“People say if you fail in Seattle, you’re screwed,” said Marcelo Calbucci. “If you fail in the Bay Area, you just have a badge of honor.”

We were at the TechStars reunion event in Seattle last week, listening to early-stage investors Brad Feld, Andy Sack, Steve Hall, Greg Gottesman, Shawn Broderick, and Chris Sheehan speak about entrepreneurship and the tech startup scene in their respective cities. Calbucci, the founder of Seattle 2.0 and Sampa (which folded in August), was asking the panelists about how the tolerance of failure, whether real or perceived, affects a region’s culture of innovation.

It’s a deep question, and it continues the discussion of startup cultures in different cities that I highlighted last week. It’s also part of a debate on failure that has been going on since long before I wrote about it in Xconomy last January. There seem to be two camps. Most entrepreneurs I’ve talked to feel there is a stigma associated with having a failed startup in Seattle. Most venture capitalists, not so much. But it’s a much broader issue than just Seattle. My colleague Bruce talked with a Web 2.0 startup founder in San Diego last week who said his first failure, earlier this year, “was truly a painful experience, and I’m still not over it.” And meanwhile, Brad Feld, the co-founder of TechStars and Foundry Group in Boulder, CO, had some provocative things to say about the failure aspect of Boston’s culture.

But first, Andy Sack of Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op gave his perspective on having failed at his last startup, Judy’s Book, after having had three successes prior to that. “As much as you teach entrepreneurship, as much as there’s supply of capital out there, really when push comes to shove, entrepreneurship comes from within,” he said. “I couldn’t take a job at any of the big companies. We’ve been through the tech boom of the ‘90s. We’re just coming off of a major hiccup. I’d say right now, early-stage investors in Seattle have retreated some; venture capital has retreated some, they’re focused primarily on their portfolio. That said, you [Calbucci] failed and went out and started your own thing. I failed and went out and started my own thing. Because we didn’t know any better. The entrepreneurs that don’t know any better, they just go do it again.”

Greg Gottesman of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is one of those VCs who says he doesn’t see failure as a black mark. “My sense in this community is, to people who matter most, I don’t think failure is a huge negative,” he said. “There are certain types of failures, like failure of integrity—that’s hard to recover from. But failure of a startup, just speaking with all my partners, that’s not a negative. We talk about that as a learning experience. It’s just another piece of the puzzle.”

So how does Seattle’s tolerance of failure differ from, say, Boston’s or Silicon Valley’s? Feld, who has been investing nationally for 15 years, said, “I actually believe that the shtick of ‘failure as a badge of honor’ is really great shtick. I’ve failed a lot. It’s hard to fail. Failure impacts a person in …Next Page »

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With summer on its way in, we’re starting to gear up for Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands, which is happening on July 30 at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. If you or someone you know plays in a band that has at least one member who hails from a Northwest tech, life sciences, or tech-investment firm, we want to hear from you (application info and event details are here).

The field is already shaping up to be pretty competitive. How will we choose the finalists and the overall winners, you ask? Very carefully. To that end, we are enlisting the help of some of the Seattle area’s finest tech and music minds (and ears) to serve as judges for the event, in addition to the Xconomy staff. Their duties will range from vetting demos and selecting the finalists to helping us decide which bands get the awards on the big night.

We thought you might like to know a little bit about the judges we’ve recruited so far. Their professional expertise spans the worlds of software, venture capital, and music history. Their musical tastes span everything from heavy metal and Eddie Van Halen to post-punk and alternative rock. Without further ado, here are the luminaries who will help us decide the outcome (not sure who will be the Simon Cowell yet):

—Peter Blecha, music historian, author, and former senior curator of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Peter is the author of the recently released Sonic Boom! The History of Northwest Rock: From “Louie Louie” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Backbeat Books, 2009). He calls himself a “rock and roll archaeologist,” and has been a drummer with a number of bands in the Seattle area, including The Debbies.

—Steve Hall, managing director at Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, the group that manages Paul Allen’s investment holdings. Steve leads the firm’s early-stage venture capital investments across the technology, life sciences, and alternative energy sectors. He also plays a mean lead guitar, and notes that he has been brushing up on his Eddie Van Halen guitar solos in the past year.

—Jeff J. Lin, Microsoft program manager of Virtual Earth 3D. Jeff is the co-founder, guitarist, and pianist of the Seattle-based band Harvey Danger. You probably know them from their infectious hit single of the late 1990s, “Flagpole Sitta” ( “I’m not sick but I’m not well, and I’m so hot ’cause I’m in hell…”). Harvey Danger has released three full-length albums, played shows with bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Green Day, and once appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman.

We’ll have more details on the judges and prizes soon. But don’t delay, the deadline for submissions is June 12 (event details and info here). If you want to enter, please e-mail your band’s info to techbands@xconomy.com.

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One of the great pleasures of being a journalist is listening to influential leaders discuss where they come from and how it affects their strategy. Luke and I recently sat down with Tom Alberg, co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. In addition to sharing his thoughts on the future of newspapers and online media, Alberg spoke extensively about his career and how he has witnessed, and participated in, the rise of the technology industry in Seattle.

Let’s take a big step back here. At Xconomy, we’re about delivering the most important breaking news and in-depth analysis of tech and life sciences innovation. But it’s hard to fully appreciate all the latest trends unless you understand the perspectives of the top players. In our interview, Alberg touched on the early days of his career as a lawyer at Perkins Coie in the late ’60s, his later stints as president of LIN Broadcasting and executive vice president of McCaw Cellular, and the birth of Madrona in the mid ’90s. Along the way, he built notable relationships with leaders in wireless, medical devices, and e-commerce—people like Craig McCaw, Jeff Bezos, and Gordon Kuenster of ATL (and more recently, Asemblon).

Maybe you know all the history already, maybe you don’t. Certainly the story of Madrona’s involvement with Amazon has been told many times. But I bet the broader story of Alberg’s career and his observations from the local scene will give people a deeper understanding of Seattle-area innovation and Madrona’s role in the business community.

Here is an edited account of our conversation:

Xconomy: So tell us about your early days in Seattle.

Tom Alberg: My career has paralleled, a little bit, the growth of the technology industry. I started off as a young lawyer in 1967. In those days, there were a few high-tech companies. There was Fluke Manufacturing, and Physio-Control was about to start. There wasn’t much. Seattle had Boeing, and it would go through phases of being less about airplanes, more about computer services and other things. But there were little companies, and there was starting to be more entrepreneurship. When I joined Perkins, I’d been in New York a couple of years, so I was an expert, I thought, in securities law and raising money. But I’d been dealing with hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar deals, not startups. For some reason, I always had a technology interest.

One of the early things that happened was a guy came in named Gordon Kuenster. He’d been a Boeing executive and had been hired to run this startup called ATL [Advanced Technology Laboratories], an ultrasound company out of the University of Washington. He comes into Perkins because Perkins handles The Boeing Company. I’m the low man on the totem pole, so the partner in charge of Boeing has me come and meet with this guy. The partner said, ‘I don’t know, we don’t really do startups.’ I had to plead, ‘Let’s try it!’

X: How did ATL play a role in the rise of the Seattle tech scene?

TA: ATL became a major success at the same time as Physio-Control. Physio went public, and ATL got bought by Squibb for $60 million—big money in those days [1979]. And then what happened was, Hunter Simpson at Physio-Control and Gordon Kuenster at ATL, they invested in some other companies. People who made money in those companies invested in some companies. And then the biotech thing started. I represented Immunex when it first started [in 1981]. It went public, the stock crashed, it survived all those years somehow. So on the biotech side, a bunch of stuff started happening. There was quite a bit of activity, but nothing like it is today.

And then, of course, there was Microsoft. So in 1990, I was still at Perkins. It was a good technology practice. I went over to McCaw Cellular, partly because I was interested in technology. McCaw was sort of a secret company in Seattle. It was in the cell phone business; nobody had cell phones. There was that phone in some people’s cars, sort of like a radio phone or something. Nobody knew much …Next Page »

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In football, the expression is “three yards and a cloud of dust.” But at Microsoft, it’s apparently “three screens and a cloud.” That’s according to chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who took part in a keynote conversation with University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska at today’s State of Technology Luncheon, hosted by the Technology Alliance at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle.

Ozzie was speaking about the evolution of cloud-based software to serve three key device categories: phones, laptops, and TV-sized monitors. He and Lazowska (an Xconomist) touched on many other aspects as well, including Microsoft’s leadership and culture, the past, present, and future of computing, and even Boston versus Seattle (which suits Xconomy’s mission particularly well since we’re in both cities). The event was a big deal, especially because Ozzie doesn’t make a lot of public appearances around town, but there was also plenty of other high-profile news and activity from the lunch. Here’s a quick recap, including an edited account of the Q&A with Ozzie.

Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance (also an Xconomist), made the opening remarks and introduced Gov. Chris Gregoire, who kicked things off with a few comments about the region’s technology leadership. “On a national scale, I’m very excited that science and technology is back in a big way,” she said. “The innovative spirit that is the lifeblood of the 21st century economy is going to happen in our state.” Gregoire cited the importance of such technologies as the smart grid, broadband access, and healthcare software, and stressed the need to improve education from early childhood through graduate schools. Lastly, Gregoire singled out a few Washington companies, including Modumetal, Insitu, and Verdiem, saying “This is the future of our great state…It is not going to happen without all of us working together. We will get through this terrible downturn in our economy.”

Next up, Marty Smith of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels announced his group had just closed a $4 million-plus seed fund yesterday, to make “sidecar-type investments.” The Alliance of Angels funded five companies that were acquired last year—Cleverset, Shelfari, Insitu, SnapIn Software, and Coffee Equipment Company. And one of these, SnapIn Software (acquired by Nuance for an estimated $180 million last August), was named the Alliance of Angels 2009 Company of the Year, Smith announced. SnapIn, based in Bellevue, WA, was backed by Frazier Technology Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Oak Investment Partners.

Jeremy Jaech, chair of the Technology Alliance and CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, followed with an eye-opening rundown of benchmarking stats comparing Washington state with its top technology peers around the country: Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, California, New York, Colorado, and Utah. Jaech, who’s also an Xconomist, pointed out that Washington ranks 4th among its peers in terms of its share of total U.S. venture capital investment (behind California, Massachusetts, and New York), which is encouraging. Washington also ranks in the top 5 in the strength of its engineering workforce, but suffers in education rankings such as 8th grade math proficiency, high school graduation rates, number of bachelor’s and graduate degrees awarded, and state spending on academic research. The most urgent recommendation from Jaech’s team? Boost investment in undergraduate and graduate science and engineering education.

Then it was time for the keynote. The UW’s Lazowska introduced Ray Ozzie by telling the story of how the latter showed up in Seattle in 2005 (when his startup Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft) and gave a three-hour lecture on collaborative software in Lazowska’s class on the history of computing. I’m not going to do justice to Ozzie’s background here—he’s the main creator of Lotus Notes, among other things, and was a developer at Data General, where Craig Mundie also worked—but let’s just say I’ve long been fascinated by his story of discovering the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois in Urbana. (In part because that’s where I did my first computer programming as a high-school kid in 1983. And also, props to a fellow Illini alum.)

Here’s a condensed and edited version of the Ozzie conversation:

Lazowska: In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he talks about the importance of serendipitous timing. What is it about people born in 1955 for computing—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and you?

Ozzie: Timing is a huge, huge factor. Something else in Gladwell’s book is pretty …Next Page »

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Leave it to Paul Allen to create a museum that flies. Literally. This Saturday afternoon in the skies above Everett, WA.

Okay, the museum doesn’t really fly, it’s an aircraft hangar that remains on terra firma. The part that flies is most everything inside the museum, which the billionaire with omnivorous interests calls his Flying Heritage Collection. It’s composed of 15 World War II-era fighter planes that Allen has assembled from around the world over the past decade, polished up, and restored to FAA-certified flying condition.

Aviation fans can marvel at the roaring engine of the P51D Mustang, or imagine the danger pilots of other planes faced when performing night bombing raids over Berlin or London. But the larger question Allen is raising with his collection is an even more fascinating one, for me, anyway: What ingredients are necessary to make big leaps ahead in innovation? After all, this short historical period from 1935-1945 saw planes go from propeller-driven to the era of jet engines. Speeds went from 60 mph to 600 mph. Wood and fabric were replaced by all-metal body frames. Radar went from concept to mainstream. How did those stars align so quickly?

I drove up to Paine Field on a rainy Wednesday afternoon to see for myself and meet Adrian Hunt, the executive director of the Flying Heritage Collection. Since it opened in June, the flying museum has apparently been something of an instant hit. More than 11,000 people have already visited, the type of attendance figure that organizers thought it would take six months to eclipse, Hunt says.

Apparently, people are drawn to the living, breathing aspect of the place, where the artifacts don’t sit around collecting dust. Hunt pointed to an eye-washing station on the wall next to an exhibit, and a fire hose. They aren’t props—this is an active aircraft hangar. “That’s not the sort of thing you see at the Seattle Art Museum,” Hunt says. He adds, “It’s important that these are restored to flying condition, so people can experience the power, the engines, and the noise.” (The public can’t hop on board, the planes are flown strictly by professionals.)

By taking a close look at each plane, you can see the step-by-step advances aviation made in those formative years. Allen’s exhibits credit the leaps in innovation to six main themes, which you can see etched on the wall before you enter the hangar. The first is political will, defined by government leadership and public support, which the museum says was “driven by ambition or the need to survive.” (I’ll go on a limb and say that’s a more powerful motivator than stock options).

But political will alone wasn’t enough. For one, the means and manufacturing capacity from capital and labor had to be in place. For another, the support technology like weather instruments needed to mature. More precise weaponry had to be developed. Of course, engines had to evolve with greater horsepower to fly longer, higher, and faster. Then fuselage and wing materials needed to get stronger and lighter in order to make planes safer and more nimble.

Even though I’m the biotech guy at Xconomy, it made me think there’s got to be some lesson here for my corner of the world. Maybe it’s the next flu pandemic that mobilizes political leadership and public support around vaccine research, which could be the catalyst to propel us to a new era of disease prevention after decades of immunology research. Then again, if we aren’t already laying the right foundations in research, maybe we won’t be equipped to make such rapid leaps in a time of crisis. That’s something to think about when the 70-year-old planes rumble in the skies over our modern high-tech mecca this Saturday afternoon.

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Last October marked the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. And next month, Sputnik’s American offspring, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will also hit its 50th birthday. The milestone has occasioned the biggest flurry of media retrospectives on the space program since Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, including two well-made documentaries that aired this week on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater, When We Left Earth and In the Shadow of the Moon.

If you missed them, it’s worth searching your local listings to catch these two programs when they’re shown again. (They’re also available on DVD and Blu-Ray disc.) Though much of the footage in the two films is familiar, they’re notable because this is the first time most of this material has been shown in high definition. Also, both programs contain extensive new interviews with the surviving astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days—plain-spoken rocket jockeys who are just plain fun to listen to.

I’m a veteran space buff—my first piece of “technology journalism” was a poster on the Saturn V rocket that I designed when I was in the fourth grade—and the Discovery Channel programs sent me on a trip across the Web to see what else I could find in the way of historical images from the Apollo missions. If you follow NASA at all, you know that the Web is the best place to see the raw data coming back from current-day missions like the Mars Phoenix lander and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (which are still trucking across the Martian surface, four years after they were expected to expire). But it turns out that the Web also holds a vast mine of original data from the Apollo project, and in today’s column I thought I’d point you toward some especially rich veins.

While NASA itself has a large collection of Web resources about the Apollo days, they aren’t particularly well organized, and they tend toward the hagiographic. The two Apollo sites that impress me the most are labors of love created by amateur historians with no direct connections to NASA. One is the Project Apollo Archive, assembled by a Lynchburg, VA, native named Kipp Teague.

Pay no attention to the 1994-era Web graphics and ugly HTML tables (Teague deliberately labels his collection of history sites the “RetroWeb”). The glory of the Project Apollo Archive is the material itself: thousands of photographs scanned from NASA originals, including large-format Hasselblad images captured by astronauts on Apollo 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17; hours of MP3 recordings of communications between flight controllers and the astronauts; and a few MPEG videos covering events you don’t see in the TV shows about the moon landings, such as the moment when Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean accidentally points the television camera at the sun, destroying its vidicon sensor (and preventing the world from witnessing the rest of the mission on TV).

An even more detailed resource—hosted on a NASA web server but assembled and edited by a former Los Alamos scientist named Eric Jones and a Canadian space buff named Ken Glover—is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Destined to be used by historians far into the future, the site is a collection of transcripts of all the recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston, interwoven with after-the-fact commentary from the editors and from 10 of the 12 astronauts who were actually there. It’s supplemented by MP3 and RealAudio clips of the same transmissions, as well as hundreds of photos, Quicktime VR panoramas, and flight documents, right down to the technical checklists the astronauts wore on the cuffs of their spacesuits.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the journals. This is from Apollo 17, at the moment when Harrison Schmitt—a PhD geologist, and the only trained scientist to go to the Moon—noticed something unexpected:

145:26:22 Schmitt: Oh, hey! (Very brief pause)
145:26:25 Schmitt: Wait a minute…
145:26:26 [Eugene] Cernan: What?
145:26:27 Schmitt: Where are the reflections? I’ve been fooled once. There is orange soil!!
145:26:32 Cernan: Well, don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:35 Schmitt: (Very excited) It’s all over!! Orange!!!
145:26:38 Cernan: Don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:40 Schmitt: I stirred it up with my feet.
145:26:42 Cernan: (Excited, too) Hey, it is!! I can see it from here!
145:26:44 Schmitt: It’s orange!
145:26:46 Cernan: Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It’s still orange!
145:26:49 Schmitt: Sure it is! Crazy!
145:26:53 Cernan: Orange!
145:26:54 Schmitt: I’ve got to dig a trench, Houston.
145:27:00 [Bob] Parker [EVA Capcom]: Copy that. I guess we’d better work fast.
145:27:01 Cernan: Hey, he’s not going out of his wits. It really is.
145:27:07 Parker: Is it the same color as cheese?

It turned out that Schmitt had discovered an unusual deposit of volcanic glass—formed under the surface of the moon billions of years earlier and stirred up by a relatively recent meteor impact—with a colorful orange cast that strongly contrasted with the Moon’s generally gray-black soil. (The moment is recreated fairly faithfully in From the Earth to the Moon, a wonderful 1998 TV mini-series produced by Tom Hanks, who, of course, played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13). If people ever go back to the Moon, …Next Page »

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For your afternoon viewing pleasure, may I commend to you the following video from Alex Randall, co-founder of the Boston Computer Exchange.

To commemorate what he says is the 25th anniversary of the very first e-commerce transaction, Randall sat down in front of a video camera to tell the tale of how he and his wife, Cameron Hall, set up an online marketplace for computers in their living room and, on March 5, 1983, sold the first one to a customer in Chile. It’s a fun story filled with nostalgia gear (remember the days of the Apple I, the Osborne, and 300 BPS modems?), and a great reminder of the Boston area’s key role in computer and internet history. Happy birthday, e-commerce!

And now, for those of you who want to dispute Randall’s claim to having facilitated the first online transaction—and I know you’re out there—fire away.

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In studying why Boston has been a center of innovation for nearly four centuries, the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative has identified a set of drivers which came up in all eras, in all types of innovation (technical, medical, and social). Deep historical research on more than 60 cases, conducted with funding from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, pinpointed five drivers that re-appeared over and over in the stories behind each of these particular innovations—why they happened in Boston, and why they happened at the time they did. These are Boston’s “secret sauce,” explaining why we have an innovation tradition.

We call these five ingredients or drivers the “High Five.” They are:

1) A driving entrepreneur or a team of leaders.

2) A local network of people and businesses/organizations sharing information, working across silos.

3) Local funders.

4) Local demand which the entrepreneur can use to refine and perfect the new idea or product.

5) National or global demand for the innovation.

An example of entrepreneurship truly driving a particular innovation in Boston’s past is the Boston Associates, a group of entrepreneurs including Lowell, Appleton, and others, who set up the first factories in Waltham and later Lowell, taking the wealth from shipping and transferring it into a new industry, textile manufacturing. More usually innovation is driven by a single entrepreneur like Cambridge’s Elias Howe and his sewing machine or An Wang and office word processing in the 1970s.

An example of the second driver, local networks and clusters, can be found in the fierce debate in Boston between black abolitionist David Walker and white abolitionist/journalist William Lloyd Garrison, which helped to spur the abolitionist movement—a social innovation.

The third driver, local funding, or capital and financing from Bostonians and local institutions, was central to King Gillette’s development of the safety razor, funded by John Joyce; the birth of state-chartered banking in 1784; and Georges Doriot’s invention of the venture capital model in the 1940s.

Local demand, the fourth driver, helped to get Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, off the ground. Bricklin was able to sell his first units in 1979 because there was a local market exemplified by the Boston Computer Society, a user group founded in 1977. Other cities didn’t have such a ready market.

Finally, the development of the lucrative salt cod trade in the 17th century was a response to national and global demand. Bostonians have been particularly good at gauging and meeting this demand, whether with salt cod in the 17th century, mass-manufactured textiles in the 19th, or Ned Johnson inventing check-writing off mutual funds in 1976.

Four of the High Five drivers are local in nature. Taken together, these factors led us to identify the phenomenon of the “bump and connect.” Proximity brings about crucial encounters among entrepreneurs, funders, and researchers, collaboration within industries and clusters, and professional and social networking. Even in today’s digital world, business leaders like Novartis’ Bernard Aebischer report that networking opportunities are important—and were in fact a determining factor in the decision to locate Novartis’s research headquarters in Cambridge’s Central Square, in close proximity to Cambridge’s “Genetown,” MIT, MGH, and Harvard’s Longwood campus.

Also central to our research findings is that innovation in Boston has had a broader racial, ethnic, and gender base over the past few centuries than many think. Our innovation tradition is not only white and male. African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics have made an important difference in technical, social, and medical innovations. Immigrants have played a leading role in introducing new ideas and social movements. And the role of women has been critical, from the first years of Massachusett’s settlement all the way through to the present.

Our History & Innovation Collaborative works to ensure that the “bump and connect” is recognized and continually woven into our fabric—whether in new real estate developments, or the Boston Museum coming soon to the Greenway, or our 2008 History & Innovation Awards. Helping to generate new waves of innovation is all about fostering the bump and connect.

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Editor’s note: This marks the second and final installment of a unique profile—a detective story, really—of a Boston-area entrepreneur and his famous invention. The story was excerpted from Xconomy contributing writer Seth Shulman’s The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (W. W. Norton 2008), which will be officially released on Monday. The first installment ran yesterday. Be sure to examine the pictures in today’s article.

*******

Over the next few days, in a binge of work, I puzzled over a complex knot of irregularities about Bell’s life-altering visit to Washington, D.C. To begin with, the timing of the trip seemed more than a little odd. Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876, but, according to Bell’s laboratory notebook, he did not successfully transmit intelligible speech over a telephone until March 10th. Was it true that, in the lingo of the patent office, Bell had yet to “reduce his invention to practice” at the time he filed his patent application? That, in other words, Bell patented an invention he had never actually made?

Even the logistics of this question were mystifying. I knew from reporting on disputes over intellectual property that working models of inventions were required by the U.S. Patent Office in the 1800s. It took only a little digging to learn that on February 14, 1876—the very day Bell filed his telephone patent—a U.S. Senate Committee held hearings on a bill calling for the agency to do away with this requirement. Supporters of the bill, proposed by Connecticut Senator James E. English, testified that the patent office’s attic coffers were literally overflowing and that there was no space to put the roughly twenty thousand new models the agency expected to receive in the coming year.

Of course, there would have been no point for the Senate to debate the issue unless, as of February 1876, the patent office at least technically continued to require working models to accompany patent applications. Why, then, hadn’t the patent examiner in Bell’s case required him to submit a functioning model of his telephone?

Equally baffling was the patent office’s decision to grant Bell his telephone patent even before he had returned to his lab in Boston on March 7, 1876. How was it, I wondered, that one of the most momentous patents in history was issued in just three weeks? When I looked at other patents filed and issued around the same time, they all seemed to have taken months, if not years, to issue…

The U.S. Patent Office’s speedy work to approve Bell’s patent seemed all the more extraordinary because, on February 19, 1876, the patent examiner had notified Bell that his patent would be “suspended” for three months, after which time, the letter said, the office would formally decide whether to declare so-called interference proceedings. Such interference disputes almost always include formal hearings to determine which inventor can rightfully claim “priority of conception.” Sorting out the interference claims on inventor Emile Berliner’s 1877 patent application on the microphone, for instance, ended up taking more than thirteen years. That was, of course, an extreme case, but even the more common interference proceedings lasted for one or more years.

There was no question about it: the swiftness of the patent office’s actions seemed highly unusual. I wondered what had made U.S. Patent officials change their minds so quickly about their contention that the claims of others overlapped with Bell’s. For that matter, I wondered exactly what those other claims were.

Thanks to the Dibner Institute’s extraordinary library at MIT, I easily answered the latter question. The filing that conflicted Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.

Today, if he is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.

History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.

As I soon learned, once you start looking, you can find a good deal of information about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end…

In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the patent office called a “caveat.” Although …Next Page »

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Editor’s note: Just about everyone knows the story of Alexander Graham Bell and his invention of the telephone—and those famous words uttered in the inventor’s Boston workshop to his assistant, Thomas Watson.

But what if the whole history of the telephone was rooted in a lie? A few years ago, when I walked into the Dibner Institute at MIT to turn in a letter of recommendation for Xconomy contributing writer Seth Shulman to spend a year as a fellow studying the history of science and technology, I had no idea that in some small way I might be taking part in challenging Bell’s famous account. But a few months ago, when I first saw the fruits of the labor Seth began during his fellowship year—a manuscript for a book entitled The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (W. W. Norton 2008)—I was instantly brought alive with the awareness that history was being rewritten.

I decided on the spot that Xconomy had to run an excerpt when the book was published (sales officially begin next Monday). Bell, after all, was a Boston entrepreneur. His startup company—the Bell Telephone System, aka AT&T—is one of the area’s greatest corporate success stories. Of course, Xconomy normally covers the present and future of entrepreneurship and new technology—and Bell’s first telephone call took place more than 130 years ago. But Seth’s research and its potential impact on Boston’s innovation legacy are just too compelling to ignore.

So, in two parts, beginning today and concluding tomorrow, you can judge for yourself whether Bell deserves his place in history, or whether the story of the telephone needs to be reconsidered. —Robert Buderi.

Mr. Watson, come here!

Thomas Watson hunched over the bureau in Alexander Graham Bell’s attic bedroom at the modest boardinghouse at 5 Exeter Place in Boston. Watson’s ear pressed tightly against the metal frame of the small “speaking telegraph” receiver.

The booming voice was unmistakable, even in a tinny, ghostlike facsimile. Watson reeled in amazement when he heard it. Jumping back, he swung open the bedroom door and ran into the hallway.

In the adjacent room, Bell was leaning over his workbench and shouting into the mouth of a metal cone clamped onto a block of wood…

Bell was undoubtedly still shouting into the contraption when Watson burst into the room to report what he had heard. Only then did Bell realize that he had placed the world’s first telephone call.

The feat was hard for either man to believe. They had labored toward the goal for so long—and with such paltry success—prior to that moment on March 10, 1876.

The Bell and Watson “eureka” moment is one of the best-known stories in the history of invention and among the most romantic with its two earnest and visionary young inventors profoundly changing the world from their humble quarters. I first heard the tale as a child and have read enough versions now for its familiarity to give it a luster, the way polished old wood develops a patina.

Bell’s voice traveled just ten yards along a bare wire from one room to another. It was a modest transmission of sound waves to have unleashed such an enormous change in human interaction. Yet even today, after untold billions of long-distance conversations spanning more than a century, Bell’s oddly emphatic words are still probably the most famous ever uttered into a telephone.

The story of the telephone’s invention is not just well known, it is impeccably documented, beginning that very evening, when both men wrote about it in their notebooks. With contemporaneous eyewitness accounts from each of the episode’s principals, the story is the historian’s equivalent of a slam dunk.

Late one October evening, I was working in the plush office I had been given for the year at MIT. On my computer screen, courtesy of the Library of Congress, was a high-resolution, digital reproduction of Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory notebook from 1875 and 1876, exactly as he had written it in his own hand.

The large windows near my desk looked out on the Charles River and downtown Boston. I gazed at the glow of the night skyline and realized I could practically see the spot at 5 Exeter Place in Boston where, more than a century ago, Bell had written the words before me.

On the screen, the images of Bell’s notebook lacked only the musty smell of the notebook’s leather binding and the brittle feel of its lined pages. In every other respect, they offered a perfect facsimile, allowing the viewer to follow Bell’s work straight from his own fountain pen. In some passages, I thought I could even roughly gauge Bell’s excitement from the way his penmanship got scratchy when he seemed to write more hurriedly.

I wondered what Bell would have made of the fact that I was viewing a perfect reproduction of his notebook via the World Wide Web. He’d surely marvel at the technology. And he would also be justified to feel proud. After all, the Internet is little more than a powerful descendant of the communication device he himself pioneered.

As a journalist who specializes in science and technology, I have long been interested in invention—how it occurs and how it is remembered. So I jumped at the opportunity to spend a year as a science-writer-in-residence at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. It was the first time they had invited an outsider to join in the program’s seminars and discussion groups.

Given my interest in inventors, I had proposed to do a year of research on the relationship between two towering icons: Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was a project that seemed full of possibility and I was grateful for the opportunity to begin it. …

*******

On the night I was paging through Bell’s notebook, the first thing I noticed was its sensible progression. Day after day, Bell made incremental changes in his experiments using the same elements: electromagnets, vibrating reeds, and tuning forks. The work was clear, tangible, elegant. I felt I understood what Bell was doing and maybe even what he was thinking about.

For the most part, he was not thinking about the device we now call the telephone. Bell, like many other inventors in his day, was actually trying to solve a problem then plaguing the burgeoning telegraph industry: how to send …Next Page »

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Today, the Technology Square business park next to MIT is home to Dyax, Novartis, Forrester, the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, and many other startups, bigcos, and research labs alike. Soon after World War II, however, Lever Brothers shut down its soap plants at this very location and shifted work to cheaper and more modern sites elsewhere in the U.S. At the same time, dozens of industrial firms were abandoning Cambridge, once one of the biggest industrial centers on the East Coast. This spelled disaster for city authorities since it meant loss of property taxes, blighted residential areas, plummeting business vitality, and surging urban unemployment—all part of a pitiless self-reinforcing feedback loop.

And yet many of these empty or underused industrial sites were within a few blocks of MIT, an institution which had expanded massively since WWII thanks to federal research money pouring into electronics, materials science, and other emergent fields—and all leading to beneficial civilian side-effects. To help accelerate this process, just after the war MIT President Karl Compton and colleagues had co-founded American Research & Development, creating the first modern venture capital fund. ARD helped commercialize several research projects, including MIT-related ventures such as Ionics, High Voltage Research, and Digital Equipment, and generally gave birth to the venture capital industry.

This was at a time when development of the suburbs was the dominant mode, driven in large part by the proliferation of the automobile. Indeed, after an initial period of time in old, cheap industrial space in Cambridge, many of the MIT-related technology startups found a home along Route 128, the Boston ring road which became known as “America’s technology highway.” By contrast, the inner city was an increasingly depressed place of the past. Throughout the 1950s, the industrial zone around MIT hollowed out, and it was under these circumstances that Cambridge Mayor Edward Crane came to then MIT President James Killian and asked for the Institute’s help. Killian agreed and MIT—together with the City of Cambridge Redevelopment Authority and real estate developer Cabot Cabot & Forbes—planned and financed Technology Square, one of the country’s earliest university-connected business parks, and perhaps the first civic-academic partnership to redevelop a disused old urban industrial zone.

The contemporary MIT campus is now surrounded by a patchwork quilt of business parks, stand-alone office buildings, and research lab space which collectively form an informal Technology Venture Zone (see photo below). MIT has been directly involved in orchestrating much of this, having first learned how through the birthing of Technology Square.

In the mid-1960s, with MIT’s financial help the city initiated a redevelopment project for the Kendall Square area to accommodate a proposed NASA research center and private development. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Boston Properties had built Cambridge Center on city-owned land, creating the Marriott Hotel complex on Main Street and a new eastern gateway for the Institute. By the 1990s, MIT was intensively developing the University Park area in collaboration with Forest City on the former Simplex Wire & Cable property, reinvigorating the neighborhood south of Massachusetts Avenue between the school and Central Square and creating quarters for dozens of businesses.

And today, half of MIT-owned One Broadway, in the heart of Kendall Square, is run by another MIT-related company, the for-profit Cambridge Innovation Center. The center, which offers flexible office and light R&D space for more than 100 emerging growth technology companies, including several dozen MIT spin-offs, represents a neighborhood unto itself.

The success of these MIT-catalyzed developments and the entrepreneurial boom zones they foster has been noted by other universities around the US and the world. Atlanta’s Georgia Tech, for instance, named its recent urban redevelopment project…Technology Square!

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With all that happens so quickly in life, Dr. Harold “Doc” Edgerton made his name by bringing the fastest-moving things on earth to a dead halt. His teams developed the technology to literally stop a bullet in front of your eyes, synchronizing flash photography with the exact moment of impact, the moment of truth—when the bullet was passing through an apple, a playing card, or empty space.

MIT has posted some of his pre-World War II images online. The website of the school’s Edgerton Center also features a remembrance published by the National Academy of Sciences. And here is a blow-up of the inset 1959 self-portrait, used with permission of the Naylor Collection.

Edgerton was born in 1903 and raised in Aurora, Nebraska. Throughout his career, he was fascinated by stroboscopes and their ability to create intense flashes of light that, properly synchronized with film in a camera, could produce wonderfully detailed, high-resolution action photos—of, say, a gymnast doing a flip across several frames of film. The technology enabled new studies of physiology and the solution of previously baffling problems. Edgerton’s desire to learn, to discover, and to experiment led to a life filled with creativity and inestimable industry.

As a graduate student at MIT, he developed the technology to “see” high-speed machinery at work. He created night-vision imaging systems with the Defense Department during World War II and enhanced underwater imaging of the ocean floor in consultation with Jacques Cousteau and the National Geographic Society. He spent a good bit of energy on sports photography—boxing, golf, football, and tennis, in particular. His images, with their compelling revelations about how the human body moves, have helped and haunted athletes for years.

In 1947, he founded EG&G Inc. with two partners, Kenneth J. Germeshausen and Herbert E. Grier. The firm expanded almost exponentially over many years to become a “family of companies” numbering in the dozens—all centered on technology’s use in explaining the world (and universe) that we inhabit.

Harold Edgerton was a true Renaissance Man. He was an accomplished guitarist and singer, as well as, arguably, one of the most remarkable fine artists in his primary medium, photography. Some of his images are icons of art. They are images of the unseeable, seen. As if by magic, Edgerton’s team brought invisible events into view—and the wonder they provoke is ineffable.

Edgerton’s contemporaries and mentors—Edwin Land, George Eastman, John Hadland, to name just three—all had deep respect and great enthusiasm for his work. They sought to aid, abet, and even compete with him to more rapidly develop the technologies he’d helped pioneer. Edgerton wisely stayed deeply ensconced in his science, and MIT made sure that he had the laboratory facilities, lecture halls, and exhibit or experimentation space that would allow him to explore endlessly. It was no mistake that Land set up his own company—Polaroid—across the street from MIT in Tech Square. The vibrant back-and-forth between Edgerton’s labs and Land’s was a veritable engine of invention, each man using his company to commercialize technologies that could be used in science, medicine, industry, and even the arts.

I was fortunate enough to work with Dr. Land and his team, in concert with, and with admiration for, Dr. Edgerton’s team, as well as Hadland’s team from England, which pushed much of the same technology ahead in other parts of the world. It was the most exciting time one could imagine!

Harold Edgerton passed away in 1990, leaving a legacy of positive energy at the Hamilton Trust, at MIT, where his archives are kept, and at the many offshoots of EG&G. He also left us with a new understanding—through our own eyes—of the marvels of nature and science.

He said, “Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am after the facts, only the facts. In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.”

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