830 a French patent for his machine and by 1841 establishing a shop in Paris with 80 machines stitching clothes for the army. However, a mob of threatened tailors soon attacked his shop and destroyed his machines. Political unrest doomed his next attempt at the end of the decade, and he died a poor man. In the United States, in the 1830s Walter Hunt had invented a machine which sewed with great speed and accuracy, but it failed to sew anything with curved or angular lines. p. 11

p. 219

The Honorable Charles Mason, Commissioner of the Patent Office in his decision and opinion offered on May 24, 1854 for the Hunt vs. Howe interferance suit. (pg. 13)

p. 41

Eighty Years of Progress in the United States (New York, 1861), vol. 2, pp.413-429 (and page 58)

p. 60

First Phone Call, 685 Main Street

Most of the innovations highlighted throughout Cambridge’s history are noteworthy as sparks of inspiration that have since changed the world. The new ideas represent firsts of their kind, groundbreaking perspectives, or solutions to global questions. The case of telecommunications in Cambridge is different. The first major innovation in telecommunications involved Cambridge by mere chance. However, more than 130 years later, thinkers in Cambridge remain on the cutting edge of telecommunication technology.

Telecommunication simply means the action of transmitting information over a significant distance for the purposes of communication. Telecommunication as we know it today is the result of the work of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. Alexander Graham Bell was interested in hearing devices from an early age, enhanced by the fact that his mother and, later, his wife, were deaf. Bell experimented with hearing and speech communication devices for years.

A native of Scotland, Bell came to Boston, in 1871 to teach at the Boston School for the Deaf. Three years later, a chance meeting with Thomas A. Watson, an electrical designer and mechanic, would ultimately lead to one of the most important inventions in history. Bell was racing another inventor Elisha Gray for the first “acoustic telegraph” patent. While it is still somewhat debated as to who actually made it to the patent office first, Bell got the patent. Only a few days later, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke into his device, and Mr. Watson was able to hear him in the next room.

Both Bell and Watson knew, however, that the true value in this innovation could only be realized if sound could be transmitted over long distances. This success was achieved on October 9, 1876 when the first wire conversation took place between Bell’s Boston laboratory and was received in Cambridge. Bell was on Kilby Street in Boston and Watson was two miles away at the Cambridge office of Walworth Mfg. Co.. The following year the Bell Telephone Company was founded and within a decade, 150,000 people in the United States owned telephones.

Today, telephones are as pervasive as almost any other form of technology. Modern smart phone technology continually adds to the possibilities of what modern phones can do. One company driving the smart phone technology is Google. Arriving a bit late to the smart phone market, Google was part of the Open Handset Alliance, a business alliance, currently consisting of 83 companies, which promotes open source standards for mobile device development. Google bought the start-up Android, Inc. the initial developer of the Android software, in 2005. Since then, the earliest iterations of the Android platform have been developed in Google’s Kendall Square office to become one of the most successful mobile operating systems on the market. Adherents to the Android system will boast of superior browsing, stronger connectivity, a strong app market, personalization options, and the open source transparency of the code to make Android the best modern phone on the market.

Google Cambridge does much more than just work on the Android OS. YouTube, Blogger, Friend Connect, Google books, image search, and other infrastructure projects are all based out of the Kendall Square address. While Cambridge was first part of worldwide telephone news with the first telephone call between two cities, today Google Android is at the forefront of telecommunication technology.

http ://www .innoeco .com /labels /Android .html
http ://technology .inc .com /tag /cambridge –massachusetts /
http ://www .wickedlocal .com /cambridge /archive /x 880805415/Google –looking –to –grow –in –Cambridges –Kendall –Square #ixzz 1 U 7 dlAiqf
http ://www .innoeco .com /2008/05/inside –googles –cambridge –ma –offices .html
http ://www .techrepublic .com /blog /10 things /10-things –android –phones –do –better –than –the –iphone /1131
http ://www .businessweek .com /technology /content /aug 2005/tc 20050817_0949_tc 024.htm

Center Isle Train Car, 579-587 Main Street

A train is a staple of modern transportation. Ask even a young child to describe a train, and the description will be generally the same. They may vary slightly from the outside, but on the inside, people sit in rows of seats along both sides of the cars, while passengers, train staff, or anyone else, move through the length of a car along a center aisle. While this may seem obviously simple today, in the past, train cars were much different.

Early rail transportation gained attention for its promise of efficiency but certainly not for a promise of comfort. Without being forced to rely on the limited capabilities of horsepower for mobility, trains could go farther, faster, and were quickly surpassing coaches and carriages in popularity for early 19th century travel. To ride in a train car, however, meant sitting on not much more than road coaches mounted on flanged wheels. Often the train’s wheels protruded up into the car itself–a clumsy, dirty, and dangerous arrangement. Even with these drawbacks, the only people who could afford to travel by train were those who had, or had saved, enough money to pay for an exclusive seat in the train’s small compartment.

Innovation in train car design is credited to Charles Davenport. Davenport was a young, recently-apprenticed wheelwright working in Cambridge in the early 1800s. After completing his apprenticeship, Davenport joined his friend Ebenezer Kimball, operator of a stage line between Cambridge and Boston, formed the company Kimball & Davenport, and began to make a name for themselves producing carriages and related goods for the rail line. As their company grew, they employed a blacksmith, a painter, a harnessmaker, as well as two journeymen and four apprentices. In 1834 Kimball & Davenport was commissioned to build four-wheeled cars for the Boston & Worcester Railroad. Davenport’s suggestion for how it should be done involved an innovation which revolutionized transportation.

The Boston & Worcester Railroad commission required that each of the cars seat 24 passengers. To complete this project, it is described that, “Mr. Davenport designed a car with the passageway running its entire length and permitting the passengers to all face the same way. This was the beginning of the American type of railroad passenger car. The first cars had the entrance door in the center of the body, with a step on both sides running along the entire length of the car, similar to the running board on the later-day open trolley car.” 1

What Charles Davenport had introduced was the center-aisle train car. No longer were there only a few seats in a closed train car compartment, but he had made rows of seats on either side of a central aisle. The practicality of this design was obvious to all, and Davenport’s next iteration of the car saw doors at either end of the car instead of only in the center. With comfort and ease of travel a revealed priority for rail travel, ladies washrooms and toilets began to be included in train construction as well. While the physical design of the center-aisle train car was revolutionary for its increased efficiency, it also had major social consequences for travelling. A person no longer needed to pay for an entire compartment to travel, or even one of a few expensive seats. With rows of identical seats, anyone who could afford a single ticket could travel, and people all sat together as equals in the car.

In 1835, Davenport received a patent for an additional innovation in train transportation. He had created the the Davenport drawbar, which eased the jolt of a starting train by including a spring in the seat design. His new seats were also reversible, meaning they could be flipped to face the opposite direction when a train turned around, eliminating the need to turn around the entire car so that passengers could face forward.

Davenport’s partner Ebenezer Kimball died in 1839, and Davenport soon partnered with his son-in-law Albert Bridges to form Cambridge’s car-building powerhouse of Davenport & Bridges, which remained the leading manufacturer of railroad cars in the United States for the next twenty years. In 1842, the Davenport & Bridges works moved to the south side of Main Street, where they occupied the entire block between Portland Street and Osborn Street. Their factory, the largest in Cambridge at the time, was described in the American Railroad Journal in 1848:
“To the three-story brick building fronting on Main Street, two large wings were added in 1848, extending on Osborn Street, known as the east and west wings. [Main Street running roughly east and west.] The west wing, facing on Osborn Street, was about three hundred and fifty feet long by forty feet wide. [Slightly more than the length of a modern football field from goal post to goal post.] The east wing extended parallel to the other wing, with an open area between. This building was two hundred and forty feet by forty-three feet, both wings were brick, two stories high. One wing was used as a foundry and blacksmith shop, the latter containing sixteen forges, while the other was used as a machine shop. There were eight smaller buildings, most of them about one hundred by thirty feet, some of them being two stories high. Over one hundred men were employed.”

The factory of Davenport and Bridges built some of the most luxurious and expensive train cars of the era. The company was even commissioned by the Untied States government to build “100 baggage wagons” during the Mexican War.

Later in his career, Davenport split from Albert Bridges. In 1854 he opened the Davenport Car Works at 708 Main Street, Cambridge. The following year, he retired a wealthy man of only 43, and sold his company to Caleb Allen and Henry Endicott. Davenport spent the rest of his days traveling the United States and around the world.

The importance of Davenport’s innovation has perhaps been obscured by its omnipotence. Nevertheless, the center-aisle train car is an immensely important innovation which has forever altered how the world travels.

Sources:
Charles Davenport, 1812-1903. Leaders of Cambridge Industry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Trust Company, 1931
http://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/davenport-bridges1.htm
Bianculli, Anthony J. Trains and Technology: Cars. University of Delaware Press, 2002, p. 22

1 Charles Davenport, 1812-1903. Leaders of Cambridge Industry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Trust Company, 1931

Radar, Sonar, Rad Lab, Building 20, MIT (Vassar Near Main)

The development of microwave radar doesn’t belong solely to Cambridge. By the mid-1930s, engineers were bouncing radio waves off objects and using the returning signals to estimate distance and direction. Before World War II, the British had created Chain Home, a series of radio radar stations that gave them a short notice of incoming planes.

However, the range of was very limited. Higher frequencies were needed. By 1940, a group of British researchers had developed the “cavity magnetron”, which allowed for the development microwave radars. Lacking time and resources, a team of scientists and a magnetron traveled to America and soon after the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab, was established at MIT.

The Rad Lab operated from October of 1940 through December of 1945. It was originally a part of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) until that committee was renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941. Vannevar Bush, a Tufts graduate and one of the founders of Raytheon in Cambridge, was appointed the Chairman of NDRC and then OSRD by President Roosevelt. Lee DuBridge was the director of the Rad Lab and physicist Alfred Lee Loomis was significant in securing the early funding for the lab.

The Rad Lab developed most of the Radar used by the U.S. and Allied forces during WWII. It also developed Long Range Navigation or LORAN, the first world wide radio navigation system and what today’s Global Positioning System (GPS) is based on. The Rad Lab’s microwave Radar early-warning saved London from aerial destruction by designing approximately 50% of the radar used to shoot down enemy bombers and guide Allies’ planes during the war. The Rad Lab went on to developed over 100 radar systems.

While the Rad Lab was developing the technology of Radar and Sonar, Percy Spencer at the neighboring Raytheon factory created a fast, cheap process to produce magnetrons, making radar a usable technology. Raytheon produced 80% of the magnetrons used during the war.

Synthetic Penicillin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In terms of public health, penicillin is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. Its medical benefits were famously discovered in 1928 by Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming from a piece of moldy bread. Penicillin was quickly realized to be a miracle drug, but its production was slow and laborious. Fleming’s process required harvesting the penicillin for months before creating even just a small dosage. During World War II the demand far outstripped what was produced. Subsequently, the American and British governments spent $20 million and recruited more than 1,000 scientists working in 39 different labs, to synthesize the creation of penicillin. Years of failure led most to believe it was a lost cause and the end of the war saw the governments pull their funding from the research.

In 1946, as others were jumping ship, a 31-year old organic chemist, John Clark Sheehan, began his 31-year career at MIT and dedicated himself to tackling the penicillin problem. His was the only lab continuing research to create synthetic penicillin. Nine years later, he proved all the doubters wrong, successfully creating a general total synthesis of penicillin. He created both a total synthesis as well as an intermediate compound which became the foundation of hundreds of additional kinds of synthetic penicillin. This was made possible with the isolation of Penicillin 6-APA, the nucleus of the penicillin molecule, which, once isolated, allowed for the creation of various and specific types of penicillin by stringing molecules from this stable nucleus. By the end of his career, Sheehan had over 30 patents, including numerous targeted treatments that vastly improved the effectiveness of this miracle drug. His research paved the way for further medicines including peptides, antibiotics, alkaloids, and steroids. Ampicillin, a commonly-used semi-synthetic penicillin, able to be taken orally rather than by injection, is one of the most well-known of Sheehan’s additional medical innovations.

The importance of Sheehan’s innovation is indescribable. Since his discovery, penicillin has become more easily produced and used in medicine. A wide range of penicillin derivatives have been discovered to prevent and treat diseases most often stemming from bacterial infections. Many people have benefited from this work to treat such ailments as ear infections, strep throat, tonsillitis, and even general cuts. Additionally, the flexibility the treatment of penicillin now enjoys means that variants of penicillin can be quickly adapted to treat almost any specific medical problem. Synthesized penicillin, an innovation rooted in the MIT laboratory of John Clark Sheehan, in Cambridge, is one of the most important and far-reaching innovations in the field of modern medicine.

Fire Hoses, 27 Hampshire Street

Historically, fire hoses were made of strips of leather riveted together. Too much pressure would cause the rivets to pop and storing them incorrectly would cause the leather to crack. When a hose was needed, it was never certain if it would hold up.

In 1870, Cambridge’s Lyman Blake, already the inventor of a machine to sew soles into shoes, invented a new machine that could sew rubber-lined canvas into a hose. Retired army Colonel Theodore Dodge saw the possibility for an improved fire hose and together they began to manufacture the “Blake hose.” At first the innovation was in the cost-efficiency of the hose’s production, but soon quality, durability, and increased size forever altered the hose industry.

Over the coming years, Dodge worked with James Gillespie and Robert Cowen to create woven multi-tubular fabrics, or essentially hoses woven from rubber and cotton. Cowen was an engineer who simplified and improved Gillespie’s machine to loom fabric in a tubular shape. These fabric-reinforced hoses were flexible, resilient, and could withstand much greater pressure than any other hoses being made at the time. The loom designed to create these hoses quickly became the industry standard and remains the basis of similar machines today.

The successful combination of Dodge and Cowen’s efforts resulted in the formation of The Boston Woven Hose Company. They rented space in the Curtis Davis Soap factory on Portland Street and started to market their wares. It took them ten years to convince conservative fire departments to begin using their hoses, but their persistence paid off and by the 1880s they became the largest producer of fire hoses. Change in rubber hoses was the innovation that founded The Boston Woven Hose Company, but leaders in the company saw room to grow and markets to expand into. Belting, packing, gaskets, mold-work, mechanical goods, and pretty much everything made of rubber except clothing and shoes became the focus of The Boston Woven Hose Company. By the mid-twentieth century, they had grown to be the largest manufacturer of rubber parts in the world.

Graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology often came to the company to work on some of the most innovative machinery of its time. From world-altering fire hoses to inner-tube bicycle tires, and later to convertible tops and the liners for gasoline tanks, the rubber products that have revolutionized the world can be largely attributed to the innovations at The Boston Woven Hose Company of Cambridge, Mass. Today the inside of one of the Boston Woven Hose Company’s factories, though altered from its original appearance, can be seen by visitors to the Cambridge Brewing Company in Kendall Square.

Sources:
Gilman, Arthur, ed. The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1896.
http ://www .centralstateshose .com /bostonintro .php
http ://mysecretboston .com /deep –background /getting –hosed

Venture Capital, 146 Sixth Street

Venture capital (VC) is money provided to young, high-potential start-up companies with an innovative (and therefore potentially lucrative) business plan. The concept behind this investment strategy is the belief that with the investment, the start-up will be able to become a successful company, and therefore the investing company, owning equity in the start-up, will make a significant return on its investment. While investments to bolster young companies existed in the first half of the 20th century, the money always came from wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and Warburgs. Companies were founded from the wealth of these super-rich families, but there was always a limit to their growth, dependent on what the families spent.

Modern venture capitalism was created when firms investing with private equity developed in the years following World War II. The potential for growth with this model became seemingly limitless. According to a 2009 Global Insight study, venture-backed companies accounted for 12.1 million jobs and $2.9 trillion in revenue in the United States in 2008.(1) Much of the boom in VC companies was fueled by the firms on Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, CA: the access point of Silicon Valley. Companies in this area have invested in and developed, among other things, numerous computer hardware, computer software, electronics, semiconductor, and telecommunications firms. While the contribution to the growth of VC is undeniable in Silicon Valley, the origins of venture capital exist on the other coast of the United States. Georges Doriot, French immigrant, WWII hero, Dean of the Harvard Business School and innovator, is known as “the father of venture capital.” While his firm was based out of Boston, many of his first investments, the investments that made modern venture capitalism a possibility and later a reality, were start-up companies in Cambridge.

Georges Doriot was born in France in 1899, and fought in the French army during World War I. He immigrated to the United States to earn his MBA at Harvard, stayed on, and rose to become a professor in the Harvard Business School in 1926. He became a U.S. Citizen in 1940, which allowed him to play a highly influential role in the U.S.’s war effort during the Second World War. He became Director of the Military Planning Division, working on military research, development and planning, in order to get new ideas made into products to be used for the battlefield. He rose as high as Brigadier General, and at the end of the war U.S. Army General Chief of Staff, Dwight D. Eisenhower, asked Doriot to serve as the director of a new Department of Research and Development. Eisenhower explained that “The armed forces could not have won the war alone. Scientists and businessmen contributed techniques and weapons which enables us to outwit and overwhelm the enemy…This pattern of integration much be translated into a peacetime counterpart.”(2) Doriot, however, wanted to return to Harvard and his life as a professor, and agreed only to serve as deputy director until a permanent replacement could be found. Doriot explained later, “There was no hope of doing anything very constructive and everybody was sort of bossed out and fed up with Army expenditure.”(3) Despite not taking the job, he did, however, share in Eisenhower’s ideas.
Once back at Harvard, Doriot did not return to his old life as planned. Intimately aware of the importance of science and technology, Doriot embarked on a new path to ensure postwar American prosperity. Along with MIT President Karl Compton, Ralph Flanders, Merrill Griswold, and Donald K. David, Doriot founded the venture capital firm American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) which was incorporated under Massachusetts law on June 6, 1946. Doriot wrote in the company’s first annual report that ARDC was created, “to aid in the development of new or existing businesses into companies of stature and importance.”(4) As mentioned above, this was not the first VC firm, but it was the first not backed by a wealthy-East Coast family inheritances. The founders of ARDC were celebrities of their era, and the foundation of ARDC was covered and discussed in many leading newspapers. People were curious to see if this experiment would survive. The Boston Globe concluded that, “if this company does not pan out, it will not because it has not plenty of the right kind of brains behind it.”(5)

In order for any VC firm to survive, both the first and VC firms of today, it must make sound investments in companies that have a bright future. Innovative companies based in science and technology, employing the brightest minds of their generation became the sustenance that allowed ARDC to survive. Many of these start-up companies were in Cambridge. ARDC itself started out on Milk Street in Boston, and later moved to the 23rd floor of the John Hancock building, but Doriot remained active at Harvard and the ideas of Cambridge thinkers attracted his attention.
In its first year ARDC invested in three companies. Circo Products, a Cleveland-based company received $150,000 for worked to develop a handgun that melted car engine grease. The other two companies were based in Cambridge. High Voltage Engineering Corporation, a company based out of a converted parking garage by two MIT scientists, received a $200,000 investment for their work on developing a two-million-volt generator, eight times more powerful than existing X-ray machines. An additional $150,000 went to Tracerlab, Incorporated, also founded by scientists at MIT, which sold radioactive isotopes and made radiation detection.

ARDC was very picky in deciding which companies to invest in. In any given year ARDC would never finance more than 4% of the proposals they received, and usually the number was closer to 1 or 2 %. In 1947, their first full year of of operation, ARDC received over 400 proposals. Of the ones the company did invest in, Baird Associates of Cambridge, received $225,000 for making instruments used in the chemical analysis of metals and gases.
While the company saw modest growth early on, it continued to invest carefully, looking for the first major “home run.” At the end of 1948, Cambridge-based Ionics, Incorporated was one of the more revolutionary companies in the ARDC portfolio. Doriot had been introduced to Walter Juda, a PhD candidate in chemistry at Harvard who was working on a membrane that was designed to make brackish water potable for irrigation and drinking by sorting metallic from nonmetallic ions. Doriot called up a colleague at Dow Chemical Company to ask if this idea had any merit. The colleague told Doriot that the technology was impossible, but Doriot had Juda send a membrane to the Dow company. Doriot received a note a few days later from his colleague which read, “That’s the breakthrough,” and ARDC soon after invested $50,000, creating Ionics, Inc. Doriot himself joined the board. By the end its first decade, Ionics, High Voltage Engineering, and Tracerlab, all Cambridge companies, were the most successful of ARDC’s investments. By the mid-1950s, however, profits were stagnating, and proposals were becoming less frequent. In 1954, ARDC made no new investments. The firm needed its big break, and in 1957 they got it.

Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, Olsen an MIT grad and Anderson on the staff at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, put together a business plan in the spring of 1957 to launch a computer company that would make machines that were cheaper and easier to build and use than the hulking, IBM mainframes they had experience with at the Lincoln Labs. Doriot needed some new projects and was intrigued by their ideas, but thought the plan needed to be edited. Olsen and Anderson wanted $100,000. ARDC offered them $70,000, and $30,000 loan, in return for a 70% share of the company, take-it-or-leave-it. No other companies had offered them anything, and according to Olsen, “A number of companies had started in the Korean War. A number were no longer in existence.”(6) They had no other options, and so they took the deal. As part of the agreement, in response to an industry still hesitant to the word “computer,” Digital Computer Corporation was renamed as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was the first VC major success. In 1968, following DEC’s initial public offering, ARDC shares were worth $355 million—500 times its original investment.

The impact of ARDC is immeasurable. During the Doriot years, ARDC launched several major companies that are still influential today. Teradyne Inc. was not making money when the company came to ARDC for an investment in the 1960s. Today, based out of North Reading, Teradyne is worth $2.3 billion. Ionics Inc., one of the early Cambridge-based ARDC investments, was purchased by GE in 2004 for $1.1 billion, and remains a leader in the manufacture of water treatment solutions that create value for people, businesses and industries.(7)

Beyond being the first modern venture capital firm, a number of Doriot’s employees founded their own influential VC firms. Former employees of ARDC have gone on to found several prominent venture capital firms including Greylock Partners in Silicon Valley and Morgan, Holland Ventures, the predecessor of Flagship Ventures, in Kendall Square, Cambridge. Doriot retired in 1971, and the following year merged ARDC with Textron, Inc. of Rhode Island, after investing in more than 150 companies. ARDC company has since become and independent entity again, but it does not disclose much about its activities and it does not have a website. Venture capital is an elemental part of the modern American economy, and this important innovation stems from offices in Boston but investments in the start-up companies of Cambridge.

References:
Spencer E. Ante, Creative Capital, Harvard Business Press: Boston, 2008.
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/04/06/venture_capitals_grandfather/ –with a video
http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2008/june/prophet.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/doriot_hi.html
http://museum.mit.edu/150/78 –mit museum article
http://www.ionicsfidelity.com/aboutus.html
http://nvca.org

2010 Global Venture Capital Survey Results, nvca.org (back to text)

Spencer E. Ante, Creative Capital, Harvard Business Press: Boston, 2008, p. 106 (back to text)

Ibid. (back to text)

Doriot, quoted in Ante, p. 107. (back to text)

Ante, p. 111. (back to text)

Olsen, according to Ante, 149. (back to text)

http://www.ionicsfidelity.com/aboutus.html

Guidance Systems, 555 Technology Square

The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., first known as the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and called the “I” Lab, was founded in Cambridge in the late 1930s by Charles Stark Draper. The Laboratory was renamed for its founder in 1970 and remained a part of MIT until 1973 when it became an independent, not-for-profit research and development corporation, and remains so today in the heart of Kendall Square.

Charles Draper founded the lab as a teaching laboratory to develop the instrumentation needed to make precise measurements of angular and linear motion. During his tenure at MIT, he extended the curriculum of courses in the fields of instrument engineering and fire control while he was head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He wrote extensively in the fields of instrumentation and control, and he served as a consulting engineer to many aeronautical companies and instrument manufacturers, and held a variety of patents for measuring and control equipment.

The application of Draper’s interest and research was most clear in the study of aircraft motion and Draper’s lab gained government attention during World War II when asked to developed an inertial navigation system. These systems were initially developed for rockets andGerman scientists were far more advanced that the United States in the 1940s and 50s. Fearing a dependency on foreign technology the U.S. government tasked Draper’s lab with defining and improving the inertial navigation technology. The results included a navigation aid that uses a computer, motion sensors, and rotation sensors to continuously calculate via dead reckoning the position, orientation, and velocity of a moving object without the need for external references. This method came to be used on vehicles such as ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft. Before Draper developed his inertial guidance systems, navigators depended on more laborious methods, such as celestial navigation and radio navigation. The success of the lab’s creation was its use in applicability in both manned and unmanned vehicles, its successful performance in unfavorable weather, and the fact that it does not rely on information from external sources to be accurate. U.S. Department of Defense research contracts bolstered the lab’s focus on the development of advanced guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) technologies to meet Department of Defense’s and NASA’s needs.

Draper’s inertial navigation system was adapted by the Navy and the Air Force in significant ways which would lead to its most dramatic application with NASA’s Apollo space program. In the 1950s the Marine Stable Element System (MAST), was developed for ships and boats and the technology was soon employed by the Air Force in missile guidance systems. In conjunction with the MAST research, a parallel effort in aerial navigation took place in February 1953, when an Air Force B-29 bomber took off on a top-secret mission from Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts, traveled 2,250 nautical miles to Los Angeles in 12.5 hours, and made aviation history. For the first time, a plane had flown from coast to coast with the pilot essentially as an autonomous spectator. Draper himself was aboard the plane that day, cheering along with seven other engineers from the lab, as the 2,700-pound Space Inertial Reference Equipment (SPIRE) system located at the back of the B-29 automatically directed the plane’s flight using the first working implementation of “inertial navigation” for a cross-country trip. This success opened the door for numerous other advancements.

Guided planes were quickly recognized to be capable of transporting guided missiles and Draper reconnected with its DoD past. Ballistic missiles at this time needed improvement in guidance accuracy. In the past, radio guidance had been used, relying on ground-based radars to track the missile’s flight path and ground-based computers to compute steering commands sent to the missile via a radio link. However, the main drawback to radio was its susceptibility to interference or jamming. Inertial navigation was nonjammable, and Draper’s lab busied itself with the created of guided missile systems. Many of the U.S.’s important strategic weapons, including the Air Force’s Atlas, Thor, and Titan, and the Navy’s Polaris, Poseidon, and Trident missiles were Draper innovations.

Beyond defensive contracting, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory’s most heralded innovation is perhaps the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which was the on-board computer and control for guidance and navigation of the Command Module and Lunar Module of the Apollo space program. The AGC was designed under Draper’s supervision, and the hardware for instruments were created by another Cambridge-based innovator, Raytheon. (link to article). In addition to creating the computers that enabled man to walk on the moon, Draper Labs were the first to use the integrated circuit technology that subsequently gave us desktop computers and so many of the consumer electronic products that fill our lives today.

Known today as Draper Labs, the Cambridge laboratory is heralded for its long history and continuing efforts toward the design and development of the world’s most accurate and reliable guidance systems. From its earliest work pioneering inertial navigation, Draper’s work has contributed substantially to the development of today’s complement of precise inertial sensors, software, and ultra-reliable systems that are critical for precision GN&C of commercial and military aircraft, submarines, strategic and tactical missiles, spacecraft, and unmanned vehicles. In tribute to the memory of Charles Draper and all that his laboratory achieved, Draper Laboratory endowed the Charles Stark Draper Prize, an international engineering award administered by the National Academy of Engineering. The Prize is awarded annually to individuals whose outstanding engineering achievements have contributed to the well-being and freedom of all humanity. The legacy of Draper’s innovation continues in Cambridge, and the lab named for him continues to explore the boundaries science and technology as a self-proclaimed “independent, not-for-profit laboratory in applied research, engineering development, education, and technology transfer.”

Sources:
http://www.draper.com/
http://www.draper.com/draper25/draper25.pdf
http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/computer.htm
http://klabs.org/history/apollo_11_alarms/eyles_2004/eyles_2004.htm

Human Genome Project, 146 Sixth Street

The complete mapping and understanding of the human genome was one of the most ambitious endeavors undertaken by the scientific community. The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international, 13-year effort, formally begun in October 1990. The project sought to sequence the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, thus creating a complete map of human DNA. Sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the United States Department of Energy (DOE), the project was predicted to last 15 years and cost $3 billion. Ultimately, the project’s goals were met ahead of schedule and under budget when completed in April 2003 for $2.7 billion. While the project took place over a decade and around the globe, laboratories in Cambridge were among the most important in unlocking one of science’s greatest mysteries.

The Human Genome Project was completed with the help of laboratories around the world, but in the United States, three main locations became leading sequencing centers for the genome. These included the Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University in Saint Louis, and, perhaps most influential of all, the The Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Mass. The work done at the Whitehead Institute and MIT Center for Genome Research was led by Dr. Eric Lander, currently a Professor of Biology at MIT, member of theWhiteheadInstitute, co-chair of PresidentBarackObama’sCouncilofAdvisorsonScienceandTechnology, and founding director of theBroadInstitute. Lander’s lab, as explained by the Whitehead Institute, “Pioneered the automation and informatics strategies for DNA sequencing and contributed one-third of all human genome sequence assembled by the Human Genome Project,” making this work some of the most important to the entire project. The success of the Human Genome Project and the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research led, in part, to the November 2003 founding of Cambridge’s Broad Institute, a research collaboration between MIT and Harvard University which continues to pioneer scientific innovation.

The completion of the Human Genome Project did not mean an end to genetic innovation. Around the world, the effects of Human Genome Project have already lead to the identification of 1,800 disease genes, meaning work towards cures are underway. There are now 2,000 genetic tests for human conditions, and, currently, scientists are working to reduce the cost of mapping an individual’s genome to under $1,000 to facilitate medical care. At least 350 biotechnology-based products, directly related to discoveries from the Human Genome Project, are in clinical trials.The project reinforced scientists in the United States, and particularly in MIT and Cambridge, as leaders in the biotechnology industry. Biotechnology has continued to develop as a major industry in Cambridge and Massachusetts as a whole, with some of the most innovative thinkers working out of the technology and life science hot-beds like the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Beyond the scientific discoveries associated with the project were a number of other important innovations for the scientific community and the world beyond. One of the most important aspects of the project was the fact that all of the data created by the project was made available to the public, via the Internet. The intention of this action was to accelerate the pace of discovery and information-sharing around the world. Additionally, 5% of the Human Genome Project’s annual budget was set aside in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications program intended to address ethical questions relating to the project. This amount was more than that spent on any other NIH project, and as a result, the program has become a model for other research efforts in dealing with sensitive and often controversial ethical questions.

Francis Collins, the director of the NHGRI during the Human Genome Project, explained the importance of the project’s completion saying, “It’s a history book – a narrative of the journey of our species through time. It’s a shop manual, with an incredibly detailed blueprint for building every human cell. And it’s a transformative textbook of medicine, with insights that will give health care providers immense new powers to treat, prevent and cure disease.” The success of this project is one of the most monumental achievements of modern science, and one from which innovation will continue to emerge from for decades to come. For Cambridge, it is an example of the importance of the city to biological science, technology, and innovative global thinking.

Sources:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.shtml#HGP
http://www.wi.mit.edu/about/history/genomecenter.html
http://www.genome.gov/
http://www.broadinstitute.org/
http://www.broadinstitute.org/scientific-community/science/projects/mammals-models/human/human-genome-project

Radar and Microwave Ovens, Ratheon, 292 Main Street

In 1922, two former Tufts University students, Lawrence K. Marshall and Vannevar Bush, along with Harvard physicist Charles G. Smith, founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Initially interested in refrigeration technology, they soon shifted their attention to electronics and had their breakthrough with a helium rectifier. This innovation essentially eliminated the need for expensive, short-lived batteries. The application for this was quickly transferred to radios, a market facing rapidly increasing consumer demand in the 1920s. The tube that made this all possible was named Raytheon, meaning “god of life” in Greek, and this company was renamed the Raytheon Manufacturing Company in 1925 after the success of this first product. As the company grew they diversified and within a decade were involved in the manufacture of electron tubes and switches, transformers, power equipment, electronic automobile parts, and vacuum tubes.

Diversification in products and in investments with other companies kept Raytheon successful during the 1930s. As the 1940s dawned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the development of radar technologies through the joint efforts of American and British scientists. MIT’s Radiation Laboratory pioneered innovation of radar technology and chose Raytheon to develop the top secret cavity magnetron, the vacuum tube that made microwave radar a possibility. In 1941, the potential of radar was realized as Raytheon was awarded the contract for 100 radar systems for Allied naval ships. By the end of the war, Raytheon magnetrons accounted for 80 percent of the radar magnetrons produced during the war.

While the MIT Rad Lab continued work on theoretical applications of microwave technology with Raytheon’s products, at Raytheon headquarters, as the story has it, an innovation developed by accident revolutionized life across the entire globe. Raytheon scientist, Percy Spencer, working on microwaves noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket melted while he was in the laboratory. Intrigued, he brought in popcorn kernels and was astounded to watch them pop. Whether this tale indeed took place, or is just an nice anecdote, it is certain that Spencer and others set to work on the application of microwave technology for cooking and heating food. In 1947, Raytheon introduced the Radarange microwave for commercial use—a technology which hinted at a change to the notion of cooking forever.

Following the war, Raytheon’s business was booming and the company was again quick to diversify beyond defense contracts. April 1945 saw the purchase of Belmont Electronics, a Chicago company working on television for the commercial market. Soon after, Russell Electric and then Boston-based Submarine Signal Company were also added to the Raytheon fold. Sub-Sig, as it was known, added sonar knowledge to Raytheon’s strong radar expertise. Subsequent American wars would see booms in Raytheon’s growth and influence, with increasingly sophisticated weapons technology. Despite the undeniable importance of Raytheon’s military role, defense technology is not the entirety of the company’s innovation.

In the 1960s and 70s Raytheon re-considered their organizational structure and moved away from government contracts towards more commercial endeavors. This new focus saw the acquisition of Packard-Bell, Amana Refrigeration Company, and several other electronics companies. Amana allowed for the microwave oven, which Raytheon had invented more than 20 years before, to be successfully manufactured in the commercial market. Raytheon’s Radarange was perfected, and in 1967 introduced as the first counter-top microwave, featuring 100 volts of power for less than $500– a major improvement from its 670-pound, five foot tall, $2,000-3,000 predecessor. Inventors knew the importance of the microwave. Twenty-six year old, Jo Anne Anderson, led a team of 42 women, who put on demonstrations to sell the microwave. Anderson promoted the use of Lazy Maple bacon in demonstrations because the odor attracted people to displays. Anderson clearly understood the impact microwaves could have. “Never ever lie or exaggerate about this machine,” show told demonstrators, “You don’t have to. It’s a marvel.”

As the world was revolutionized by microwaves Raytheon continued to grow. Caloric Corporation, manufacturer of gas ranges and appliances; E.B. Badger Co. Inc., designer and builder of petroleum and petrochemical plants; United Engineers and Constructors, designer and builder of power plants; D.C. Heath & Company, a textbook publisher; and Seismograph Service Corporation, a geological survey company, were all absorbed by Raytheon.

Raytheon has continued to grow and acquire a wide array of companies. After the Reagon administration the company shifted back towards defense contracts. Today, it remains the third largest defense contractor, behind only Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Company. From its earliest roots in Cambridge, multiple locations, global investing and relationships, and billion dollar contracts underlie the importance of Raytheon today. Raytheon innovations have altered the world, starting with technology to win WWII, and including the first commercial microwave, miniature tubes for hearing aids, the Fathometer depth sounder, mass production of magnetron tubes, early shipboard radar, the first successful missile guidance system, the Apollo Guidance Computer which landed men on the moon, mobile radio telephones, the first combat-proven air defense air defense missile system, and Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. The innovations of Raytheon are pervasive, in both our everyday homes and in continuing national defense contracts, and the impact of the work done in Cambridge’s Raytheon are some of the most important today.

For additional reading, see:
William Hammack. “The Greatest Discovery Since Fire: There’s a lot More to the Story of the Microwave Oven than a Melted Candy Bar.”

Innovation Incubator, One Broadway

Documenting the history of innovation in Cambridge reveals a story that is extensive. Cambridge is arguably the most innovative city in the world, though the recent technology boom in Silicon Valley, California has threatened Cambridge’s dominance. One building in Kendall Square, however, may be the key to the city’s resurgence.

The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) is the largest and most flexible innovation incubation space on the East Coast. It is a collection of office spaces for small and growing companies. The goal of the CIC is to provide the conveniences of a modern office space within walking distance of the innovation powerhouses of MIT and Harvard, and all for a reasonable price to encourage growth and success. Within the walls of the CIC are communal bays, micro-kitchens, glass-walled conference rooms with LCD projectors, high-speed Internet connections, unmetered phone calls, copying, and faxing—all the makings of successful businesses for those companies still in the start-up phase. Modern conference and presentation spaces allow for high-level, professional accommodations for all CIC’s tenants. All of these resources give tenants the conveniences of professional, invigorating, modern work environments, with the conveniences and cost-efficiency of a shared space.

Even more revolutionary is the fact that venture capitalists share hallways with companies looking for investors, furthering the chance for everyone’s big breakthrough. Communication and interaction make the CIC a dynamic and exciting place for a company to work from. Since they started keeping track in 2001, two years after the CIC was founded, CICers have raised more than $1.1 billion in venture capital.

While the business-model of the CIC and the work being done inside its walls are seeking to elevate the power of Cambridge’s 21st-century innovation with that of Silicon Valley, perhaps the most important innovations from the CIC have yet to arise.

Frozen Orange Juice -National Research Corp., 70 Memorial Drive

Physicist Richard S. Morse founded the National Research Corporation (NRC) in Cambridge, Mass, which has had a profound, if largely unknown, impact on American daily life. Starting out in 1940, Morse’s goal was to create new products and to develop new processes, but also to encourage manufacturers to invest in new ideas and make them into realities. Within its first 15 years, NRC grew from a $50,000 start-up into a $4,500,000 research company with 150 patent applications.

National Research Corporation contributed a number of important innovations during its time, and perhaps the most notable are vacuum processes to powder drugs, coat optical lenses, dehydrate food without losing taste or nutrition, and to create fine powdered metals without impurities. While this may not sound like much, it allowed for the development of instant coffee, antibiotics, the hardware for television and radar tubes, and frozen orange juice.
In 1945, Morse commercialized his company’s innovation with the establishment of the Minute Maid Corporation, originally known as the Florida Foods Corporation. The first big contract for frozen orange juice came when the United States Army ordered 500,000 lbs of concentrate for soldiers during World War II. The war ended before any infrastructure for production was built, but the idea for the product remained alive. After some initial marketing struggles, the company changed its name to Minute Maid in 1949 and signed on Bing Crosby as a pitchman. From there, Minute Maid grew from being the first to sell orange juice concentrate to the leader in a booming market for frozen OJ. Minute Maid made fresh, healthy, and delicious orange juice available in any climate at any time of year.
National Research Corporation would go on to innovate in numerous other fields, but Dr. Morse left the company in 1959 to work in research and development for the Army. He later rose to Assistant Secretary of the Army, but resigned without public comment, from this post after only a few months. NRC was later acquired by the Norton Company, and Dr. Morse returned to Cambridge in 1961 as a lecturer at the Sloan School of Management. He devoted much of his time towards efforts to reduce automobile pollution and to search for cleaner fuel alternatives.
Dr. Morse retired from M.I.T. in 1977 and passed away in 1988. His legacy lives on in the numerous new products that Cambridge’s National Research Corporation developed, especially in the glass of orange juice many people in non-tropical places are able to enjoy every morning.

Sources:
http ://www .time .com /time /magazine /article /0,9171,820445,00.html
http ://www .nytimes .com /1988/07/04/obituaries /richard –s –morse -76-an –inventor –of –orange –juice –concentrate –dies .html
http ://www .minutemaid .com /aboutus .html
http ://en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Minute _Maid #History
http ://coldwar –ma .com /National .html
LIFE magazine . Published February 15, 1963

Zip Cars, 25 First Street

Two women from Cambridge have taken carpooling, a simple concept used by commuters for decades, to new levels. Antje Danielson and Robin Chase worked together to launch Zipcar: an idea inspired by the travel needs of the student population in Cambridge that has grown to an international scale. Zipcar customers, known as “Zipsters,” are able to find nearby, available cars and make reservations in less than an hour by logging in to an online account or using a mobile phone application. Once a time-slot is booked, a personalized Zipcard, carried by Zipcar subscribers, grants access to the waiting car. This timely transfer of shared cars between multiple Zipsters is possible due to an advanced system of tracking and wireless communication between the car and Zipcar’s organizing system.

Zipcars not only allow the convenience of suburban living in urban areas, but also reduce the number of cars on the road, in turn reducing carbon emissions. Because Zipsters only pay for the time they use a car, each individual is able to reduce both their personal cost of transportation and their impact on the environment. By pricing car transportation per hour, Zipcar’s innovative model draws attention to the need for cars as a means of transportation, enhancing efficiency over the “must-have” mentality of most car ownership. This heightened awareness has led to an increase in public transportation, biking, and walking among Zipsters– and not solely in the direction of waiting Zipcars.

Company focus on environmentalism and sustainability manifests in Zipcar’s targeting of colleges and businesses: two areas with high demand for sustainable yet practical carpooling. Headquartered at 25 First Street in Cambridge, Zipcar’s approach to car sharing, utilizing advanced technology to ensure a sustainable and efficient system, and easing the strains of city living, is truly unique and innovative approach to modern, personal transportation.

Sources:
http://www.zipcar.com/
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=11382
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/06/zipcar-iphone/
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/zipcar-adds-toyota-prius-plug-in-hybrids-to-fleet/
http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-top.pag?docid=190795176