The Innovation Trail

The Innovation Trail Audio Guide is a production of The Innovation Trail of Greater Boston, a grassroots nonprofit based in Boston. To learn more about the Trail, visit theinnovationtrail.org. If you enjoyed this audio guide, please consider making a donation to The Innovation Trail to help support our outreach initiatives — especially to schools in the Boston area. The co-founders of the Innovation Trail are Scott Kirsner and Bob Krim. The executive director is Anna Dunbar. The narrator for the audio guide is Carmichael Roberts, founder and managing partner at the Boston-based venture capital firm Material Impact. Wade Roush wrote and produced the guide, with editing from Scott Kirsner. The music is from Titlecard Music and Sound. The guide was created with help from a grant from MeetBoston, a visitor services organization promoting tourism, meetings, and conventions in Boston and Cambridge. Special thanks to: Bob Krim Ron Robinson Shervone Neckles Luci Marzola Jim Utterback Gavin Kleespies Jazz Dottin Rosalyn Elder Charlotte Gray John Herman Sarah Alger Tim Rowe Bill Aulet John Durant Tali Sasson Rich Miner Debbie Douglas Namrata Sengupta Ruth Lehmann Phillip Sharp Walter Gilbert Tom Leighton Julia Austin Peter Kachmar Noubar Afeyan Victor McElheny Susan Benjamin

810 Main Street, Cambridge  In the early 20th century, this stretch of Main Street and nearby Massachusetts Avenue was home to so many candy companies that the neighborhood was affectionately known as Confectioner's Row; the factories employed thousands of people and filled the air with a chocolatey aroma. The big white building at 810 Main Street is the last relic of that era. It houses a subsidiary of Tootsie Roll Industries known as Cambridge Brands, maker of beloved candies such as Junior Mints and Charleston Chews. Look for a mural across the street from 810 Main, toward Toscanini's Ice Cream and Central Square, that tells the story of candy manufacturing in Cambridge. If you are starting the tour at this stop, please refer to our website for Google Maps that can help guide you from place to place.  Guest speaker Susan Benjamin, Founder, True Treats Candy, Harper's Ferry, WV; author, Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America's Favorite Pleasure (2016)

700 Main Street, Cambridge This is one of the most storied sites in Cambridge's industrial history—a nexus for advances in everything from railroad car manufacturing to telephony to photography to biotechnology. Our audio guide focuses on just one of 700 Main Street's tenants, Edwin Land and his company Polaroid. Working in this building in the 1940s, Land and other engineers and scientists at Polaroid figured out how to, in essence, build an entire darkroom's worth of chemistry into a multilayered photographic medium. The first black-and-white Polaroid instant camera went on sale in 1948 and was a massive success, ultimately leading to a color version in 1972. For decades, Polaroid was one of the dominant employers in Cambridge, only to decline into bankruptcy after the development of competing technologies such as one-hour film processing, videotape camcorders, and digital cameras. During business hours Mon-Fri, the LabCentral lobby at the back of the building is open to the public and includes a display about the building's history. When facing the building, walk down the sidewalk on the left side. Restrooms are also available. Guest speaker Victor McElheny, Founding Director, MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program; author, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (1998)

200 Technology Square, Cambridge  While Moderna gained fame as one of the pharmaceutical companies that created mRNA vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in 2020, it has actually been working on mRNA therapies for a variety of health problems since 2010. The basic idea behind all of the company's treatments is to use messenger RNA to carry coding sequences into human cells, where the cells' own machinery follows the code to build the desired therapeutic antibodies or other proteins. The pandemic gave Moderna the opportunity to test this approach in tens thousands of test subjects and then make billions of FDA-approved vaccine doses, vastly accelerating the company's programs. "We never anticipated this kind of an exponential increase in the possibilities," says Noubar Afeyan, Moderna's co-founder and chairman. Guest speaker Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering; Co-founder and Chairman, Moderna Pharmaceuticals

555 Technology Square, Cambridge Charles Stark Draper founded the Aeronautical Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT in 1932, and in 1973 the lab was spun out independent nonprofit under Draper's name. For eight decades, it has played a pivotal role in the development of guidance and control systems for aircraft, spacecraft, and missiles—but its most famous exploit by far was the creation of the Apollo guidance system that helped American astronauts fly to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. A giant model of the moon hanging in the company's atrium commemorates the 50th anniversary of that accomplishment. Guest speaker Peter Kachmar, Systems Engineer, Draper Laboratory

145 Broadway, Cambridge If you started using the web in the 1990s, you may remember the "World Wide Wait," the long loading times that plagued popular websites. Akamai, a spinout from MIT's Lab for Computer Science and mathematics department, solved the network congestion problem by developing algorithms for distributed computing and building its own network of edge servers that could store copies of high-demand content closer to users. Even today, Akamai sends streaming video and other content to billions of people each day—and in its iconic new building at 145 Broadway, it remains one of Kendall Square's anchor technology companies. Guest speakers Tom Leighton, Co-founder and CEO, Akamai Julia Austin, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School; former VP of Engineering, Akamai  

115 Broadway, Cambridge Biogen, founded in 1978, was the first biotechnology company in Cambridge, and in many ways, it created the mold for the life science businesses that dominate Kendall Square to this day. The company exploits fundamental insights into gene and protein expression to design monoclonal antibodies and other medicines for the treatment of neurological and neuromuscular diseases, hematologic diseases, and cancer. Its Cambridge campus includes this facility at 115 Broadway as well as its world headquarters office at 225 Binney Street.  Guest speakers Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor emeritus, Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Co-founder, Biogen; Nobel Prize winner, 1993 Walter Gilbert, Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University; Co-founder, Biogen; Nobel Prize winner, 1980

455 Main Street, Cambridge The Whitehead Institute, founded in 1982, was the first of a cluster of nonprofit life sciences research institutes located along Main Street in Cambridge, all affiliated with (but operating independently from) big local universities such as MIT and Harvard. It's most famous as the leading contributor to the Human Genome Project; researchers at the Whitehead sequenced about one-third of the DNA included in the "rough draft" of the genome finished in 2000. Today the Whitehead continues to be a leading generator of fundamental research publications and advances in molecular biology and genetics. It's especially well known for its Fellows Program, which boosts the careers of promising young investigators. Guest speaker Ruth Lehmann, President and Director, Whitehead Institute; Professor, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

415 Main Street, Cambridge The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is an independent, nonprofit research center established in 2004 to investigate the applications of genomics to human health. In the Discovery Center, facing Main Street, the institute shares exhibits designed to explain the technologies researchers at the Broad and its partner institutions are developing and the new treatments they're exploring in areas such as cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, and psychiatric conditions. For example, the Broad played a crucial role during the Covid-19 pandemic, partnering with MIT, the City of Cambridge, and other organizations to use Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase PCR diagnostic assays to test more than 37 million nasal swab samples for the SARS-CoV-2 virus; one exhibit in the Discovery Center tells that story, with help from a video interview with Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui. Guest speaker Namrata Sengupta, Associate Director of Scientific Public Engagement and Broad Discovery Center, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

32 Vassar Street, Cambridge The Stata Center, designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, opened in 2004 as the home for MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as the school's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and several other labs and departments. It's designed around a wide first-floor "Student Street" featuring art, chalkboards, eating places, and displays honoring famous student hacks from MIT's past. The space includes exhibits celebrating Building 20, a large structure built on this same site during World War II that was intended to be temporary but was actually occupied for nearly six decades. The shabby but infinitely flexible building housed the Radiation Laboratory, the secret lab that developed radar systems for the war; later it became a warren of small labs, programs, and organizations such as the Tech Model Railroad Club, which counted many early computer innovators among its members. Go in and explore the first floor, grab a snack at the café, or sit down in the Stata Center as you listen to this segment. There are also restrooms inside. Guest speaker Debbie Douglas, Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum

355 Main Street, Cambridge The large buildings at 325 and 355 Main Street house more than 2,500 employees of Google, one of the world's leading providers of search, AI, advertising, mobile, web, and cloud computing technologies. Focus areas for the product teams here include search infrastructure, travel, web browsers, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. (Google has had offices in Kendall Square ever since it acquired Android in 2005.) The lobby is public, and you can go in and sit down while you listen to this segment. Or, if the weather is nice, take the outdoor stairs near the Marriott and the Kendall Square T station to the Urban Park Roof Garden, a public space where you can see into some of Google's office. Guest speakers Tali Sason, Engineering Director and Site Lead, Google Cambridge Rich Miner, Co-founder, Android; Advisor, Google/Android

314 Main Street, Cambridge The MIT Museum, not unlike the Smithsonian, began as "MIT's attic," a place for all of the artifacts, models, and documents the Institute had accumulated since its founding in 1861. It was long housed in a former radio factory on the northern edge of MIT's campus, near Central Square. Today, in its new location in the center of Kendall Square, the museum functions as a gateway to MIT, turning the Institute "inside out" and making its work "more accessible and more visible," in the words of longtime director John Durant. Guest speaker John Durant, Director of the MIT Museum from 2005 to 2023

Outside the Kendall Square Marriott, Cambridge, near the MBTA station entrance Installed in 2011, the granite plaques making up the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame are meant to celebrate the creators of organizations and innovations that changed the world, from Hewlett-Packard's electronics to Apple's computers to Microsoft's operating systems to Lotus's spreadsheet software. The Walk of Fame's instigator, Bill Aulet, says the purpose of the installation is to help give budding entrepreneurs role models to celebrate. Guest speaker Bill Aulet, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

One Broadway and 101 Main Street, Cambridge One Broadway in Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Innovation Center, a "Switzerland for startups" where early-stage companies—often spun off by, or started by alumni of, local universities like MIT— can rent flexible space for their ventures and mix with peers and potential investors. Many well-known companies and technologies got their start here, including Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system. (After Google bought Android in 2005, the CIC was the longtime location of Google's first Boston-area software engineering facility.) Since 1999 more than 8,000 companies have called the CIC home, helping to make Kendall Square what's been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet." Guest speaker Tim Rowe, Founder and CEO, Cambridge Innovation Center

1 Museum of Science Driveway, Boston Boston's Museum of Science began in 1830 as a natural history museum, and its original building was in the Back Bay neighborhood. In 1951, it relocated to the Charles River Dam Bridge, and today the complex includes exhibitions such as the Hall of Human Life, the Engineering Design Workshop, the Theater of Electricity (featuring the world's largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator), and an Omnimax movie theater. The mission of the museum, in the words of its president Tim Ritchie, is "to inspire a lifelong love of science in everyone to the end that we can envision a world where science belongs to each of us for the good of all of us." It's open 9 am to 5 pm, seven days a week, 363 days a year. (You can access restrooms, the gift shop, and the cafeteria without needing a ticket.) Guest speaker Tim Ritchie, President, Boston Museum of Science

2 North Grove Street, Boston Mass General Hospital built the Russell Museum of Medical History and Innovation in 2012 as a place to display and explain a range of remarkable artifacts from the hospital's two centuries of medical pioneering, from the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia (1856), to the identification of appendicitis (1886), to the first successful reattachment of a severed arm (1962). The museum is free and open to the public and features three levels of displays, artifacts, and photographs. There are also restrooms inside on the upper level. Guest speaker  Sarah Alger, Director, Russell Museum of Medical History and Innovation

Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston On the top floor of the Bulfinch Building, the first and oldest building at Mass General, is the operating theater where doctors and medical students observed surgeries. (To find it, enter the hospital's main lobby and follow the signs pointing to the Ether Dome. The room is open to the public as long as there isn't a lecture or meeting going in on inside. Even if a meeting is taking place, you can see historic photos and exhibits around the operating theater and on the building's first floor.) In the early days of medicine, surgery was a brutal and painful affair. But in this room in 1846, physician John Collins Warren, Mass General's founder, used inhaled ether formulated by local dentist William Morton to anesthetize patient Edward Abbott and remove a tumor from his neck. After the operation, Abbott said only that it "feels as if my neck's been scratched." The innovation quickly spread around the world, and led to our current era of painless surgery. Restrooms are available inside Mass General. Guest speaker John Herman, MD, Associate Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital

Outside the JFK Federal Building, Cambridge Street, Boston Here, a waist-high stone pedestal with a plaque entitled "Birthplace of the Telephone" marks the former location of Charles Williams Jr.'s telegraph instrument factory. In June of 1875, in the attic of this building, Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell and machinist Thomas Watson discovered that a weak electric current could cause two linked receiver reeds to vibrate in concert. The experiment suggested to Bell how a modulated current might be used to reproduce the complex vibrations of speech at a distance. The following year, in a more private lab space at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, Bell would transmit the first distinct words sent over the telephone: "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you." To get a drawing of the invention to help with his patent application, Bell would later go up the street to the patent law office of Crosby, Halstead & Gould to enlist draftsman Lewis Latimer. Guest speaker Charlotte Gray, author, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention (2011)

Outside the Government Center T Stop An outbreak of smallpox in Boston in 1721 infected 6,000 people and killed 900, out of a total population of just 11,000. But this devastating toll might have been even higher if not for the actions of an enslaved person named Onesimus and his enslaver, the prominent Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather. Several years before the outbreak, Onesimus informed Mather that he'd been inoculated against smallpox as a child in West Africa. When smallpox hit, Mather worked with local physician Zabdiel Boylston to try the process Onesimus described in an early "clinical trial" of sorts, inoculating up to 250 Bostonians against the disease and tracking their health. The experiment stirred enormous controversy, but ultimately helped to prove that inoculation was an important tool against the illness. Guest speakers Rosalyn Elder, architect; founder, African American Heritage Massachusetts; founder and operator of the Treasured Legacy boutique in Boston and Jamaicaway Books in Jamaica Plain, MA Gavin Kleespies, former Director of Programs, Exhibitions and Community Partnerships, Massachusetts Historical Society

King's Chapel Burying Ground, Tremont Street, Boston King's Chapel Burying Ground dates to 1630 and is Boston's oldest cemetery. In the back right-hand corner you'll find several tombstones marked Tudor, including one for Frederic Tudor, who built an ice harvesting and shipping business in the early 1800s that made him one of America's first millionaires. In the days before refrigeration, ice was unavailable in the world's tropical regions. But Tudor, working with collaborators such as Nate Wyeth (whose grandson Andrew Wyeth would become famous as a painter), figured out how to keep ice from New England lakes and ponds insulated in the holds of cargo ships for the long journey to places like Martinique, New Orleans, and even India. Guest speakers Bob Krim, Associate Professor, Department of Business, Framingham State University; founder, Boston History and Innovation Collaborative; author, Boston Made: From Revolution to Robotics, Innovations that Changed the World (2021); co-founder of the Innovation Trail James Utterback, David J. Mcgrath Jr. (1959) Professor of Management and Innovation, Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management; author, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation: How Companies Can Seize Opportunties in the Face of Technological Change (1996)

Tremont Temple, 88 Tremont Street, Boston Technicolor was a Boston startup that helped the movies evolve from a black-and-white medium to a rainbow of color. While the company's breakthrough year was 1939, with movies like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind," the company got its start in 1915. In 1917, this building was the site of the first public screening of a Technicolor movie, "The Gulf Between." The film was made using the Technicolor company's original two-color system, in which an elaborate projection system merged images from a greenish-blue print and a separate reddish-orange print. Two of the co-founders of Technicolor, Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Comstock, were graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they named the company after their alma mater — known then as "The Tech." Guest speaker  Luci Marzola, lecturer, USC School of Cinematic Arts; author, Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System (2021).

30 School Street, Boston Welcome to the official Innovation Trail audio guide. If you're starting in Boston, this is the first segment to listen to. In this segment, you'll meet your guide and narrator, Carmichael Roberts. He'll tell the story of Lewis Latimer, a Black draftsman and inventor who spent part of the 1860s and 1870s working at a patent law firm located on the upper floors of the Boston Five Cent Savings Bank building, right in front of you. Latimer was born in Chelsea, and he came from a famous family of escaped enslaved people who fled the South. He worked with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and other leading inventors of the day to perfect some of the most important inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution.  If you are starting the tour at this stop, please refer to our website for Google Maps that can help guide you from place to place.  Guest speaker Ron Robinson, co-director of the Lewis Latimer Society

Here's a short overview of The Innovation Trail's audio guide, from producer Wade Roush. More info about the Trail on our website.