Author Archives: Eric Hintz

About Eric Hintz

Eric is a historian with the Lemelson Center. A former Fellow himself, he runs the Center's Fellowship program.

Perks of the Job: Up Close and Personal with the Jazz Collections

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Let’s start with something obvious: I have a cool job! Here at the Lemelson Center, I spend most of my time thinking about American independent inventors, or Places of Invention like Hartford and Silicon Valley. However, I recently had the opportunity to get up close and personal with the Museum’s incomparable jazz collections. Let me explain…

One of my job responsibilities is to coordinate the Lemelson Center Staff Projects Initiative, an internal grant program in which the Center makes modest grants to our NMAH colleagues to stimulate new research, exhibitions, and programming on innovation. One of our grantees is the Create: Smithsonian project, directed by Susan Evans and Amy Bartow-Melia in the Museum’s Office of Education and Public Programs. With Create: Smithsonian, Susan and Amy developed a yearlong series of six workshops designed to inspire a Smithsonian organizational culture of creativity, innovation, and risk-taking, while having fun and building esprit de corps with our colleagues. The workshops draw upon literature (like Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and Andrew Hargadon’s How Breakthroughs Happen) suggesting that, in order to foster innovation, organizations must create opportunities where smart people from diverse backgrounds and experience can collaborate. This mashing together of disciplines, techniques, and perspectives can spark unlikely partnerships, leading to all kinds of creative outcomes. So it’s been fun to attend the Create: Smithsonian workshops to see how the grant funds are being used and find out what happens when the Smithsonian’s zookeepers, fundraisers, housekeeping staff, vertebrate biologists, art historians, and docents all come together.

Create:Smithsonian Flyer

The Create: Smithsonian workshops are one of the Lemelson Center’s grantees. Courtesy of Susan Evans.

On January 31, I attended the latest Create: Smithsonian workshop, which focused on what we as an organization can learn from the history and artistry of jazz. We were treated to a talk by Dr. John Hasse, the NMAH’s jazz curator extraordinaire, who described the various leadership lessons we can learn from jazz masters like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. For example, it sounds basic, but in jazz (and on your work teams) you must listen closely to your band mates. Bandleaders must recruit and nurture great talent—like when Miles Davis recruited sax greats Cannonball Adderley AND John Coltrane to play on the seminal Kind of Blue. Finally, team leaders, like bandleaders must create a basic structure for the tune, but loosen the reins and let their best players improvise occasionally.

John then walked to a table where he described some of the treasures of the NMAH’s musical collections. He picked up a pair of black sunglasses and said casually “So these are Ray Charles’ Ray Bans….”—there was an audible gasp! Then he showed us Ray’s special chess set for the blind and his Braille copy of Playboy magazine—he really did read it for the articles! Then it was on to Ella Fitzgerald’s Grammy and Duke Ellington’s conducting baton—real treasures of American musical history.

Ray Bans worn by Ray Charles.

Ray Bans worn by Ray Charles. Photo by Eric Hintz.

 

Grammy won by Ella Fitzgerald.

Grammy Award won by Ella Fitzgerald. Photo by Eric Hintz.

Then we got a DEMONSTRATION!  A trio from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra—Ken Kimery (drums), James King (bass), and Chuck Redd (vibraphone)—played a few selections, demonstrating how to listen, how to lead and sometimes follow, and how to improvise. But the most amazing part of the performance was Chuck’s instrument—he was playing the vibes donated to the museum in February 2001 by the late, great Lionel Hampton!

Lionel Hampton's Vibraphone.

Lionel Hampton’s vibraphone, donated to the National Museum of American History in February 2001. It still sounds awesome. Courtesy of Eric Hintz.

Chuck Redd playing Lionel Hampton's vibraphone.

Chuck Redd of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra playing the vibraphone donated by Lionel Hampton. Photo by Kate Wiley.

I play the drums and have dabbled a bit in the other members of the percussion family, so it was thrilling to think that I was so close the same set that Lionel himself had played “The Price of Jazz” and so many other classic tunes. I left the Create: Smithsonian event feeling even more energized than usual about working at the Museum—clearly the grant funds were going to good use!

2013 Jazz Appreciation Month featuring Lionel Hampton.

Legendary vibraphone virtuoso and bandleader Lionel Hampton graces the 2013 Jazz Appreciation Month poster. Courtesy of Smithsonian Jazz.

April is Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), and we do it in style here at the National Museum of American History, with a full schedule of donation ceremonies by jazz legends, talks on jazz history, and several live performances. Lionel Hampton is featured on the 2013 JAM poster and to kick things off on April 9, his vibes again emerged from the Museum’s vaults to be played in a tribute performance by members of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Quintet.

So, like I said at the top, I have a cool job.  For a music buff like me, working at the Smithsonian is Seriously Amazing!

Yankee Ingenuity Part II: The Inventors of Hartford

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Editor’s Note: Hartford is a featured case study in our upcoming Places of Invention exhibition. For more on Hartford as an invention hot spot, read Part I of Yankee Ingenuity.

In the 1800s, New England (and Connecticut in particular) was the home to dozens of iconic inventors, including Hartford’s Samuel Colt, Hamden’s Eli Whitney and New Haven’s Charles Goodyear—not to mention hundreds of lesser-known, but highly skilled machinists and toolmakers who worked in the region’s factories and shop floors to continually improve their manufacturing processes. Hartford is a microcosm of that larger story. In just a few blocks in downtown Hartford, you can see how the methods of precision, interchangeable parts manufacturing spread from firm to firm and industry and to industry—from arms-making to sewing machines to typewriters to bicycles and automobiles, creating a real hot spot of innovation.

Some notable inventors from Hartford at this time:

Samuel Colt, 1859, courtesy of the Connecticut State Library.

Samuel Colt is the reason we are still talking about Hartford today. A Hartford native, he patented his namesake revolver in 1835-1836, but his real innovation was perfecting a precision manufacturing system that allowed him to mass produce 1000 identical copies of his design with interchangeable parts. He was a brilliant inventor and a manufacturing genius, but he was an even greater promoter of his business. He would shower liquor and lavish gifts on Army generals, schmoozing them to secure arms contracts in a way that would make us blanch today. Colt was an equal opportunity salesman—in the years before the Civil War, he sold arms to both the Northern and Southern states. He traveled to Europe and sold arms to both the British and Russian governments, arming both sides of the Crimean War. He was incredibly wealthy, brash and larger than life, with expensive tastes in art—like a modern day Larry Ellison or Richard Branson.

Albert Pope, circa 1900, courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society.

Albert Pope was a Boston entrepreneur who first saw a high-wheel bicycle at the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair. These were imported from England, but Pope was determined to manufacture bicycles in the United States. After securing patent rights in the U.S., he arrived in Hartford in 1878 and contracted with the Weed Sewing Machine factory to build his bicycles. Eventually the bicycle business became so lucrative that Pope bought out Weed. Eventually in the 1890s, Pope also began making steam, gasoline, and electric cars in Hartford.

Christopher M. Spencer, circa 1863, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Christopher Spencer was a serial inventor and entrepreneur who worked across a number of industries. He invented a winding machine for silk thread, a repeating rifle that Abraham Lincoln personally tested and adopted for the Union Army during the Civil War, and an automatic screw-making machine.

Mark Twain, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Mark Twain was the quintessential American humorist and author of the 19th century—he was famous all over the world—but most people don’t know that he was also an inventor. He secured three patents: a men’s garment that worked like suspenders, a self-pasting scrapbook with pre-glued pages, and a type of historical board game, much like Trivial Pursuit. He was also a failed venture capitalist, who nearly lost everything when he unwisely invested in a failed typesetting machine that he thought would revolutionize the printing business. (When I was in Hartford, I got to visit his historic home in the Nook Farm neighborhood and see Twain’s “man cave”—he had an upstairs room where he and his friends would play billiards, smoke cigars, and drink brandy. In the corner was a little writing desk where he wrote all of those classic novels.)

Colt employees on the shop floor, circa 1900, courtesy of the Connecticut State Library.

It’s easy to learn things about a famous industrialist like Samuel Colt or Albert Pope, but much harder to find information about the folks who worked for them. It’s been difficult to understand what life was like for the average machinist or engineer who worked on the shop floor in one of Hartford’s many factories. I would love to know, for example, what it was like to work at Colt’s armory. What was the experience of living in the Coltsville factory neighborhood—to play in the Colt band, to play on the Colt baseball team, or to attend dances at Charter Oak Hall? Unfortunately, there are hardly any first-person accounts of the city’s workers. This is especially true of immigrant workers; many were not literate in English and left few records.

Yankee Ingenuity: Hartford, Connecticut

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Hartford, Connecticut, is a classic story in the history of American technology. If you have ever wondered why people refer to “Yankee ingenuity,” this is what they are talking about. Hartford in the mid-1800s was one of the birthplaces of American mass production, making it a perfect case study for our upcoming Places of Invention exhibition. Around 1850, Hartford native Samuel Colt perfected the precision manufacturing process that enabled the mass production of thousands of his revolvers with interchangeable parts. Over the next several decades, a variety of industries adopted and adapted these techniques and Hartford became the center of production for a wide array of products—including firearms by Colt, Richard Gatling and John Browning; Weed sewing machines; Royal and Underwood typewriters; Columbia bicycles; and even Pope automobiles. In the mid and late 1800s, the United States overtakes Great Britain as the world’s foremost economic superpower, largely on the strength of its prowess in inventing and manufacturing new technologies. Hartford is at the center of that revolution.

Coming out of Hartford at this time is a whole class of general purpose machine tools, like the turret lathes, drill presses, and milling machines. These were essentially machines that ground and shaped metal blanks into precise shapes that became the components of finished products—things like revolver barrels, sewing machines needles, and bicycle gears. These milling machines were general purpose technologies. Essentially, these were machines to make other machines. I think of it as similar to today’s microchips—a basic memory chip can go into any number of products, from laptop computers to digital cameras to the cable box. Once the basic techniques of forging and milling pieces of metal were understood, you could make just about anything, and they did in Hartford.

In addition to the manufacturing industries, there was so much more going on in Hartford at the same time. Most people, if they know much about Hartford, probably know it as “the insurance capital of the world.” So in addition to all of these manufacturing firms, at the exact same time, you have the emergence of all these major insurance firms, like Aetna, Travelers, and “The Hartford”—firms that still exist today.

Hartford also had this amazing literary scene in the mid-1800s. The city was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which ignited the abolitionist movement in the decade before the Civil War. Her next door neighbor was none other than Mark Twain, who wrote many of his classics in Hartford—including The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince & the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). In fact, the protagonist of Connecticut Yankee is based on the superintendent of the Colt armory.

Hartford reached its peak in the decades before and after the Civil War. It begins to wane in the first decade of the 20th century, when some of the original inventors and entrepreneurs begin to retire and sell their businesses. In 1901, Colt’s widow, Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, sells the firm to a conglomerate; Pratt & Whitney also sells out in that same year. Many of these parent firms are based outside of Hartford, and they begin to relocate certain operations. Meanwhile, Albert Pope’s bicycle and auto-making operations face labor unrest and a banking crisis—he gets over-extended and declares bankruptcy in 1907 and the firm gets broken up into pieces. At the same time, firms looking to expand can’t do so within the city limits of Hartford, so they start to move to the suburbs of West Hartford and Manchester, and to cheaper labor markets in the Southern states and outside the U.S. By the 1950s, Hartford—like many industrial cities—begins to lose its commercial tax base, and starts to experience white flight some urban decay. However, because Hartford is the state capital and maintained the insurance industry, it has remained an important and vibrant city. Even today, we still have Colt-brand firearms, Columbia-brand bicycles, and Pratt & Whitney’s precision gauging and measurement tools.

Read Part II to learn more about the inventors of Hartford.

Behind the Scenes at the Political Machines symposium

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On Nov 2 & 3, 2012 the Lemelson Center hosted Political Machines: Innovations in Campaigns and Elections—the latest edition of our annual symposium series, New Perspectives on Invention and Innovation. By all accounts, the weekend was a great success!  If you weren’t able to make it, here’s an inside look at some of the events and talks…

Friday Nov 2 – Final preparations and “The Political Party”

If you had been in the Lemelson Center offices on the afternoon before the symposium, you would have seen a flurry of activity as we made final preparations – setting up banners, printing name tags, confirming the food order, etc. At 3pm, the team assembled in the Warner Bros. Theater for a final tech run-through with Keith Madden, the projectionist, and Robb Rineer, our technician from Meridia, who gave us a preview of our audience response system. When we broke at about 4pm, the team sprung into action – setting up tables, placing banners around the Museum, escorting C-SPAN’s camera crew to the theater, and generally gearing up for the arrival of our guests.

The Political Party, outside "The American Presidency" and "The First Ladies" exhibitions. Photo by Jaclyn Nash.

When we welcomed our symposium speakers to “The Political Party,” a kick-off reception held, appropriately, right outside two of the Museum’s most popular exhibitions: The American Presidency and The First Ladies, they found the 3rd floor atrium transformed into an elegant reception with an election motif. One side, lit in blue, featured Chicago-style hot dogs and other treats reminiscent of Barack Obama’s “Windy City.” Across the atrium, lit in red, were shepherd’s pie, New England clam chowder, and Boston cream pie from Mitt Romney’s “Beantown.” Several of our invited speakers—trained as political historians, campaign workers, etc.—took a few moments to enjoy the collections in The American Presidency, before heading down to the theater for the symposium’s opening act.

David Schwartz. Photo by Jaclyn Nash.


Friday Nov 2, 8pm – Ghosts in the Machine, but David Schwartz is a Pro

David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, opened the symposium with his talk on the history of presidential campaign ads. I began to feel slightly ill as the Museum’s Internet connection decided to bonk just as David began clicking on streaming video links from his online exhibition, The Living Room Candidate. But being a consummate pro, David stayed cool and used the temporary glitch to describe the genesis of the site in the late 1990s. In particular, he noted how innovative it was at that time to stream videos back in the days of dial-up connections before (…tongue planted firmly in cheek…) “the blazingly fast speeds of today’s Internet.” That drew lots of laughs and by then, the goblins that temporarily interrupted the Internet connection departed and left David to click freely and finish his wonderful talk. Disaster averted!

Saturday Nov 3, 10:30-5pm – Symposium Saturday

The symposium continued with a full day of panels and talks by our amazing symposium speakers. There’s no way I could capture all of their smart ideas in a short blog post.  However, our intrepid communications team—led by Erin Blasco, Kate Wiley, and Michelle DelCarlo—live-Tweeted the event so you can get a flavor of the proceedings.  Check out http://twitter.com/amhistorymuseum or http://twitter.com/SI_Invention or search for #PoliticalMachines for the full blow-by-blow.

Keynote speaker Darrell West. Photo by Jaclyn Nash.

Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite moments from the symposium:

  • Our keynote speaker, Darrell M. West, described the trend in campaign technologies from broadcasting to “nano-casting”…
    • Broadcasting—building ads with broad appeal for the three TV networks
    • Narrow-casting—creating ads for cable TV, tailored to a particular regional service area or a particular channel’s viewership, e.g. young men watching ESPN
    • Micro-casting—using targeted emails with links to YouTube ads to reach VERY specific groups, e.g. conservative blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio, that oppose  gay marriage
    • Nano-casting—using mobile phones, geo-location services, and consumer information to send text messages or emails with precise, individually-tailored messages—e.g. “Dear Sally, please vote today, your polling place is 123 Elm Street.”
  • Jon Grinspan explained the innovative role of alcohol in elections during the mid-1800s. Westward expansion into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio meant more access to grains like wheat and corn, which created bumper crops of hard liquors like bourbon. Saloons were among the biggest buildings in frontier towns, so they served as party headquarters and polling places. Party operatives traded booze for votes—but not too much, otherwise, passed-out voters would never make it to the polls!
  • Zephyr Teachout explained how the emergence of the Internet challenged the traditional power structure of campaigns, previously ruled by a triumvirate of political, finance, and communications directors. Eventually campaigns made room for a fourth director—the Director of Internet Organizing, a role she pioneered in Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign—and we’ve never looked back.

Vanderbilt’s Sarah Igo, who has studied the history of George Gallup and the birth of modern opinion research, chats with Gallup’s modern-day counterpart, Jon Cohen, the chief pollster at The Washington Post. Courtesy of Eric Hintz.

  • Sarah Igo explained that we used to call public opinion researchers “pollers.” However, sometime during the 1940s, a newspaper columnist, skeptical of their methodology, called them the “pollsters” because it sounded like “hucksters.” The name stuck…
  • Jon Cohen, polling director at The Washington Post, said that there is still skepticism about the methods of today’s pollsters, but that sampling—and the bias that inevitably creeps in—is unavoidable. To illustrate the point he said: “Next time you go to the doctor and they ask for a blood sample, tell them ‘No—take the whole thing!’”
  • Thad E. Hall wondered aloud why we could buy airline tickets and do our banking via the Internet, but we have yet to implement Internet voting. The key difference is that, with online purchases, the identity of the purchaser is tied to the transaction. However, with voting, the trick is to maintain security while separating the identity of the voter from his or her vote—and we are still figuring out that trick.
  • David Becker described many of the problems with our present system of election administration, but quickly brought things back to proper perspective. He doubted whether any corporation (or nation besides the United States) could get nearly 117 million people to all do the same thing (in this case, vote) on one given day, and do it in an orderly fashion absent any riots or violence. There are always a few problems, but they are minor relative to the overall achievement that is Election Day. His final charge was classic: “On Tuesday, go out and hug your local election worker!”

Photo by Jaclyn Nash.

Meanwhile, out in the Lefrak Lobby, visitors were treated to an up-close and personal view of dozens of historical campaign buttons, posters, and fliers from our museum collections dating as far back as the 1860s. It was fun to see an Abraham Lincoln-Andrew Johnson ticket from 1864 on the table next to a Spanish-language poster supporting JFK and LBJ from 1960! Plus, over the lunch break, our visitors got an up-close and personal audience with speakers Sarah Igo, Thad Hall, and Zephyr Teachout, who graciously signed copies of their books.

Photo by Jaclyn Nash.

Monday Nov 5, 9am – Reflections and Thank You Notes

After a well-earned day of rest on Sunday, everyone came back to work on Monday and chatted around the water cooler about the symposium. We all agreed that we’d had some very high-caliber speakers, all of whom were smart, funny, and engaging in describing the role of “political machinery” in the realms of Advertising, Campaigning, Polling, and Voting.  Thanks again to our tremendous speakers!

Wednesday Nov 7 – The Day After the Election

On November 7, the day after Obama’s re-election to a second term, some prognosticators had already begun speculating about who would run for President in 2016. No rest for the election-weary, I guess. Similarly, my teammate Michelle DelCarlo innocently asked me—“So what do you think will be the theme for next year’s symposium?” COME ON ALREADY!! Let’s enjoy this one for a few weeks, before we start speculating about 2013.

We’ll start brainstorming for our 2013 symposium in the New Year—maybe exploring Civil War military technologies, or sports inventions, from safer football helmets to instant replay. Then again, in the tradition of participatory democracy—what do YOU think would make a compelling theme for the 2013 symposium?

“Political Machines” Speakers in the News

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We are fortunate to have many fine speakers participating in our upcoming symposium, Political Machines: Innovations in Campaigns and Elections, taking place on November 2 and 3 here at the National Museum of American History. Our speakers are recognized leaders in their fields, so as you might expect, they appear from time to time in national newspapers, on TV, etc.  Here’s a sampling of some previous media appearances by our fabulous symposium speakers:

David Schwartz
Chief Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image

 

Darrell M. West
Vice President, Governance Studies and Director, Center for Technology Innovation, Brookings Institution

Jon Grinspan
Doctoral Candidate, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

Zephyr Teachout
Associate Professor, Fordham Law School

Sarah Igo
Associate Professor of History, Sociology, and Political Science, Vanderbilt University

Jon Cohen
Director of Polling, The Washington Post

 

David Becker
Director of Election Initiatives, Pew Center on the States

Thad E. Hall
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Utah

You can also check out our latest podcast to get a preview of each session from our moderators—Lemelson Center Senior Historian Joyce Bedi, Lemelson Center Deputy Director Jeff Brodie, Political History Curator Larry Bird, and me. Did you enjoy learning about our speakers and their research? Come see and hear the real thing this weekend!

Political Machines

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Well, it’s mid-September and we’re deep into the 2012 presidential campaign. Active campaigning for the primaries began well over a year ago in the summer of 2011, and as usual the campaign season has been nasty, brutish, and long.  Are you suffering from PCF—Presidential Campaign Fatigue? Fortunately, the Lemelson Center has an antidote.

On November 2 and 3, the Lemelson Center is marking this election year by presenting “Political Machines: Innovations in Campaigns and Elections,” a symposium that examines the role of invention and technology in electoral politics. Through this lens, we will temporarily shift the focus away from today’s candidates and issues to examine the critical role that “political machinery” such as campaign advertisements, voting machines, and automated opinion polls plays in our democracy. When these technologies work well, they often go unnoticed; when they fail (e.g., hanging chads, “Dewey Beats Truman!”), the consequences can be momentous.

The symposium will be held on November 2–3, 2012, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, on the Mall in Washington, D.C. All events will be free and open to the public. Our sessions will employ formats typically seen on the campaign trail, including a keynote address, stump speeches, and interactive “town hall” Q&A sessions with our speakers. Audience members will also be able to vote on questions posed during the symposium, using a handheld audience response system or “clicker” provided by our technology partners at Meridia. Watch out, Oprah!

So who’s speaking? “Political Machines” will bring together scholars, government policymakers, campaign strategists, and members of the news media to focus on the historic and contemporary role of technology in various aspects of the electoral process, including Advertising, Campaigning, Polling, and Voting. Here’s a sneak peek at our sessions and speakers:

Advertising: Friday, Nov. 2, 8:00–9:30pm

Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to make use of thirty-second television ads, in 1952. Courtesy of www.thelivingroomcandidate.org.

In our Advertising session, David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, will present selections from his online exhibit, The Living Room Candidate, which features over 300 television commercials from every presidential election since 1952. Schwartz will examine the persuasive techniques employed in various historical ads and explore the role of various technological platforms—from biographical films to thirty-second television ads to YouTube—in the evolution of political advertising.

Keynote Address: Saturday, Nov. 3, 10:30–11:30am

After some introductory remarks by my boss, Arthur Molella, our keynote speaker will be Darrell M. West, vice president and director of Governance Studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. In a wide-ranging address, West will set the table for the sessions to follow by describing the historical, contemporary, and future role of technology and innovation in the electoral process and in governance.

Campaigning: Saturday, Nov. 3, 11:30–12:30pm

How have candidates employed innovative campaign techniques and new technologies to deliver their messages, raise money, and garner grassroots support from voters? This session will examine the technology and material culture of campaigning—from buttons and hand-painted convention signs to the internet. One of our featured speakers will be Zephyr Teachout, an associate professor at Fordham Law School and, formerly, director of internet organizing with “Dean for America.” Teachout pioneered in using the internet and social media platforms during Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and coauthored a book about her experience, Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics.

In 1964, GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater used this clever can in his unsuccessful campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson. Courtesy of NMAH.

Polling: Saturday, Nov. 3, 2:00–3:00pm

Pioneering pollster George Gallup.

How have candidates and journalists utilized innovations in polling and statistical analysis to discern the mood of the electorate? In turn, how have citizens come to trust polling data as a reliable source of information? In this session, Vanderbilt professor Sarah Igo, author of The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, will describe the emergence of modern public opinion research in the 1930s among door-to-door pollsters like George Gallup and Bud Roper. For a more contemporary view, Jon Cohen, director of polling at the Washington Post, will describe what it’s like to use automated phone banks and statistical software packages as a 21st-century pollster.

Voting: Saturday, Nov. 3, 3:30–4:30pm

What are the technologies that underpin the right to vote—our most cherished democratic institution? In this session, we will examine the current state of election administration and explore a multitude of web-based and mobile technologies that may someday transform how we register, receive our ballots, and cast our votes. For example, David Becker, director of election initiatives at the Pew Center on the States, will describe efforts to improve our DMV databases and other technological processes involved in voter registration and identification. Also, University of Utah professor Thad E. Hall will describe how we may someday cast our ballots, as detailed in his book Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting.

The Votomatic punched-card recorder and its confusing “butterfly ballots” were at the center of the controversial 2000 Bush-Gore election. This particular voting machine was collected by curators from the Museum’s Division of Political History. Courtesy of NMAH.

Book Signings; Objects Out of Storage: Saturday, Nov. 3—times TBA

For the 1980 Reagan-Carter campaign, Herman Silvers and Cornel Tanassy wrote the single, “Hello Ronnie, Good-bye Jimmy.” Courtesy of NMAH Archives Center.

In addition, on Saturday, November 3, we will schedule some book signings with our speakers and bring out some classic campaign materials from the Museum’s collections so visitors can get a closer look. For example, we’ve pulled some amazing presidential campaign tunes from the Sam DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music.

Here at the Lemelson Center, we believe that invention and innovation are everywhere … even in campaigns and elections. So if you’re tired of the standard campaign coverage and want to look at this election from a different perspective, we hope you’ll join us on November 2 and 3 for an exploration of our “Political Machines.”

In Residence: The Lemelson Center 2012 Fellows

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Our fabulous Lemelson Center Fellows, left to right: Matthew Hockenberry, Hallie Lieberman, Steven Wilf, and Aimi Hamraie. Photo courtesy of Eric Hintz.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is that I get to coordinate the Lemelson Center’s Fellows Program. The Fellows Program is one of the many ways that we fulfill the research component of our mission, “To foster an appreciation for the central role of invention and innovation in the history of the United States.” Essentially, the Center puts its money where its mouth is—we offer paid fellowships (read: $$$) to encourage historians, museum professionals, authors, documentary filmmakers, and all manner of researchers to come to the Museum, spend time with us, and use our world class invention collections. Our fellows in turn take their findings and pen articles, write books, build exhibits, and produce films on invention, innovation, and technology. Since 1995, the Center has hosted over 50 fellows, who are now alumni of the program.  That’s a lot of “fostering.”

In a typical year, we name anywhere from three to five fellows, and they come whenever their schedules allow; thus, their times of residence almost never overlap. Well that changed this summer when we had four (4!) Lemelson Center fellows in residence simultaneously! They are:

  • Aimi Hamraie, Ph.D. candidate, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University.  Aimi is exploring issues related to universal design and disability. She will be examining several collections, including: the Accessible Snowboard collection, the Van Phillips collection, Safko International papers, and the Hernandez-Rebollar collections. She will also be working with the Smithsonian Accessibility Office to understand how universal design considerations have been built into past exhibitions and the Museum itself.
  • Matthew Hockenberry, Ph.D. candidate, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University.  Matthew is examining the global supply chains used in the manufacturing of telegraph and telephone technologies from approximately 1876-1926 He will examine several collections, including the Western Union papers, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company collections, and the papers of Western Electric founder, Elisha Gray.
  • Hallie Lieberman, Ph.D. candidate, Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hallie is exploring the technological history of sexual aids. Lieberman will explore familiar collections in new ways—for example, she will examine the trade catalogs of the BF Goodrich rubber companies for information on condoms (vs. tires) and literature from appliance-maker Hamilton Beach for information on vibrators (vs. toasters). She will also examine the Museum’s HIV/AIDS collections and our extensive periodical collections to track the socio-cultural impact of sexual aids.
  • Steven Wilf, professor and associate dean, University of Connecticut Law School.  Steven, a legal historian, is conducting research for his forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, tentatively titled: Intellectual Property Law in America: A Legal and Cultural History. The book traces the history of American intellectual property law from its beginnings in the 18th century through the digital age and describes how patent, copyright, and trademark laws serve to prompt, direct, or even constrain innovation. Wilf will examine runs of invention-oriented periodicals and IP documentation in several of the Museum’s collections, including the Telescoping Shopping Cart Collection; the Eisler Engineering Company Records; the Serge A. Scherbatskoy Papers; the Arthur Ehrat Papers; and the Leo H. Baekeland Papers.

The Lemelson Center fellows and staff talk shop over breakfast. Photo courtesy of Eric Hintz.

Having this many fellows in the Museum all at once is a rare event, like the Transit of Venus, or the Cubs winning the World Series. So to mark the occasion and foster a sense of intellectual community, we recently gathered the fellows and a few Museum staff with similar intellectual interests to talk shop at the Constitution Café. For example, Aimi talked universal design with Beth Ziebarth, director of the SI’s Accessibility Program, while Matthew talked supply chains with Work and Industry curator Peter Liebhold. We all sipped coffee, ate muffins, and enjoyed each other’s company.  (A big thank you to Tanya Garner for organizing the meet-up.)

Before signing off, I should tell you that my interest in the Fellows Program extends beyond a simple line item in my job description. You see, to paraphrase an old commercial by the Hair Club for Men, “I’m not only the Fellows Program coordinator, but I’m also a client!” Back in 2007, as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to receive a 10-week Lemelson Center Fellowship to conduct research for my dissertation (now book project) on American independent inventors. So I’m very proud to be counted among a distinguished group of alumni fellows and to serve now as the steward of our outstanding Fellows Program.

So congratulations to all of our past and present Lemelson Center Fellows.  And to our future fellows, I’ll teach you the secret handshake…

Re-Discovering the Lost Art of Tinkering

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My wife Emma took this picture of her broken dresser with the missing middle drawer.  It’s a scornful reminder of my mechanical ineptitude.

An un-repaired dresser with missing drawer. It mocks me. (Photo courtesy of Emma Hintz)

One day last year, the middle drawer started sticking.  I attempted to fix it, but it was a bad scene – mangled metal tracking and ball bearings rolling all over the floor.  Emma quickly sized up my limited abilities and put the broken drawer out on the curb on garbage day – it would end up in a landfill.  Eventually, Emma will lose patience with this two-drawer dresser and it will get discarded too.

Maybe it’s a cliché that a bookish historian like me is not so mechanically inclined.  But this episode got me thinking about the lost art of tinkering, sustainability, and what it might mean for future generations of inventors.

The history of invention is filled with stories of young inventors honing their mechanical abilities by fixing broken stuff.  For example, as a young girl, toy inventor and GirlTech CEO Janese Swanson learned to repair her family’s broken appliances because they lived on a tight budget.  She discovered that tinkering was fun – she later took apart an old mechanical typewriter and re-arranged the keys so she could type in her own secret code!  This kind of tinkering is basic training for inventors.  Through tinkering, budding inventors come to understand the properties of motors, gears, and electrical circuits.  They sharpen their manual dexterity and what Eugene Ferguson has called the “mind’s eye” – the ability to envision various technical configurations in the inventor’s imagination prior to actually building them.

We used to be a nation of tinkerers – just ask two of our former Lemelson Center Fellows.  As Kathy Franz has observed, tinkerers reinvented the early automobile, developing new accessories to customize their famously standardized and mass-produced Ford Model T’s.  Similarly, Kristen Haring, has described the fraternal technical community that coalesced around tinkering HAM radio operators between the 1930s and 1970s.  In both of these examples, tinkering was more than just a technical matter.  It was a hobby, a means of self-expression, and the genesis of new social communities.  Tinkering was not just practical – it was pleasurable.

Since then, it has become more difficult for the average person to be a successful tinkerer.  This isn’t entirely our fault.  In the 1920s, Ford’s competitor, General Motors, famously adopted a strategy of planned obsolescence, in which the firm introduced the now familiar “annual model change.”  Thus, instead of tinkering and fixing up your old car, consumers were enticed to trade up and buy a new car.  This strategy now permeates the world of personal computers, software, and consumer electronics.  If a laptop computer or cell phone lasts more than 5 or 6 years, it’s a dinosaur.  And good luck trying to get Microsoft to support Windows XP or any operating system more than one or two generations old.  As our technologies have become more complex while changing more rapidly, they have also become more disposable.  As a consequence, many of us never learned the importance of tinkering (see Hintz, chest of drawers).

This does not bode well for our economy or the sustainability of our planet.  If changes in our patterns of consumption have discouraged tinkering, then we are denying future inventors both the opportunity and the raw materials for their hands-on training.  Plus, when people like me do not repair their broken things, they end up in landfills while straining our supply of natural resources to produce their replacements.  It’s something of a Catch-22.  Our policymakers encourage investments in research and innovation to help us dig out of a looming environmental crisis.  And yet, that quest for relentless innovation, the drive for more and more new things, discourages the very culture of tinkering that would train the next generation of inventors who will be expected to invent us out of trouble.

Fortunately, our society is rediscovering the lost art of tinkering.  In our current era of fiscal austerity and environmental awareness, consumers are now more inclined to fix their broken things, rather than buying replacements.  A series of grassroots “fixer collectives” have sprung up all over the world; for example, in Amsterdam, the Dutch government has underwritten bi-monthly “Repair Cafés” where the mechanically challenged can have their appliances repaired free-of-charge by volunteer tinkerers who just like to fix things.  Web-based businesses like RepairClinic.com now stockpile and sell discontinued appliance parts and provide troubleshooting guides to help DIYers fix their household items.  And a half dozen Tech Shop franchises have sprung up in major cities, in which aspiring inventors can pay a monthly membership fee to tinker with the shop’s tools and equipment.  Meanwhile, in the realm of sustainability, the ethos of tinkering is gaining wider cultural traction, as the traditional three Rs have been supplemented by a fourth (Reduce-Reuse-Recycle-REPAIR).  There’s even a children’s song about it.

Kids and families are encouraged to tinker in Spark!Lab. (Photo by Kate Wiley)

Here at the Lemelson Center, we try to foster this attitude among our visitors, especially in Spark!Lab.  We want our visitors to get their hands dirty, to try things, to break something and re-build it, to experience the pleasures of tinkering.  In our own way, by providing an environment where tinkering can flourish, we are helping build a nation of future inventors.

 

But these lessons are obviously lost on me.  Just ask my wife, whose clothes are in a pile on the floor.