Introducing Blue Collar 101

/

Labor has become an important topic here at the Museum. After all, in 1821, the first industrial strike in the U.S. happened right here, at the Boston Manufacturing Company. While visitors first notice the machinery and other industrial artifacts on display in the Museum, it’s the stories of the people who made and used them that are the most important. It’s the reason “Innovation “ is part of our name. People drive the creativity and ingenuity that those machines have made possible.

So we are excited to begin a new public education event series called Blue Collar 101. At a moment when conversations about workforce development and the future of work often happen without workers in the room, this program starts from a different premise:

The people who build, maintain, and repair the physical world are experts, and their knowledge deserves a public platform.

Each session spotlights a different trade or type of industrial work, including those that keep our electrical grid powered, water flowing, transit systems running on time, and our modern world functioning.

Our inaugural session, Building Trades & the Path Through Apprenticeship, is Thursday, May 7th, 7PM. Joining us will be members of Local 339 of the North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, who will offer a policy and workforce perspective on how apprenticeship programs function across the Commonwealth.

Expect honest, ground-level discussion about what the work looks like day to day, how skills are acquired, what the apprenticeship pipeline actually offers, and what the public often gets wrong about the trades.

Upcoming Blue Collar 101 talks will present workers from Boston Water and Sewer and engineers for Keolis/MBTA Commuter Rail. Look for dates and further info soon!

Like our popular Mill Talks, Blue Collar 101 is FREE to the Public, thanks to the support of the Lowell Institute, but REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED.

One Year Later: Remembering Marcia Folsom

/

On April 16th of last year, our friend, colleague, and mentor Marcia McClintock Folsom passed away. While she had been our board chair since 2007 and a trustee since 1991, most importantly, she carried forward the spark that her husband Mike had kindled almost 40 years ago.

For those who are not already aware of the history of this place, the Charles River Museum was founded in 1980 by Marcia’s husband, Mike Folsom, an MIT professor of industrial history who breathed new life into this derelict yet historically significant mill. Shortly before the Museum opened to the public in 1988, Mike suffered a stroke and tragically passed away in 1990.

To honor Mike’s legacy, Marcia would accept an invitation to join the Museum’s Board the following year. She served officially as corporate Clerk and Secretary for many years before becoming President and Board Chair. But she was the Museum’s heart and soul throughout her thousands of days of service, no matter what the role.

One of Marcia’s many wonderful traits was the grace with which she fully embraced this path. She herself was an esteemed professor, although in a very different field. Marcia is celebrated in literary circles as a leading scholar on Jane Austen and retired only a few years ago from a long and distinguished career as Professor of Literature and Chair of Humanities and Writing at Wheelock College. I encourage all to read the wonderful reflections on her own many-faceted legacy that are available online.

We who serve the Charles River Museum as Trustees, Volunteers, and Staff, miss her dearly. Always so positive and poised, there was never anyone more kind, inquisitive, thoughtful, and respectful. She always made each of us feel valued, appreciated, and supported.

Anyone fortunate and privileged enough to know and to work with Marcia Folsom understands what this Museum meant to her. We can all count our blessings that she understood what this Museum means to our community and country, and invested that knowledge into decades of heartfelt and practical service.

While I am proud to serve as the current board chair, I am sad to do so without the wise counsel and warm friendship that I know Marcia would have offered. She will remain a guiding light to me and to all who knew her.

Rudy Ruggles
Chair,  Charles River Museum Board of Trustees

Celebrating 150 years of the history of the telephone!

/

A history-making night at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation, even as we were celebrating 150 years of the history of the telephone!

In March of 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded a patent for his new invention, a device for transmitting speech across telegraph wires. He had, not long before, uttered those famous words from the attic of 109 Court St. in Boston:

"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"

A century and a half later, and we all carry a form of this invention in our pockets wherever we go. It transformed the ways in which we communicate, connect, and transmit information over distances.

Friday, March 27, we co-hosted a commemoration of that pivotal, catalyzing moment that happened here in Boston. In attendance were two very special guests:

Sara Grosvenor, great-granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell and President of The Alexander and Mabel Bell Legacy Foundation, and

Dr. Robert Mellors, great-grandson of Thomas Watson, and his wonderful family. This was the first time the two descendants had met one another.

We even got to take their photos in front of our 109 Court St. dioramas!

Another highlight - Graham Gifford of the New Hampshire Telephone Museum came all the way from Warner, NH, to share some of the special 19th-century phones of their collection with our guests.

On view nearby were handwritten letters by Alexander Graham Bell, on loan from the Boston University archives, as Bell was a BU professor at the time of his invention of the telephone.

That's why this event was a collaboration with the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets & Society, Boston University Questrom, and was particularly special to me as a proud Terrier. Kristal May and Caroline O'Connor crushed it - perfect planning and execution of such a multifaceted program!

We live-streamed two panel discussions, including one with Sara, Bell's great-granddaughter, and Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath.

On our museum side of things, the leadership, tech, archives folks, and all our interns and volunteers were amazing.

Anyone remember GTE...?

/

Anyone remember GTE before it merged with Bell Atlantic and became Verizon? We need some old-school expertise!

Verizon Communications was created on June 30, 2000 by Bell Atlantic Corp. and GTE Corp., in one of the largest mergers in U.S. business history.

But, at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation we're more interested in the past - and the treasures and mysteries of our deep storage area, the WayBack!

This is where we need some #GTE retirees to give us some insight:

There are three large blue frames with telephone or fiber equipment inside.

They are metal cabinets on castors, and phones on the side of each. It looks like it was a telephone switching display of some kind. We've found no records in the archives of what it is and where it's from.

One has a screen and a clear GTE logo, and all three look to be about 1980s technology that bridges traditional telephone switching and early fiber optics (maybe?).

We've also found a display board with the following description:

"Welcome to the GTE Laboratories Burst Switching Exhibit at the Charles River Museum.

"Pick up a phone, and when you see the four lights attached to your phone-line light up in the display, call the two-digit number of one of the other phones. When the other person picks up the phone that rings, the four lights of that phone-line light up. With both sets of four lights lit, you have a connection between the two phones. The lights and the connection will be established long before you can raise the phone to talk. Try it. Just watch the display, and pick up the ringing phone.

"How many words can you say in one breath? Those words are a "burst" of speech. Normally we breathe 12 times per minute. Everyone's "speech bursts" are in those average 12 breaths. With 256 talkers, this switching unit can, on average, send three persons' voices on the same path, or channel, between their breathing intervals.

"This equipment switches data, too. Like voice signals, data also has bursty characteristics caused, for example, by the way we type. The bursts of data are switched between the voice bursts and other bursts of data. Such data bursts are referred to as "packets." The classic packet switch stores each packet burst for a short interval before sending it forward. This burst switch switches directly through the network without that packet delay.

"AT&T has developed a "fast packet" switch that also switches bursts, and further development during the 1980's resulted in a communication standard called Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), which switches bursts of information.

"But these two switches with the display attached, and the original blue rack on the right, were the first ATM switches in the world of telecommunications. GTE provides advanced telecommunications services throughout the United States and other parts of the world."

Can these be made to work again???

Digging into some Curtiss-Wright history

/

It would be hard to find a company with deeper history than Curtiss-Wright Corporation, and we've got some early pieces of that story right here at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation.

Deep in our archives, we have a tremendous amount of material related to the first years of the aviation industry. Much of it was part of the WH Nichols collection, as the company started by William H. Nichols here in Waltham manufactured key components for both civilian and defense aircraft. We have blueprints, airfoil calculations, documents relating to the Experimental Air Service of the US military, schematics from the University of Toronto, and correspondence with Curtiss-Wright Corporation.

Locally, Charles Metz of the Waltham Manufacturing Company had manufactured bicycles, motorcycles, and brass-era cars, and by 1911 was hosting an aerodrome show from his headquarters, Gore Place.

Much of that dates from the 1910s and 1920s, some of the earliest days of aviation innovation. Here are a few samples - we’re hoping some folks from Curtiss-Wright might shed more insight on the people and items being discussed in this exchange of letters from the 1920s. Mr. K. M. Lane of Wright Aeronautical Corporation writes to WH Nichols to request "two duralumin Clark "Y" airfoils..." on March 25, 1925. We'd love to know more about the identity of Mr. Lane, and the exact airfoil model he's asking to have made for his purpose.

Another letter is from "Phil" of Wright Aeronautical to C. F. Taylor over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s MIT School of Engineering. He writes to "Fay" on April 22, 1927,

"As you requested, I am enclosing the following drawings of our adjustable connecting rod made from the D-1 forging...

The work is progressing on the barrels with various styles of fins, and we hope to be able to ship them sometime next week. In this connection, we believe that a test of these fins with the air, striking at an angle to the fins will be interesting as this may change the relative heat participation to some extent."

This is what innovation looks like in real time - and shows the nexus of academic research, defense, and the private sector all working together on new technological advancement.

This is just a small subset of the vast aviation history represented in our collection, and we're eager to connect with companies and organizations interested in adding context, and sharing in this century of technological innovation it reveals.