Boston Made: Innovations That Changed the World with Dr. Robert Krim

Disclaimer: Unedited AI transcript

Announcer (00:00:06):

You are connected and you are listening to specifically for seniors, the podcast for those in the Remember When Generation. Today's Podcast is available everywhere you listen to podcasts and with video at specifically for seniors YouTube channel. Now, here's your host, Dr. Larry Barsh.

Larry (00:00:41):

This message comes from specifically for senior sponsor snoozer.com. That's S N E W S er.com, the UpToDate news site designed for older adults. Stay current with just one click@snoozer.com. There's always something new@snoozer.com and it's free. Before I introduce today's guest on specifically for seniors, Dr. Robert Krim, author of Boston Made From Revolution to Robots Innovations that Have Changed the World. I'd like to explain the change of format today specifically for seniors, has been considering whether to include live streaming podcasts in which you, our listeners, can participate as the podcast progresses. It would be almost like watching a live TV show, including all the glitches, audience reactions and questions, and being able to participate in the interview as it progresses. Today's podcast is experimental and the first attempt to find a format that works. It was recorded live at Orchard Cove, a senior residence in Canton, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston. We learned several important factors during this podcast. First, the projected images do not record clearly and had to be added when the podcast was edited. Second, a single mounted camera does no justice to the speaker or the presentation. Third, an interview format focusing on the guest and host would work better with fewer projected images. And finally, the podcast should live stream and be available to the listeners as it is being recorded. These findings will help us prepare for future podcasts and live streams.

Robert Krim (00:03:24):

As you might expect, a live video podcast is almost as technically difficult to produce as a live television show. Simply recording a live presentation does not accomplish our goals. We'd like your opinion as well and have included a brief survey in the show notes. Please take a few minutes to fill it out and let us know whether you would enjoy live streaming that is scheduling a podcast at a specific time, and allowing you, our listeners to ask questions live as the interview is progressing, and include them in part of the eventual recorded podcast. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for you watching this podcast. Now onto Bob Rim's presentation.

Robert Krim (00:04:31):

Dr. Robert Crim is a leading expert on the factors that have driven and continue to drive Boston and Massachusetts to be the most innovative city and state in the United States. His revelations about Boston have been made into a permanent exhibit at Logan International Airport and it's called from Massachusetts to the World, forced Centuries of Innovation. It draws millions of visitors every year. Most recently, he co-founded the Innovation Trail, a two hour guided tour through Kendall Square in downtown Boston. He ended out some brochures about it. It's 21 sites of innovation, which originated here and changed the nation or the world. Boston Magazine awarded the trail tour as quote, the best walking trail in Boston in its best of Boston, July, 2023 special edition. Bob taught for a decade at Clark University and became a tenured professor at Framingham State University. Now he semi-retired professor at Framingham State. He teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and founded the Cowork, the Co-Working Entrepreneur Innovation Center. And today, the reason he's here, Bob is the co-author of the book, busman Made From Revolution to Robots Innovation that changed the World. He headed up a 20 year long study of more than 450 innovations that started in Bo and change the nation and the world. He's worked with hundreds of organizations, universities and companies to tell the story, and he's here to tell us here and why this happened in Boston. Bob

Robert Krim (00:07:00):

And I, I want to thank Iris for suggesting this. I've heard of Orchard Cove and had never been here until a meeting that Larry and I had a couple of weeks ago. But Iris was somebody who was a, a brilliant, excellent student in the entrepreneurship and in the College of Management there, and she actually also played a key role at our entrepreneur Innovation Center along the way. So if you don't know her, I'm I hope you get a chance to, to meet her. She's only been here, what, three months? Four months. Four months, okay. <Laugh>. And I, I want to thank Richard Cove and Susan and Aisha for for putting together today's thing. I know that a good number of you are from the Boston area or Massachusetts.

Robert Krim (00:08:08):

And good number of you are from a city that is referred by many of us in New York as well as other parts of the country along the way. Our city is and region are really known worldwide, certainly in the United States, is a place where the American Revolution started where the country really started. And it's well celebrated. And the Freedom Trail in Boston is very popular and draws a lot of visitors what isn't so well known even to a lot of people who have been in the greater Boston area for a long time, and some of you for a little time and some for a long time as it's the most innovative city in our nation over four centuries. Today, I want to paint for you a different picture of the importance of Greater Boston.

Robert Krim (00:09:23):

I don't assume that most of you come in the room saying well, this is the most innovative place and or whatever was invented and can't, you know, and, and by 30 minutes from now, I, I hope you have a little bit more sense of it. And if, if you'd like to read the book, you'd get even more details about it. The book and the exhibit that I did at the airport cover the same 50 innovation. So a few examples of of innovations that have happened here. One of course is the the first organ transplant that happened in 1954 at was in the Brigham Hospital once the brig, the Brigham and Women's M g H other things that have been invented here, the, the microwave oven and the chocolate chip cooking the first robots to be used in major civilian places as well as in the military and of course the first college in the United States, first state to abolish slavery while we're still in the midst of a revolution.

Robert Krim (00:10:57):

So there's a lot of innovations. Many of these are not ones that you might be familiar with other others you might be. So as Larry mentioned in introducing me, I, I have worked on this for for decades, and we started this journey back in 1997 when the head of the tourism organization for Greater Boston, Boston said to me, you know, we tell the revolution story over and over again, and I know there are other stories that would be convincing, and what about if you put together a little organization to look at what would be some stories about Greater Boston that would make people feel like the city has more to offer and more, more to visit? So, eventually over what's now more than 20 years, almost 30 years we involved hundreds and hundreds of organizations, and I had 500 interns over 10 or 15 years.

Robert Krim (00:12:16):

You know, you have interns come in for a semester or two along the way, and many companies and many interested people. And along the way, it took us on a very different route than what I thought was gonna happen at, at the very beginning, <laugh>. And I was hopeful, you know, that this might be something that, that we could get going in the city. So we started off with about 25 innovations that we knew about some of which I mentioned before. And identified by 2001, about 2, 3, 4 years into it about a hundred and then within another couple of years, 300 and then up into the four hundreds. And we could, I have reams of stuff for other things that could be going there. The innovations needed to meet two criteria.

Robert Krim (00:13:31):

One is that they happened in Greater Boston or Massachusetts, sort of using the two of them interchangeably, but relatively locally and second while originating here, that they were ones that changed the nation and the world. This one of the TV stations in Boston channel Four talks about being the first TV station in New England, and it's like, well, that's good. But the first TV stations were in New York and in Pittsburgh along the way. So, so they needed to meet those two criteria. And so there are hundreds or more of innovations that were suggested to us along the way that didn't quite meet those criteria. So we're talking about ones that you're probably more familiar with rather than you know marshmallow Fluff, which was invented in Somerville, and which is known in Massachusetts and New England, but not very well in the rest of the country.

Robert Krim (00:14:32):

<Laugh>. so Boston has been studied, and it's, and its history is well known, and there are libraries full of books about various stages in Boston's life and various things that it's happened before this. We put together this study, this organization, the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative. No one before has ever really looked at Boston through the lens just of innovation. So this is something relatively new or very new, and looking at it. So I'm gonna talk about four different conclusions, which are part of the book Boston Made today. And the first one was the one that was most surprising when I sat there, the first week or two working alone. And it was like, well, there's 25 innovations that are pretty well known and the number of innovations here, and we're, there's many more are not included.

Robert Krim (00:15:54):

It could be are unmatched by any other city in the United States. And one that comes closest is Baltimore, which has 73. You, you may not know all the, the things that have been invented there, and, but they include various things like the man who wrote the Stangle banner and his birthday is as part of one of their innovations. So you know, it's not quite as rigorous as we are here, <laugh> study. And so one thing that the Globe has a wonderful innovation columnist in their business section, Scott Kirzner. And he in writing about the book on the back cover said, you know, Boston's Small, but it consistently, consistently punches above its weight. Some of you might remember the days when there was prize fighting and being, how much you weighed and how much you, you, you punched was, was an important thing, and the sports were no longer.

Robert Krim (00:17:11):

And so it's that sort of spirit that that we've found. And so as I mentioned here, the collaborative started in 97 and went through 2008, and we put together, rather than just a, a bus tour, we put together something which was sort of innovative, which was we put a play on a bus with some great actors, equity actors, and did a tour of Boston and Cambridge for about eight years until the recession hit. Going to about 16 different sites of innovation along the way. It was called The Innovation Artist and the Children's Museum got interested in it, and we play was written, which played there for a number of years called What's the Big Idea? And that led to a children's book about it. Massachusetts history is taught in third grade, so it was something geared to the third grade.

Robert Krim (00:18:16):

And I, I asked my daughter, who was then in the third grade, so, so what should be the what should be the title of this book? She said, what's the big idea, <laugh>? So the play in the book, and one of the great things about this innovation odyssey is that it began to become popular and not only in the Northeast, but also in other parts of the world. And we began to get TV camera crews before they, before the web was so, so far right around the country. And so I, we began to get these reporters coming from Tokyo and Rome, London, and I that question that why question we had this long list of innovations, and I dread somebody asking me what, okay, I mean, why, why this city more than even New York City or more than silicon patent, or more than other places that we identify with, with innovations?

Robert Krim (00:19:40):

And the, the question was, why was Boston so innovative over time? And so rather than just lying awake at night thinking of things that could go wrong, which entrepreneurs tend to do <laugh> I put together a a way of trying to study this. As I said, nobody really had studied the innovation. Over time you might suspect that that was the case, but, and what was particularly unique about this relative to a number of the other cities was that the innovations start in the 1630s and go through Moderna and COVID their drug vaccine for Covid helping to change our worlds. That's, that's quite a, quite a long time for for this to be happening. And most of the studies that have been done only look at innovation in the United States since World War ii.

Robert Krim (00:21:01):

There are all these great things that came outta World War ii, and, you know, TV really became big in the country, and this and that along the way. So Silicon Valley and now Austin, Texas, where Dell computers are, we're probably using one now, San Diego along the way. And in studying innovation, I tried to we worked with a number of people from companies and also universities and the leading researchers on, on this stuff along the way at m i t and Harvard and bu, and UMass and Wellesley, and all along the way. And what was clear is that a lot of times most people define innovation as technology. The the two are synonyms for each other. In fact, back in 1997 when I was beginning this I originally called the idea that what we do is the technology trail.

Robert Krim (00:22:04):

Somebody said to me at the time on my board, innovation's the hot word for this <laugh>. And so obviously in a city like Boston that has so many great teaching hospitals, healthcare and medicine has been a big part of the innovation there. And the city has long been a center for finance in New York as well, and Philadelphia the three competing for a long time in the the United States. So a number of major financial innovations, education, and with a first school, first college, those sorts of things. Literary innovations that changed the nation and the world that came out of Massachusetts at the time. And also social innovations like first state to to abolish slavery when it wasn't a totally abolished in New York State until 1845, about 50 years af after. So we included these silos. We could have included more in terms of music and arts, but these are the main ones that we focused on.

Robert Krim (00:23:23):

And we found a sugar daddy along the way, something called the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which was very interested in what we were finding with these innovations and interested in seeing if we could put this together a little bit more scientifically. So outta the 450, we took about 50 innovations, some from finance, some from education, and, you know, and from each of these areas. And we took them also some from 1631 and 1635, and some from, you know three, two and a half years ago with covid and major work that was done. All three major ones had very strong Boston ties, the only city in the world with that. So we decided to study 50. 'cause That's about how much money we had to do it along the way. And so then we were faced with this question of how do we study these innovations and what would be the most appropriate way of doing it?

Robert Krim (00:24:40):

And we went through a couple of different things along the way, and we came up with asking hundreds of people in various different roles in the city, from CEOs to people working for the M B T A to others. What do you think explains why this area is one of the most innovative in the world? And some chose, number one, entrepreneurship. The area has been very good at starting businesses for a long time. Others said that it was, because this was the first state to have public education mass education, as it's called said it was because the lack of natural amenities. We had some of the worst soil that you could ever have. 'cause It's filled with rock or growing things. So we weren't gonna be like Delaware or Pennsylvania, where wheat was grown as a colony. And that sort, and probably the more popular one that a lot of people would say is, well, it's because we have these research universities and research hospitals.

Robert Krim (00:25:54):

And so we took all 24 of these and said, okay, we're going to have both academics as well as interns and others study e the history of each innovation, and look at what were the key things that made that innovation happen here. And so we commissioned, and then I got a great academic overview committee, and people are innovation specialists. And we went through each of the 50 innovations looking for what were the key things that made it happen and made it happen here as opposed to some other part of the country or the world. And then we used what you're supposed to use in the academic world, a regression analysis to see what things can we learn about this. Well, we learned that there were five drivers outta the 24, which came out at the top of eight, out of the nine economic eras over the 400 years that this area had.

Robert Krim (00:27:21):

And we've had depressions, growth periods, all these sorts of things. So this is an important one, our conclusion. Number two, we found first that you needed to have a dynamic entrepreneur or a small group of entrepreneurs who were willing to take on and work, but they couldn't do it on their own <laugh>. And so, obviously most great innovations that come about come about, because there's a network that those people are part of. Some might be a academic network, but a lot of times it's talking about it with a best friend over a beer at night, or, or something that you happen to see on TV that a bell goes off or a light bulb goes off in your mind. So the vibrant networking in cluster in the city that happened to be smaller was very, very interesting. And not like, necessarily as much other cities.

Robert Krim (00:28:34):

The the third one that we found is that people were willing in the great of Austin area, Massachusetts, to buy new things when it was a product, or to buy new ideas like abolitionism or the women's right to vote or otherwise, were more likely to adopt those here and happened in other places. You look at the Wright Brothers and the problems they had with Dayton, Ohio that there wasn't the innovation culture there that there is here. So the next thing is that there has been some money in Boston and was even in the 1630s when the town was founded brought by the, some of the wealthier puritans, which was available to be invested. And this city like New York and like Philadelphia, it's been a financial center for time. Were investing in new things, including the trade to China when it looked like the craziest place to try to trade with.

Robert Krim (00:29:44):

And we became the leaders in the world for doing that. So so on. So local funding, local demand. And then also we've been very good at going and expanding, going to New York City with our new invention of the telephone and saying, Hey, wouldn't you like to have one of these systems in New York? And and as well as global doing that, which Fidelity investment did with the mutual fund in Japan in the 1980s. And Boston became the number one city for asset management in the entire world in the 1990s, as a result of, so, five different drivers that are really crucial along the way. And it's not that they're individually so important, it's, they're like a, a great sauce or a great cocktail or whatever it, the five of them worked together in most of the cases of what we found at the top of the, the innovations that were the, the most and so we came to call that the bump and connect, meaning this is places where a place where people trade ideas and try to move it along.

Robert Krim (00:31:15):

And the four or five of these working together explained most of the 50 that we were looking at, and a lot of the 450. So, as I say, we called it the Bump and connect. So a couple of stories, the book and the thing at the airport or in this trail thing are filled with them. But I'm just gonna tell two stories of of innovations. And maybe in the question and answer, we can get into some of the others and looking at why they originated here. So the first one is probably one of the most famous innovations that comes out of Boston. You wouldn't know it because the city doesn't have a museum to it or anything else, but Alexander Graham Bell was the guy, you, how many people haven't heard his name before? Okay. So a well-known innovator, <laugh>.

Robert Krim (00:32:18):

And he didn't come from Boston. He came from Edinburgh in Scotland. And he lived there and studied there, and went to London along the way, looking for things, and then went to a smaller city in Ontario looking for something to do. And his parents had moved there at the time. His father was very famous in working with the death. And then he landed up in Boston. What attracted him here? What got him here? Well, one was Dad knew somebody at one of the universities in town. There was a very small university right near the Park Street Station, which we know now as Boston University. And he taught part-time. He taught in a program to help the deaf to learn to speak. And his father was the world expert on focal physiology. So, so he had a part-time teaching job, which is still probably 70,000 part-time teaching assistants starting to teach this week, <laugh> at the different universities.

Robert Krim (00:33:32):

But there's something else that brought him to Boston, which was Boston. The, the Telegraph had been invented in 1846. I, a guy from Charlestown section of Boston Samuel f b Morris, he didn't invent in Boston, so we can't include it <laugh>. However the, there were two cities in the United States that had people who were trying to work to perfect a much more vibrant telegraph system than the single wire that would go from one city to another city. And one of those one was New York City, and the other was in downtown Boston, very close to where he was teaching. You, many of you might know city Hall in Boston, or government center that it's called. And this building was torn down in order to build a John F. Kennedy federal building in Boston. But this was Charles Williams Jr. Was one of the leading innovators in the telegraph world. And he had this building and he rented out space innovators who were interested in working on things. One of them happened to be two years before bill, a guy named Thomas Edison. Anybody ever heard of Edison <laugh>? So the two of them didn't know each other 'cause they were there two years apart. But both, both of them rented space in the same building. And bells was up in the gar on the top over there.

Robert Krim (00:35:15):

And so the idea that bell had, was using the telegraph wire to send the human voice. And like with most, you know, 21 year olds talking about some crazy idea, idea, it seemed like a crazy idea, except he decided he would put in all the extra time that he had and working up in the Garrett there. And he started in about 18 72, 18 73, and then got really into it as a full-time thing, a co a year or two later, he hired a, a guy who worked on the first floor Thomas Watson on the Telegraph stuff, who was very good at building models of new things, stuff like that. Hired him part-time. Some of you, if you know the, the Bell story might know Watson's name. And he also hired Louis Latimer. Peon Latimer was the son of runaway slaves who had stowed away in a ship and come to Boston in the 18 forties, 1850s.

Robert Krim (00:36:32):

And he was brought up in Chelsea and then in Boston. And Latimer had become a draftsman and in fact, the best draftsman for patents on a street in downtown Boston School Street. And he worked with Bell on developing the patent. We won't get into it, but later on the patent, this patent versus another patent for somebody else's became the most famous and longest patent case in American history. It's like 15 years. So it was a very important document in any case. Third, he needed money to pay for these people and to keep himself going as well. And he went to the father of one of his deaf students a girl named Mabel Hubbard. And his the father ended up or not, was somebody who invested in in new things. And Hubbard also said, and I'll, I'll get some other people too, and we'll put some money into this.

Robert Krim (00:37:45):

And so the thing had become such a hot thing that they had to move out of the Garrett because the press was onto this, you know, something new about the Telegraph. Well, that's like artificial intelligence right now, right? I mean, it's something that people are very interested in. Anyhow, so he went to another part of the city, and he worked on making it something that was in a beaker with acid. And otherwise, as you can see, if you look closely there, the acid has spilled and it spilled on Bell's pants. And bell was in one room, and there's a thick wall between him and where his assistant was Watson, and he said, Mr. Watson, come here and I need you <laugh>. And Watson came in all excited, and he said, I heard you.

Robert Krim (00:38:48):

And this was the first spoken word over what they knew was an innovation, an invention that could work. And so the newspapers did publicize this, and the country was celebrating its centennial, July 4th, 1876 in Philadelphia. And they decided to have a sort of a fair about science and other things. And Bill was inve invited to do a demonstration where he would talk at one end and there'd be a phone, I don't know, a hundred feet or 150 feet away that somebody else was listening and talking back. And they had the leading scientists in business, people in the country there to to listen to this, the president of the Telegraph Company. Well, at the time, that was the biggest company in the United States, and the head of the Smithsonian Institution that was about 10 years old, the scientific one, the emperor of Brazil was there, who was very into science.

Robert Krim (00:40:02):

And they did the conversation and they the scientists said, this is real, this works. And the news spread to Boston. By the time they all got back to Boston, three days later, Charles Williams said, I want one of these. This is, this is hot, this is great. In fact, I want two. I want to put one here and one so I can call my wife in Somerville. And so Bell said, well, you're the guy who knows how to produce these things. So we'll put together a company, which Hubbard did the next week, and we'll make them, we'll call this the bill company. And so so the telephones got put in with number one and number two. Those were the two the two telephone numbers in the world at that time, <laugh>. And so anyhow, the thing began to be produced.

Robert Krim (00:41:09):

Within six, eight months, they began to sell them in New York City. And then the word had spread back to the old world. And queen Victoria in Inve invited bell to come back to the United Kingdom and to and to the palace, and do a demonstration there. And that worked out. And so within four months, they were producing phones in England as well as in the United States. So in terms of the five drivers so you can see sort of what we noticed as we were studying. Why the hell did Bell come to the United States and Boston to invent the telephone? Well, one, you have a dynamic entrepreneur who was willing to break through anything to make it happen. Second they had that network that he developed with with you know, the guy working on the design and, and with Latimer and with Hubbard Sanders and otherwise.

Robert Krim (00:42:26):

And so, and there were early adopters, as you could hear, <laugh> people who wanted to be the first, that didn't happen in other cities necessarily. And the funding was local and the national and global demand and changing the nation and the world came out of it. So we didn't just find this bump and connect, you know, in one or two of the 50 that we studied, or the 450 that we knew were invented here. But we kept seeing three or four of these drivers, and sometimes five of them along the way. And it was like, my God, we have a, we have an explanation now for why this happened. It's a second case, this one a, a medical case. Many people have heard of Sidney Farber or the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. So Sidney Farber was a a young doctor in Boston at the end of World War ii, 19 45, 19 46, working at Children's Hospital. He was a pathologist. He was the one who did the the pathology on kids who had died for various reasons in trying to figure out what that was. And there's a picture of him in his microscope in children's husband. And at the time, he began thinking about this in 19 45, 19 46, it being children's leukemia. 85% mortality of kids who had childhood leukemia. And by the time he retired in the 1970, that had been changed to 85% survival.

Robert Krim (00:44:31):

Wow. But they told him he was crazy. And the same thing as Belle and <laugh>, most of these other people. And along the way. And so he was faced with doing his own studies. He used this I'm not very good at pronouncing it amino Trin and found that the amino Trin would stop the corrosion, the marrow inside the bone, which was what the jaw to leukemia was, or at least cut down its power. And again, he was told by the cancer specialist, the oncologist, that he was crazy. Nobody in children's would give him money or anything along the way. So he had to be very innovative along the way. And as I said, he was really denounced by most people. Eventually, of course, he's known as the father of modern chemotherapy, quite a, quite a change from the guy who's in the basement working away.

Robert Krim (00:45:51):

And so there was a group in Boston of public relations. People were looking for something, some charity to, to help in 1947. And they found out about Farber, and Farber found out about this public relations group. And they put together a fundraising thing about a kid named Jimmy, who had gotten childhood leukemia and had been saved by Barbara's thing. And of course, I got Ted Williams. Those of us of that generation know that he was a big baseball player, and he and the Red Sox made it a charity. No other major league team in the United States in any sport was in, into charities at, at that point. So that in itself was <laugh> an innovation. And so they developed a way to do funding, again, the dynamic entrepreneur, in this case, a doctor along the way, the thing that got the thing going, even though the children's hospital management wasn't into it, was that the local pediatricians heard by word of mouth that there was a study going on Children's Hospital and would bring their kids in and pediatricians seeing faces of their the parents of these kids who had childhood leukemia started putting pressure on the hospital and others to to do something about this.

Robert Krim (00:47:43):

And so here we have the thing again, and again, where we're local, the bump and connect. And and so this is the, the second of the, the, the two ones. I as you can probably guess, I could go on for hours and hours and hours, and I wanna leave time for, for questions very soon. So, some of the other innovations, which are really notable of the 50 the first use of Ether for which what happened at Mass General and allowed in 1846 or surgery to be done without the patient being aware of the pain. And that changed surgery in the world. And it's why it's really the most famous of the innovation side of Boston, probably because you could then operate inside the body cavity along the way. Second a year later was the invention of the first sewing machine in the world by Elias.

Robert Krim (00:48:50):

How third is Gillette King Gillette is is his name, who invented the safety razor as opposed to the popular razor at the time, which was called the Cutthroat razor, and, and developed the idea of the disposable crop along the way. Then there's Boston Latin. The first public school in the United States founded in 16 35, 4 years before 30% of the population of Boston had died in the first year or two of being the place being settled. And here people were putting money, their corn that they grew in to help pay for the first school that all, in this case, only boys, but all boys of all classes were allowed into it for free. New York City took 60 years for the first public school to the next one was, the one I mentioned before was the first organ transplant kidney transplant at the Brigham Hospital.

Robert Krim (00:50:00):

And out in Waltham was the which Raytheon Company had worked on radar during World War ii. And they were looking for something in 1946 to keep the company going. And they found out that popcorn in front of the magnetron would make corn pop and that you could cook. So this guy person, Spencer, invented the microwave oven. I was lucky enough that my father worked at Raytheon and was a friend of the guy. So we had one of the experimental ones, and I used to sit in front of the experimental one when I was four or five, and that's how I came up with these crazy ideas, or as my wife's says, when I'm, when I'm irritable. Yeah, you got zapped <laugh>. So, and then we had the first subway. We were in a race with New York City on building the first subway, and Boston won because we were the center for developing new electric systems.

Robert Krim (00:51:04):

And the company, general Electric, and to Thompson Houston worked with the people who were trying to put the first subway in underground in Boston, and developed the most powerful power plant to the entire world at the time, in order that the trolleys could go up and down some of the high hills in Boston First State for marriage equality on the moon. The Draper Labs in Cambridge put together the important software, which actually was named by a woman working on it at the time, the software to go in the module that landed on the moon. And as you may know, it was very well designed. The woman who was head of the team that did it, Margaret Hamilton has been awarded the you know, medallion for Freedom by the President as a result of the, that work.

Robert Krim (00:52:05):

As you know, they came within 13 seconds, the thing crashing. And she had designed it and designed this very small computer thing when computers, as you may remember, were whole buildings. So that in Boston. Then this guy over here who was the one who Vulcanized Rubber his name is Charles Goodyear. You've heard of the entire company that was named 50 years after he died. He, as you'll read in if you read the book, had the most difficult life of any innovator I've seen. So, and most recently COVID. So the book tells 50 stories, and I'm just gonna run through this here. One thing we found is that the city hasn't always been successful with innovation, and we've had four major depressions along the way. Each time new innovations were developed here, it led us to get out of that.

Robert Krim (00:53:14):

And if you lived in the Boston area in the 1950s, forties or sixties, it was not a very prosperous city, but it's come back through biotech and other things along. So in any case, these are some of the ones that happen. So anyhow, that's, that's a story. And I know that we had said we didn't want questions during the talk, but questions or comments you have, thank you. If I can add to your comments on Dr. Farber and Jimmy Fun. Yeah. It was actually started in 1947 on a radio quits Yes. Program called Truth and Consequences. And that featured the, then Boston Braves, and they had, I think, collected about a hundred thousand dollars. And that was picked up by the Variety Club of New England. And they had, they were collecting money in every theater through New England.

Robert Krim (00:54:21):

So, and, and when Braves left, the Red Sox picked it up absolutely right. And I stand corrected on, on, on my storytelling. <Laugh>, you paint a very interesting picture of how we got put some pressure, what that gonna look like five years from now. I'm good at looking at history, but, but my forer is not the future. I, you know, I could say what's in everybody's minds in in the last couple months. Artificial intelligence is gonna change a lot of things. But I don't, I, I can't say I, what I would say in general is that you're gonna have ups and downs of industries along the way. And the thing that you need to have is a place that really makes it easy for people to challenge each other and do that along the way. I, I don't know whether I've answered your question.

Robert Krim (00:55:40):

Hi. Hi. Very successful in digging deeply into most of these. Unfortunately, the one that's I'm curious about was the chocolate chip cookie. Ah, I haven't heard anything about that. Okay. Well, I, I'll tell it to you. And, and one thing that Larry mentioned at the beginning is that in my retirement, I'm teaching innovation at Framingham State University. And the chocolate chip cookie is very closely tied to Framingham State University, which is, and here's how <laugh>. So the chocolate chip cookie was, was invented at a it was invented as a, an exaggeration. The chocolate chip cookie came out of a, a place called the Toll House, which is in Whitman, not too far from here at Whitman, is about 10 miles, 15 miles south. And there a couple, one of who was a woman, Ruth Wakefield who went to Framingham State and was a nutrition major.

Robert Krim (00:56:56):

And along the way, she's studied many different recipes for cookies and stuff. And so she got married, they bought this old toll house on a road in Whitman, and they opened it up. And she was the one who cooked baked the desserts and stuff. And she used to use the chocolate baker's chocolate that came out of Dorchester to make a very old colonial chocolate cookie. I forget the name of it exactly. And she would chop up the baker chocolate, put it in the in the cookie bake it, and it came out all chocolate. One day she ran outta Baker's chocolate. She happened to have according to the Nestle's story but she, she verified this she happened to have one bar of Nestle's. And so she cut it all up, she put it in and voila.

Robert Krim (00:58:10):

It wasn't a chocolate cookie, it was a cookie that had pieces of broken chocolate. And she wa was very much sort of a scientist type. And she, she said, okay, I can throw this away. We're not gonna have this, this is a lunchtime dessert. And and they were famous for good, good baking, or I can just serve it, say it's free, and find out what my customers think, you know, early adopters, <laugh>. And so she served it. And somewhat. The rest is history. I mean, the the cookie took, this is in 1930. Does anybody remember what they from hearing from their parents what the most popular cookie was in 1930? Pardon? no, <laugh>, I, I come from Newton, so I would like to believe that <laugh> and Newton's were, and fig Newton's were made in Boston, but no, no, the the oatmeal raisin Cookie, yeah. How many people remember those cookies? Okay. How many would choose a chocolate chip cookie looking like that versus <laugh>?

Robert Krim (00:59:39):

So so it's interesting to see how history changes, sometimes inadvertent, sometimes an inadvertent learning thing. Oh, thank you. Did ice cream start here? No. it didn't start here. It, it, it has a higher proportion of people eating ice cream in the winter than almost any other city <laugh>. But Boston has a long history of sweet things, which ice cream is connected to. And that goes back to the slave trade with the Caribbean. And a lot of sugar came up here. And for a time in the 1780s to about 1810, Boston was the center for rum production in the world with the with the sugar coming up, and then molasses and then rum. So anyhow, I, I had a question about the yes, early communications, it's really so fascinating that the human voice being produced over long distance had so much to do with deafness, you know?

Robert Krim (01:01:05):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but I also wondered, I I was expecting the name Marconi to come up when you were talking about long distance, you know, cables and Yeah. Transportive communications. And I didn't hear that. Not in Boston. It, it's, no, it's, well, he, he didn't do it in Boston, but as you may know, there's Marconi station and beach on the Cape. And so the line, the the being able to use the systems and stuff that Marconi developed did happen here, but it didn't, it wasn't initiated here. Marconi wasn't in Boston. And I know there's been a hand up here for another while.

Robert Krim (01:02:03):

I have been to the Paul Revere site, so I should know the answer. But yeah, you did promise us that you would tell us what was done here at Canton, and, and I will. Okay. the, this is Paul, Paul Revere foundry af After the revolution, he went into the business of first of making bills and then into making copper and set up a factory in Canton, and lived here for the final 20 years of his life. Now around his foundry, which is like five, six miles from here. The there were a large number of people who helped with a foundry who were coppersmiths and blacksmiths, and others now on a totally different innovation at the time that in the early 1820s, the first railroads were being built. And one of the railroads was to go from Boston to Worcester by way of Canton along the way.

Robert Krim (01:03:23):

And they needed to grade, you know, the thing for the track to go on and all that sort of stuff. And one of the people who worked with the guys who were Irish immigrants who were doing the digging and putting it into horse and wagons and that sort of thing in order to build a railroad was a, was a guy named William Otis. And he was very, he's not, he's related to the one who did the Otis and, you know, Otis Elevator and stuff like that. But this isn't that. So he felt that there was, they had just done steamboats and some steam ships and other things, and he thought maybe I could put together this huge humongous steel, not steel iron shovel and connect it to something that you could swivel it and put the dirt into the wagon.

Robert Krim (01:04:39):

And so you didn't have to have as many people digging. And one thing would carry the whole thing. And, and he said, and maybe the force for it could come from one of these new steam sort of things like, like they have on the riverboats. And so he was then faced with a problem, which was nobody had ever built such a big shovel, and how were you going to connect it on? So it didn't break down, didn't break off the wooden part of the shovel. And there's a, a great diagram of this for the patent that's in the book. And so the he was, didn't know what to do. And then finally he said, gee, maybe if I walk down the road and, and speak to one of the ironsmiths there, or blacksmiths coppersmiths, they can tell me what metal might work and work with the wood and all of that.

Robert Krim (01:05:55):

And then he realized there were like 10 or 12 of 'em. So he went around and talked with each of them asking the different ideas, you know, that bump and connect thing I, I talked about. And so he came back and was able to put together the diagram and the patent and the first steam shovel, what we now call excavators. And so that's the innovation that comes comes outta Canton. So yeah. Anyhow, one question from my profession. Yeah. William Morton. Yes. who used Ether Anesthesia? Yes. Was a, a dentist. Thank you. Yes, <laugh>. Well, thank you. And Bob, thanks for coming. It was a great presentation. Thank you. Thank you.

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