Credits
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 . 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...
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The Last Candy Factory
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Instant Photos
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Vaccine Breakthroughs
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Getting to the Moon
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Internet Accelerator
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Biotech Trailblazer
The Innovation Trail
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,...
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Human Genome Project
The Innovation Trail
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...
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Broad Discovery Center
The Innovation Trail
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...
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MIT's Cutting Edge
The Innovation Trail
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...
info_outlineOutside 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