Museum of the American Industrial Revolution

Yankee Ingenuity.... Another name for the spirit of invention. Some have asserted that because labor shortages perpetually plagued Americans, prior to immigration, that the Yankee mind was uniquely innovative, always searching for new labor saving devices. To wit: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. But the spirit of innovation also came from another place in America, the open patent system, making innovation accessible to all, blind to race and gender and to the amateur or the professional. This talk explores the motivation and successes of four female inventors: Margaret Knight (the flat-bottomed paper bag machine), Margaret Stewart Joyner (the permanent-hair-wave-machine), Hedy Lamarr (a radio wave changing device that blocked signal jamming by the Germans in World War II) and Elizabeth Maggie (the woman behind the Monopoly game). In doing so, Dr. Amy Green explores the range of inventions credited to women, the reasons for success and failure, and more generally to evoke the spirit of innovation in America writ large.

Our Museum is on the site of America's first integrated factory, where raw materials—cotton, in this case—were converted into a finished product—whole cloth—all under one roof. It was here, on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts—at the corner of the river and what we know as Moody Street—that the Boston Manufacturing Company became the first successful industrial corporation in America, effectively launching the American Industrial Revolution. The power loom, developed by Paul Moody, is America's original high tech. It was the crucial centerpiece of the system of mass production conceived by Francis Cabot Lowell and launched in 1814. It is Paul Moody after whom the iconic Moody Street is named, and where the Francis Cabot Lowell Mill complex, now a National Historic Landmark, still stands. Tony Connors, author of the dual biography of Paul Moody and machinist David Wilkinson entitled "Ingenious Machinists," will illuminate for us what he feels were Paul Moody's most important professional years, those he spent in Waltham. For although Moody was a major contributor to the establishment later in the 19th Century of the mills on the Merrimack River just a bit further north in what we now know as Lowell, Massachusetts, Mr. Connors makes the case that most of the important inventions and innovations that made them possible were conceived and developed in Waltham.

Two members of the Watch City Bike Lab, a community bicycle workshop in Waltham, Massachusetts, explain the origins and the reasons for the Watch City Bike Lab. - Waltham has a long tradition in innovative and impactful bicycling initiatives. The Watch City Bike Lab is the latest embodiment of that tradition.

A visitor to the Charles River Museum of Industry told us this funny story about an elegant act of "oneupsmanship" that became legend at Pratt & Whitney in the post-World War II era. - The storyteller, Dave Craft's father worked at Pratt & Whitney at that time, while they were trying to find ways to market their new skills and technologies after the war was over and their factories were idled.