that was never acceptable. that wasn't what he wanted. he wanted full access to the facility. i think there were two feelings about that. they were happy that there was a library and that especially the adults were happy that their children would have a place where they could study, that would supplement what they were learn anything school, but they also knew it was not a library that was meant -- it was meant to appease, it was not meant for them to have full access to the information that they needed. samuel tucker, for one, never, i believe, set foot in the robert robinson library and, in fact, i believe there is a letter in the document section of special corrections at the barrett library where he writes saying he does not consider this a solution, building this library. he wants full access to the alexandria free library for all african-american patrons who are citizens of alexandria, who pay taxes and have a right to use that facility. they saw tucker on the street in

alexandria, they say that they saw a man with his briefcase and a slightly rumpled suit, but he had a very determined walk, and he was always headed somewhere, and he always wanted to make things right for other people. e understood the injustice that was out there. he understood that african-americans had so much, a so much harder time than the white community to get a free trial or to get access to a free trial. and he wasn't successful all the time, but he tried, and he fought against the prevailing view. and i think that was one of the most important things about him. >> go to c-span.org/localcontent. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. here's our prime time lineup for tonight. up next, alec foege presents "the tinkerers: the amateur, do it yourselves and ip eventer who

is make america great." and then at 9 on "after words," kim goddess examines hillary clinton's role in u.s. diplomacy abroad followed by jeffrey frank whose book takes a look at the relationship between eisenhower and nixon at 10. and we conclude tonight's prime time programming at 11:15 eastern with michelle rhee, the former d.c. public schools chancellor writes about education reform in her book, "radical: fighting to put students first." that's next on c-span2's booktv. >> up next on booktv, alec foege talks about the contributions made to our society by modern-day ben franklins and thomas edisons. this is about an hour, 15 minutes. [applause] >> well, i hope i can live up to the introduction. [laughter] first, i want to say it's a real

privilege to give a talk on my book at the westport library because the westport library has been a real innovator in terms of bringing tinkering and the maker culture into the library setting. so it was just sort of a coincidence that brought us together, but it's worked out really great, and thanks to bill derry for helping make this all happen. um, as he mentioned in his introduction, um, you know, my book is a lot -- it's partially about what's going on in tinkering right now in the contemporary world, but it also touches on history. but more specifically, it talks about what the ideas behind being a tinkerer are and what is the mindset of a tinkerer. so we should start talking about, well, what is a tinkerer as i define it in the book, and

how does a tinkerer differ from, say, an inventer or a hacker or a lot of the other types of innovators that we know in american society. now, typically the term had negative connotations, you know? you'd think of sort of the old crackpot puttering around in the basement not really knowing what they were making, but just sort of having fun with old spare parts. but, in fact, that's kind of the heart of what in my mind tinkering is about. because a true tinkerer is a dilettante, but in a good way. we tend to think of tinkerers as trained engineers or specialists in their fields, but historically in this country tinkerers were really, um, not specialists, they were generalists. i mean, certainly engineers can be tinkerers, but typically tinkering is what they're doing in their spare time when they're not at work. so, um, you know -- [laughter] and, in fact, i've met a lot of

those people, you know, talking to other groups about this book. um, tinkering is looking at the things armed us and, um, thinking about new things we can make from existing things. it's about keeping one's eyes and ears open to the possibilities. tinkerers sometimes try to solve problems, but oftentimes they end up solving completely different problems. but that's okay because it's really about pursuing their personal passion initially. it may turn into some huge corporation one day, but that's typically not how they first got into it. um, and, you know, we talk about education these days a lot, and, you know, whether we're teaching our kids the right things, and a lot of people wonder how can we get some of that tinkering spirit back into the schools, but, um, i would argue that it's not about teaching kids how to tinker. i think most kids know how to tinker if you give them some

things to play around with. they'll typically play around with them and try to figure out how they work and see what they can make out of them. you know, i think that we've become a test-taking culture in a lot of ways, and we sometimes forget that. teachers, of course i understand, teach the text because they're under pressure to show higher scores on, you know, for their districts, but, you know, i don't think that we really need to teach kids how to tinker, we just need to make sure we don't squash that tinkering spirit too early. so my book begins sort of with my own sort of tinkering experience, if you will, and that's when i sat on my blackberry. [laughter] i was getting into the car, and i realized pretty quickly i had damaged the screen. i also realized that the phone was still working, but i couldn't read anything on the screen, so i took it to, um, the

local phone store naively thinking they could fix it or i would, you know, turn it in for another one relatively cheaply. and the salesperson told me, you know, i wish i could fix it, i used to do that. it was my favorite part of the job, but they don't let us do that anymore actually. but he could sell me a new one. and i said, well, great. and he said, well, it's $450. and i said, well, not so great. so i went home, and i -- i don't know why, i out of frustration did a google search and found a group of -- whoops, i'm just trying to, i've got something over here -- um, videos on youtube that, um -- and i think, well, maybe i can't get this one to work. sorry. we have a little technical difficulty here. it's right there.

[inaudible conversations] in any case, i'll explain it to you. it was a video on youtube that literally told me how to take apart my blackberry, remove the screen and put in a new screen. so i went online and got a special set of screwdrivers for a couple dollars and ordered a new screen for about $20 and followed the video to the letter. to my surprise when i opened it up, there were about five pieces. it's just a screen, a circuit board. took the old one out, put it back together, and it worked like new. so that was my realization that we live in a culture now where we're sort of intimidated by these high-tech devices that we have and feel like we, we're not

supposed to open them. companies tell us you're not supposed to open them because you'll void the warranty. but frankly i figured if i was going to throw the thing out anyway, i might as well give it a shot. turned out it wasn't difficult. and, of course, humans made these things in the first place, so theoretically it shouldn't be that difficult to at least figure out how to replace the screen. um, you know, i think the idea for this book sort of came out of the time after the big economic crisis of 2008-2009. there are a lot of white collar workers sort of losing their jobs and worrying about what they actually did, realizing that we had become a huge service economy, but, you know, the united states used to be a country that could make things, and did we make anything anymore? i learned in my research, in fact, that the united states still is a huge manufacturer. most of the things that we make are very high-end, you know,

electronics items. the difference is, of course, these days we just don't need as many people to make all of those things. but we certainly are still a manufacturing hub and, in fact, there's been a trend even since i started working on the book of a lot of big companies like google and apple trying to manufacture some of their devices on american shores again. so, um, is so that turned out to be a little bit of a misnomer. um, i tried to sort of boil down what tinkering meant in terms of putting the book together but also just to sort of think about whether we as a cup had lost this -- as a country had lost this tinkering spirit or whether it -- whoops, will we go -- or whether it was something that just sort of needed to be

refreshed or reawakened. as i mentioned before, tingerring is not so much a set of technical skills, there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. you just pick up enough knowledge about electronics and textiles and metals, programming or paper folding to figure out how to do what you want to do and then, um, you know, you try to come up with something new. certainly skills are important, but they're a means to an end. you know, mastery isn't the point, i guess, with tinkering. the point is sort of coming up with manager new. before -- with something new. before i delve back into history to talk about tinkering in this country, i just want to point out a few of the things that are going on in the culture right now that show that there is sort of a renaissance going on in tinkering. i don't know if anybody -- most people here have been to a maker fair. i know the westport, mark mathias has arranged some mini

maker fairs for the westport library. they're really, really wonderful festivals of all sorts of tinkering and electronics and art and music. another thing going on these days are these so-called hacker spaces or tinkering work spaces where you can essentially go in, and there's all sorts of high-tech equipment you can play around with. this sort of tries to address the problem that some people have mentioned which is that in the old days when tinkering wasn't so, you know, high-tech most people had a workshop in their basement, and they would have all the tools they needed to pretty much do anything. and today, um, you know, a lot of people can't afford sort of more of the high-tech things that might be needed to do different kinds of tinkering. but you can certainly go and visit one of these tech shops for a day or for however long you need and try out some of that equipment.

um, hackers are obviously something that have come up a lot in contemporary culture, and the one that i sort of focus on in my book is a young guy named george who famously broke into an iphone and a few years later into a sony playstation and was -- sony in particular tried to sue him, but eventually they hired him. [laughter] to help them out and figure out some of the -- so, you know, i guess my point is, you know, hackers can be tinkerers too. certainly there are some black hat tinkerers that i wouldn't quite, you know, are more thieves than tinkerers, but they certainly intersect at some levels. um, you know, i think the main thing that's most important about, um, tinkering is that, um, there's a certain amount of humor to it.

i believe this mouse was dead, by the way, before -- [laughter] they made it into a mouse. i don't, i can't vouch for whether an animal was hurt. you know, there's a spirit of fun to tinkering. all the best tinkerers will tell you that they did what they did, and they developed innovations they did because they were enjoying what they were doing. so i think that that's sort of a key element that even in contemporary tinkering is important. um, now i'm going to go back a little bit because in my book i sort of try to really get to the beginnings of american tinkering, and we can talk a little bit later about, you know, how american tinkering differs from -- obviously, there are tinkerers around the world. but there is something about this country and the founding fathers that seemed to sort of bake tinkering right into, you know, our original history. um, obviously, ben franklin is sort of held up as the original great american tinkerer and

inventer, you know, in school we learned the story of the kite and the key, and he invented the lightning rod, the franklin stove, bifocals, to.comer the and all sorts of other things. he was also considered a huge source of wisdom which is great and really interesting figure. the only thing is that he raised the bar kind of high kind of early. [laughter] i mean, he made tinkering seem like a very daunting thing. ..

those kind of can be valuable as the of brandt owls well. the other thing that is interesting about frankland is if you look at a lot of them many of these original founding fathers in this country were sort of lifelong and george washington being probably the biggest of all is a young man. he pursued the farming works and he wanted to find the best fertilizer, the best way to prevent come of the best method of cultivation.

he owned a lot of land so there was a lot of need for it but this is something that he pursued her about his life. the other part of it is the building of the potomac canal and he was obsessed with it through his presidency to the rest of his life he actually died with the canal not actually finished. he knew he had ideas about it and wanted to hire engineers to help them build it and there were no training engineers. they had to consult engineers in england, and in fact the techniques he used to develop it and up being kind of wrong. he was built with a totally different technique but again something that he pursued what was interested in burr aharoni

machine, james madison invented a walking stick with a microscope to invent more organisms on the ground. he was too short for most people. and then i argue that alexander hamilton was the original financial tanker that founded the federal research. i guess the point is that i mean clearly these four men of wealth and leisure and founding a country that a lot of other things to do but at that time they pursued tinkering figuring out solutions to problems throughout their lives. frederick was the only tinker of his time. to jump to contemporary tankering i think i identify in

the book dean mekouar is being the contemporary for those who don't know who he is, he is a serial inventor. for one, he made his original fortune with a series of infusion pumps including insulin pumps that allowed the patient to receive medication and around the clock without having an nurse present. but he also invented a walking wheelchair which never caught on but the idea of why all he built this gyroscopic technology into it said well you might want a wheelchair to climb up on the curbs were up the stairs. and so he invented this -- he came up with this ingenious technology to do that, he didn't catch on. they were expensive.

he is probably best known for the sec'y built on the same technology as the walking wheelchair. and i guess the segue eventually became a little bit of a running joke. i don't know if you remember when it came out a number of years back it was hailed as the future of transportation coming out what's going to change the way he lived. unfortunately a lot of the big cities ban their use on sidewalks for one. they are still in use obviously. i think amazon uses them in the warehouses, and there are a lot of segue to worse around the country if she were in a city you can take a tour of the city in the sec'y. this technology is around, and maybe it will have bigger use in the future. the point is interesting is that

he actually became a wealthy off of his inventions but if you look at sort of, you know, how they track over time you couldn't necessarily put them all together and say that is exactly what he was doing and in fact the way he got into it is by building these sort of light shows that were synchronized and music and he was able to see some of the technology as a teenager actually at planetarium in new york. i actually talk about thomas edison and the book. of course, you know, the inventor of the century, you know, he was hailed again the same issue with our franklin as

he raised the issue is so high people thought of tinkering he almost seemed otherworldly but i tell the story in my book the invention of the device in this photo which didn't end up being a dictation machine. it was actually a photograph. she came up with a photograph the was workable and relatively easy to produce. but he hated music and couldn't fathom why anybody would want to listen to this device and spend their time it didn't make sense to him so he spent a number of years pursuing what he thought was the market for this device which is an office dictation and it didn't work out well for him,

he had other success but he never made much money off of the photograph and they didn't understand how electricity worked at that point so they just regarded it and when they call them the wizard of menlo park they thought he was a wizard. he represented a sort of the connection between the origins of tinkering in the u.s. and a sort of a contemporary version of it because he was a great man. he had these great ideas that spewed out of his head held a legend went and they had all of this assistance to figure out how to make them work and that became the new architect for how to tinker and innovate and in

fact you could argue that his lab was the first researcher development operation in the modern sense. but again, he just could not understand why people would want to listen to a photograph for entertainment purposes, and in fact the irony is the company that eventually did commercialize the photograph phonograph included alexander graham bell as a partner which is particularly upsetting to edison because he didn't see the telephone as being a very worthwhile device either. so, i guess might lead in all of that is just saying that if he didn't always get it right the and he was always muddling through everything, then surely that is okay for all of us as well. you know, if you read the account of how most of his most

famous inventions were realized it was composed with very frustrated assistance and midnight dinners and wasn't particularly easy but he was having fun. so, back to the idea of tinkering has something conceptual off in the world war ii era i sort of became intrigued with a guy named thomas mcdonald who was by most people's understanding a career bureaucrat. he grew up in the midwest in the farming community and watched as four for workers struggled on the dirt roads so muddy

sometimes they would just stay home for weeks at a time until the roads would try at so they could go out again and transport their crops. so after going to agricultural college, he became under the spell for the dean of the iowa state agricultural college who was a proponent of the good roads movement and it was actually intended to promote the use of bicycles because cars were not really a round when it started. so the idea was to build more public roads so people could ride bicycles more. eventually cars became popular and he went on to become the head of the bureau of the roads in washington and later created and education board and the american association of highway officials. the reason i think of them as a tanker is because over a period

of years he pursued this idea that there had to be a way to construct and to facilitate the construction of the interstate highway system throughout the country, and the big revelation that he had eventually is that it had to be a federal state hybrid and the idea was to build roads where people were going to go or were they wanted to go as opposed to where they were already giving. before that there was a lot of corruption. most of the roads were built by the states and there was a lot of corruption in the states and nothing was done on a lot of bad roads and in fact, you know, it was really the conceptual idea that he came up with that made the highway system happened. he liked to say that the only two other great programs of road building in history or that of the roman empire under julius caesar and that of napoleon's

friends so of course the was the only one built under the democracy. so, but there is something about working in a series of highways that intrigued me and made me realize a lot of the tinkering innovations in the latter part of the 20th century going into today's society started with tinkering with ideas and hopefully those would sometimes spin out into actual physical things the would change our lives. so why talk about the rand corporation that was the originator of the game theory. rand was an organization that was founded during of the cold war and the idea was to protect

national security but they came up with these intriguing ideas how to tinker with ideas that led some help protect us better than the ideas we already had the mathematical approach to the ability of human behavior. later on in the 70's, late 50's and early 70's, xerox which was based in stamford connecticut at the time created the paulo balto research center in california, and this was known as being one of the great research and development experiences -- experiments, i am sorry. the idea is they were going to fund research without any

product in mind. they were going to see what would come out of it and that was unheard of at that time. why would you spend corporate money on something that, you know, you didn't know what would happen with it. but it was very fruitful experiment. they hired mostly former academics. not many people who live in corporations and one of my favorite stories about the park was their version of beat the dealer which was a winning strategy for the game 21 the the use it in terms of tossing around ideas, and they love the sort of sit in these apparently mustered colored beanbags in the 70's and people would present their ideas, and then they what sort of try to beat that idea or sort of explain why it was wrong and this was, you know, this was a big departure from what edison

did where he would have the idea and say you guys do it. this was actually tinkering. and some great things came out of it. the most famous one is probably the what most consider personal computers called the amos team. in a lot of ways it is similar to what we think of now as a computer. it had a mouse and windows or the windows software elements. this came out of all of these sessions at the park. but when they showed it to the suits back in samford, they just said it didn't make any sense. they didn't see an application for business, and at that time, you know, most computers typically were -- u.s. court of

submit your request and the operator of a computer what executed for you. so they didn't see the point for it. steve jobs famously wielded his way into the park lands that he had heard about and he wanted to have a look at it and he treated some shares in his young company apple to have a look at what they were doing and as soon as he saw it he said dino what i can do with that. so, you know, xerox never really made much out of it but obviously steve jobs data, so i guess the point there is that it's not -- you know, in a corporate sense it is not just enough to have an idea. there has to be sort of a climate in which those ideas can

become realized and become commercialized in the case of a corporation to make it all happen. so, you know, there are some sort of serendipity to it even if you are trying to planet and i think that is probably worth acknowledging to be another that i spoke to for the book was this guy who was microsoft's deciphers chief technology officer. he left i think in the early 2000's obviously did very well he did some interesting things about that. some people might know him from the cookbook that he put together. he is known as he developed this whole school of scientific cooking and so he applied science and in the book a ticket

is $450 or something but you can't, it is a whole new way of cooking. but the other thing he found is that a company called intellectual adventures which i thought was interesting because he was kind of trying to address the issue that was such a problem in the 70's which is how you commercialize these great ideas that they can come up with without having them go elsewhere to develop them or not to develop them because the corporate crime that isn't right and so, the intellectual ventures isn't a venture-capital firm it is more an intellectual or inventor capital firm and the idea is that it gets all kinds of innovators and inventors together in the room and they try to just sort of

brainstorming and come up with solutions to the world's big problems. my favorite one is a laser bugs sapper that they use to fight malaria and in fact the bill and melinda gates foundation has gotten involved in and helped fund because apparently it is very effective and they come up with some really novel solutions for addressing climate change it all different kind of power solutions so it is an interesting model and its still early to see whether it will grow into something big that it's interesting. i mentioned alexander hamilton's original financial tinkering. people don't usually think of what happened a couple years back as tinkering if you are thinking about it in a positive

sense. there are obviously a lot of horrible things that came out of the tinkering of some people on wall street, but the point i make in the book about this kind of tinkering is that things like the credit to be felt swaps and the debt obligations were initially actually invented to solve problems, not to create once and in the case of the collateralized debt obligations, for example, there were two people looking for new ways to offset risk for some of their clients and so that's what they were trying to do when they were putting together these mortgages and slicing up up into the securities. in a fury it made sense, and unfortunately, you know, there can be a dark side obviously to.

and in fact probably the darkest part of that financial tinkering is that most people other than the people who came up with in the first place didn't understand that so that's something that i thing we deal with a lot in the contemporary society is that when you're looking at it in a high level whether there is financial tinkering or the tinkering of technology when there is the gap between understanding what is being done and what the average person can comprehend it sometimes creates problems. remember back to edison people fought electricity was magic so there is a learning curve some people say they can't catch up. this is another guy that i interviewed for the buck, really interesting professional inventor who was trained at mit

and lived in this country for a long time. he found a lot of companies and he's invented a lot of interesting things including qassam interesting wind turbines and actually flow in the air as opposed to being on the coast which allows them to get into the current and to be more efficient. he also fought a lot about how to make that tinkering fun again one of my favorites is where the mouse experiment came from but it's actually a lot of the sites are interesting because they are all sorts of projects that you

can download and do and some of them are very basic and high-tech but the instructions, are there so you can pretty much make an attempt at them. i mentioned before about the idea of american tinkering versus around the world and one of the things i want to look at in the book is whether there are things going on outside of the united states that we can learn from. his name probably doesn't rent jebel the technology that created a revolution and attended the recording industry and of what is interesting how about how she does a lot the technology for the file i

thought it stood in stark contrast to how we use it in this country. he has worked for a a very long time at the institute and in germany it's a series of institutes all over the country that there's these interesting public - highways. they have public -- they get some public money but they also have to earn their keep as well. so she was a professor but he was also working on projects with money-making potential. what is interesting is the npv technologies our original goal was to find a way to transmit - devotee music over the phone line. i'm not sure why, but that's what developed in p3 is a compression technologies you can

get - devotee music into a much smaller file and therefore transmitted much more easily. the after effect of that -- there we go. was maxtor and all sorts of other things that created a lot of confusion and unhappiness in the united states in particular and a lot of the large reporting companies try to shut napseter down but many other services turnup. in fact the npv technology is the most common form of music sharing technology.

so i guess my point looking at something like that is i think that in our country traditionally there was a lot of factual the federal money that went towards research and development, but there's a lot less now. there's a lot less now in the u.s. compared to a lot of other developed countries so that something that i think needs more looking into. and then i also looked at again, different kinds of conceptual tinkering and this woman is an architect in chicago. her most famous building is the aqua building which is a residential condominium. those are actually your regular concrete balcony's that create this affect and the building's right on lake michigan. so they are echoed in the lake. but it's a very cool building. it was interesting about what is

developed is the way the farmer works which is actually very collaborative tinkering environment where the architect satchel we work in small groups and she works in an office that is only slightly secluded and is near them so she can come over and look at what everybody is doing and in fact i have seen a few other companies recently doing this where it could be computer software companies where they will have to people, to engineers in a computer at the same time and they have to be both working on the computer at the same time to get anything done and the idea is you don't know what you are going to stumble upon, and it takes to to make sure that you capture all of that tinkering goodness i guess. i also looked at back overseas the creators of pingree birds -- angry birds there is a company

called rovio and what was interesting about the way angry birds was developed is these four guys trying to start their own gaming software company but what they did they couldn't afford to spend all their time developing this new game the had an idea for city would take on projects for other companies and only work on angry birds in their spare time. but instead us market researching it like he would do if you were a big company, they kept working on it and basing it on monday as programmers fault was fun and it took a lot of time to do it. but obviously angry birds became a huge success. so again, i have the idea that there is a reason why the start-ups typically -- there is a reason why start-ups typically

perform a lot better. >> [inaudible] >> i don't think that is going to work. sorry, this isn't his fault. we had to change computers at the last minute and in the process, what we did is we took the connection to the video off. so we will play the video separately because i think it is a good video. >> what i was saying is there is a reason why the start-ups tend to come up with a lot of great innovation these days in the large corporations but there's a lot of thinking on the corporation's about how we might get that sort of start up spirit in house.

[inaudible] [laughter] >> ibm the contract computer scientist by trade and founder of something called the tinkering school which aims to help kids learn how to build the films they think of so we build a lot of things and i to put power tools into the hands of second graders so if you're thinking about sending our kids to schools they can come back bruise, scraped and bloody. the book is called 50 dangerous things. number one, play with fire. learning to control one of the

most elemental forces in nature is the pivotal moment in any personal history. whether we remember it or not, it is the first time that we get control over one of these mysterious things. these mysteries are only revealed to those that get the opportunity to play with that. >> they learned some basic principles about the intake and combustion and exhaust the these are the working elements that you have to have come in and you can think of the open pit fire as a laboratory. you don't know what they are going to learn from playing with on their own terms and trust me, they are going to learn the things that you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer

at ways. number two, and a pocket knife. they are drifting out of our cultural consciousness which i think it's terrible faugh with. >> [inaudible] >> welcome to five dangerous things you should let your children do. i don't have children. i borrow my friends' children. [laughter] take all this advice with a grain of salt. i am a contract computer scientist by training but the founder of something called the tinkering school. it's a summer program that aims to help kids learn how to build

the things they think of, so we build a lot of things and i do put power tools into the hands of second graders so if you're thinking of sending your kids to tinkering school they do come back bruise, scraped and bloody. the book is called 50 dangerous things. number one, played with fire. learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. whether we remember it or not is a first time that we get control of one of these mysterious things. they are only revealed to those that get the opportunity to play with it with. this is one of the great things that we have ever discovered prior to the they are basic things about five-year and intake and combustion and

exhaust. these are the working elements of five-year you have to have on the grid. you can think of the open pit fire as a laboratory. you don't know what they are going to learn from it. let them fuller around with it on their own terms and trust me, they are going to learn the things the you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer toys. member to, and a pocket knife. they are kind of drifting off or cultural consciousness, which i think is a terrible thing. [laughter] you're first pocket knife is like the first universal tool that you are given. it's a spatula, it's a screwdriver, it is an in powering tool and in a lot of

cultures they give them as soon as they are toddlers they have . these are children from a film when i was ten and left a lasting impression to see babies playing with nine lives and kids can develop a sense of self with the tool at the very young age. you have a couple of simple rules always cut away from the body. never force it and these are things kids can understand and practice with. i've seen terrible scars in my life but they are young and if they heal fast. it turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things and if you don't use parts of your brain they tend to atrophy over time. but when you exercise them any

given muscle and strength and that applies to your brain, too. practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal lobe that has to do with the understanding and structural problem solving so it gives -- it helps develop their skills and predictability. and throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skills so it is very good for that whole body for training. these kind of target based product also help kids develop attention and concentration skills so it is a great. number five, d construct appliances. there is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. the next time you're about to

throw weld and appliance, don't throw that out, take it apart with your kid or send them to my school and we will take it apart with them even if we don't know what they are it's a really good practice for the kids to get this sort of sense of that they can take things apart and no matter how complex they are they can understand parts of them and that means that eventually they can understand all of them. it is a sense of knowing, that something is knowable. these boxes we take advantage of our complex things made by other people you can understand them. number five, two parts. break the digital money copyright act. [laughter]

>> so he is a really interesting guy but founded the sar program called the tinkering school and at the school, kids go for a few weeks and the use real tools and do things like build a suspension bridges and working of roller-coaster is and all sorts of cool stuff and he also we also saw inexpert merkel five interesting is you should let your kids do. we saw the first three of those last couple break the digital millennium copyright act which

was sort of what we are talking about file sharing and the other one was let your kids drive a car the idea now she's co-founded a private school called bright works which is based on the same principles as immersive learning while you are learning things on the textbook you can also actually do them. so if you are doing a physics experiment, you can do the physics experiment and do all these things simultaneously so it is an interesting approach on how to, again, not so much teaching kids how to tinker but encourage the tinkering they already want to do. back to the contemporary world,

it's amazing every single day now it seems to bear our new sorts of indications that tinkering is taking on a sort of -- all of the earmarks of the phenomenon make the magazines which are also a part of the media empire that helps as a magazine that still has all sorts of experiments that you can do and projects that you can build. probably one of the best known phenomenon of today's tinkering world as kickstart your and for people who are not familiar with it is in a web site where the innovators and can post their products and come up with a penchant people can go on and

the crowd in front of that innovation which created a system that has never existed before because you are a essentially taking out the middleman people traditionally needed to get their ideas realize to become marshall project so some amazing things have happened. just in the last week, there was an amazing campaign that was really just two people live in that may have been and they have a 3g printing pending and we will talk about that in a few minutes. but these have you can draw three eda objects with them and plastic comes out of the pen and it's quite amazing. the ethical of $30,000 they were

trying to make this project a reality. you can see what they are not to malloy and the idea people can go on to the site and pledge a certain amount of money to other projects and typically get the product when it is finally made or sometimes there are some prices that it's too expensive to be panning out to people, but it's just an amazing phenomena kickstart the 20 large in the next couple of years. there are a couple others, other sort of innovation web sites out there. two of the other ones are the technical starters that you are seeing more and more of these kind of tinkering incubators going on line which seem to sort of supercharge them and that is the cutting edge trend right

now. i mentioned 3-d printing and of course the westport library is way ahead on this. they purchased a think the to 3g printers and there is a third or fourth in the works now. this has become the new symbol of today. if you haven't seen one in action before the idea is you can design a three-dimensional object on your computer and then print it and a treaty printer will make a prototype in plastic and it's an amazing thing for inventors who can actually create a prototype and i know that kids enjoyed immelt, too and as you can see in the top corner upstairs in the westport library space, we've got some young tinkerers actually

assembling i think a new treaty printer that the library has purchased that was cheaper than the previous one and the only trick is that you have to put it together. so, they know their audience clearly. what's been going on at the westport library because as i mentioned at the start of my talk, it buy shares coincidence but a fortunate coincidence as i was working on this book the westport library was sort of delving right into the phenomenon and bringing the movement into the library so upstairs in the library there was a making being realized on a daily basis and this solves all of the books. i think that they are in their right now.

but it's been a great resource and i know there are other big plans in the works. the library staff has gotten involved, too. this is a photograph from a recent staff at a library where the staff members learn how to solder which he wouldn't connect the library and soldering but i think that you will in the future because the law which can come from all different directions and you always need to know how to solder if you are going to put something up in the technology to get there. succumb also i mentioned what westport has posted and i know there is another one coming up in april. just a great way to see what different people from different walks of life are working on. i know that i went with my kids to the last one and we saw all

sorts of stuff. here are some photographs of the 3g printers that kids were making fun stuff with and i know one of the biggest was from the last year with the basketball playing a robot's which were astonishingly accurate that were controlled by high school students a bill to them with laptops and what is interesting is that the robots were built as part of the first robotics competition which is something that yadin actually founded. so, again, there are all of these -- it is not just that there is a lot of tinkering among them going on, but there are a lot of interesting efforts out there right now to get kids involved as early as they can in trying to awaken that curiosity in the instinct for having the funds that are so intrinsic to

tinkering. just a few other things, the homemade submarine and i remember those as well, they have these plane kits and essentially they sold you the mechanism and then you could put it together yourself. so, you know, i think in conclusion i just want to say that, you know, for me doing my book was a real -- it became a much more exciting project than i thought that it would be at the outset although i obviously had some deep interest in it from the start. but i think that, you know, there is something intrinsic to the american spirit that seems to be, you know, really worth while tinkering pity and i think, you know, the fact that we still see a lot of people coming from all sorts of other

countries around the world to study and to work in the united states and a lot of the high-tech fields is evident that there is a lot of -- i don't know if you want to call it the frontier spirit or just this sort of optimism that americans have the tinkering seems to go so well by tend to be an optimist and i think that this whole new way of tinkering is going to bring out the new age and innovation. i think the key is from the corporate standpoint of figuring out how we can not squash the innovations before they become fully realized. i want to thank you all for coming tonight and i know we are supposed to have a question and answer period if anybody has any questions i think that we have a microphone.

>> any questions? >> that is a good question. i actually do talk about them in the book a little bit because there are some interesting things about the way law has evolved in the country. one thing that i've learned about doing their research in my book is that the idea that an invention is a brand new idea is incorrect because of course everything comes from what came before it and in fact that this in my mind one of the key points about tinkering is that it is actually taking away from you making something new out of it. even the laser bugs sapper,

which intellectual ventures developed told me that they actually built it out of spare parts from consumer electronics they built out of each -- ebay so i think that is something they wanted to do in a lot of ways. i ever stand people come up with a great idea they are afraid we are going to steal it, but the reality is that it does not usually work that way. usually people try to steal it wants to end its already successful. so if you can get to that point, then you have a high class problem. so, you know, i think it is natural for people with special the young people to think that what they have come up with is never been done before. but the chances are if you look back at the history of the airplane before the wright brothers people have been trying to build a machine for hundreds of thousands of years before that and they just happen to figure out just how they might do it and in a way that would

work. >> i just wondered are you a tinkerer and if so, have you invented anything? >> i like to think that riding is in some regard because you certainly play around with things that already exist for a long time in hopes of creating something new. i do lot of that and certainly as a kid i tinker a lot whether it was -- i remember radio shack used to make these kids where he would connect lawyers and you could build a radio or flashing light. i remember using the those and the chemistry set and all sorts of things. have i invented anything? no, i don't think i have. but you brought up a good point in the sense that i think the message in my book ultimately is not that everybody is an inventor or an innovator or even

an entrepreneur. but in fact some of these ideas about the tinkering mindset are actually very useful to anybody. so, you know, it's i think the idea that coming up with something new involves a certain level of risk and oftentimes failure to be i think we has become a society where we try to protect kids from failure so much that it is such an intrinsic part of, you know, creating something new in the success that i think that is another reason why it is important to get kids involved in tankering when they are young because i think that's how the world works yes? >> thank you for fixing the display by the way. >> in the research for your book you see more tinkering happening? its innovations from the east

coast and the last 20 years the majority of the organizations are coming from the silicon valley. islamic it's interesting, and not looking at this piece called the top ten tinkering cities in the country i may have an answer to this. you are right that obviously silicon valley has been for quite awhile sort of tinkering central. but on the east coast you've got the cambridge area. what's also really interesting i think is that over time you see these areas, the cities where you don't necessarily think of them as tinkering cities but because they have made an effort to attract that kind of activity have started growing in to those of hubs. one that comes to mind as tools of oklahoma gereed i know that they have a big medical

technology hub and there's a lot of startup companies happening there. i think going around the country there are a lot of smaller cities that are saying this is a way to attract economic growth. so yes i think that there are a lot of other places happening now. and of course in the internet is becoming sharing knowledge and two evin -- whether it is through skype or some other names to communicate in real time so that there are no longer the cultural and geographic reasons why tinkering would have been specifically on certain areas of the country. >> any other questions? daniel, luke, can you turn that on? did i mess it up?

>> right there. >> daniel, i don't think that they can hear -- they've turned it off completely. there we go. okay. >> can you hear me? >> yes. >> i wanted to ask about what you were working on in the baker space. >> right now we are working on a 400-dollar -- we have it pretty well assembled right now. this moves up and down and that's what we've done so far and we are making pretty good progress.

>> how long have you been working on it? >> this is our second day working on at. initially we built it and today we've been working on that for a few hours so we have made a good amount of progress. >> when do you think you will be done? >> i think that we will be done pretty soon. probably next time we start again. >> do you have ideas when you want to try doing on the first when you are done with it? >> we want to see what it is capable of doing and use the replicate terse we have for larger more detailed objectives. >> can you think of an example of what kind of object?

>> things like that just small little trinkets. >> are these things that you design and or -- >> most of them are from the website where people of loaded their designs and you can download them for free. it's a great community and some of the stuff we have made for ourselves. but a lot of the time you can find. >> what is the thing that first got excited about the freebie printers? >> you see a lot of it on the newspapers like "the new york times". when i started looking at the library it was just all of lot of fun because i could experiment on leone -- my own.

>> good luck with the project i can't wait to see it all done. [applause] >> i've read about some of the other companies that are developing 3d chips. are there any particular companies that are particularly involved in the chips were prominently? >> i am not sure if this is what you are referring to but i know that there are a lot of companies right now developing immersive technologies so that for example you can control your computer or your television without a mouse so it is all

oriented and i can't remember the name of the company, it is a small company that is partnering with asus and the first laptops are coming out later this year i think and they are going to have -- it all going to be jester based and i know that there is a product that you can actually body at best buy this month that does the same thing. so i think we are going to be seeing a lot more of that. if i can think about it for a minute i can probably remember. i can look it up and i will tell you. but yes, there's a lot of interesting stuff like that going on. it's funny even in the course of the past few years, you know, we've sort of lived in this world of the personal computer

for quite awhile, but it almost seems like the personal computer is going to disappear within the next few years and, you know, we will either have something tablet based or one of the things happening right now and i guess it is still in a prototype is the google glass is you put on a pair of glasses and, you know, you are in the computer. you don't need the computer anymore and i think we will see a lot of stuff like that. >> c2 >> shibley will need a keyboard triet there's another technology out there where it just project is the keyboard on to the desk and you can type on that. >> any more questions?

thank you, everybody. [applause] next bald mabus and author of walking with washington takes us on a tour of several alexandria virginia location is important to george washington. >> i retired about 50 years ago and the alexandria was looking for somebody to develop a walking tour, so i agreed to undertake that project and i spend about two years researching the history and the cam up with 140. the walking tours george

washington joined a 50 year relationship with alexandria. for the time alexander was founded in 1749 when he was 17 until he died and 99 at the age of 67. he participated in the political life of the city and he was a trustee of alexandria and was up fairfax county and represented alexandria in the house at the virginia legislature. she made sure but alexandria was included in colombia. alexandria is the largesse. this is george washington's home town. they include where george

washington slept there and bind many times and this is the one george washington's favorite tavern. george washington did sleep here. john carlisle that is one of the founders and alexandria and his brother also is the founder of alexandria. the sister so the two families got together frequently. they would come here and you can see they would stay all night here. after john died in 1780, he continued to come here to visit with members of the family. she dined with carlyle's the five daughter and her family. you see where george washington with a diamond with carlyle --

would dine with carlyle. george washington dined here many times. these are hand carved and using the office down below. this is an impediment in american history. in 1755, they came to town for the war. she chose carlisle to be his headquarters. he called a conference of the governors and this was the grandest, christopher held up until then either probably was until the continental congress in philadelphia 20 years later and they met in this room to play and low war and one of the things to talk about is how to pay for the war. remember taxation without representation so you can trace the beginnings of the revolution back to this room.

now the rule is set up for dinner and this is the way it would have been if george wilson came here for dinner it is very much might be like this. he not only dying here but in the various tavern's around town so we will go over and see the tavern that is george washington's favorite tavern. >> this is probably his favorite tavern and he dhaka and hear frequently this is in the early 17 70's and in the current building where the museum is today it was built in 1785 and the new edition was added in

1792 so it is over 200-years-old the famous people the dying here including john adams, thomas kurson, james madison and james monroe. jefferson had his dinner right here. they had a terrific reputation for hospitality known for the greater than there's said he was known all over the area and that's why the president of the united states would come here because of was the best place to eat in the entire area. he left here to establish restaurants in baltimore and the midwestern city. >> the thing about george washington as there is the revolutionary war and then the president being a very stiff character on the dollar bill, but what is needed about the tavern is that he is seen as a human being dining and drinking

and having dinner and telling stories and having conversations you see him as a real person here at the tavern triet george washington loved to dance with the most famous person of the united states. they were involved here for george washington in 1798 and 1799 they came here and the galleries was the latter out in the hallway would have been passed and they have a dance that george washington is going to be at this would have been the highlight of the social season to come to the ball with george washington. in my book walking with

washington, we mentioned a number of the associations with george washington. so now we are going to go to christ church where he would worship. >> now we are standing in front of christ church where washington visited frequently. when they are not having church services the churches built between 1767 and 1773 and was known as the little church of the woods and alexandria. now you hear all the traffic . this is where she would sit with his family, martha, depending on what her children or grandchildren you have the whole

family here to the george washington was baptized and was married in the church and he was buried in the episcopal church. he supported the church financially and as the president he supported religious freedom. there are a small number of sites to discuss in my book walking with washington. some people don't realize that washington was all over alexandria. was an important part of alexandria and it was important to george washington as well. >> next on book tv learn about the history of the alexandria police department. author amy uses photos to tell of the department and alexandria. >> the alexandria police

association is a picture book published by arcadia that specializes in history. the alexander police department was found to the actions in the line of duty and it is a very compelling history. when i learned about the police department and alexandria, the more i wanted to learn. i thought in 2006 when we were getting ready to publish. there was a history in the police department that had a lot of good collections. the early days in alexandria begs to the late 18th century but the alexandria police department was established in

1870 and that's where the book starts with the crime scenes and members of the police department doing their jobs and contacting the citizens to work as well. a really powerful photographs were taken and they were not any extraordinary cases. they were not high-profile cases but it gives you a glimpse into what life was like at that moment when the tragedy occurred they don't have a chance to clean up or put things away so it really shows you how people are living at the time the tragedy occurred. so we photographed the black and white photographs from the 1940's and 50's with powerful images to be all to see what was going on in somebody's home or barbershop or restaurant. things like that, provision and

traffic enforcement when the police had to start enforcing prohibitions and traffic law to see how what was once a cooperative relationship between the citizens changed once we had to start getting people from driving or drinking. alcohol was banned in virginia a few years before the legislation was passed there were people who believed that was not illegal because they technically were not in virginia. they didn't need a lot of vehicle. it was a pretty small area they were responsible for in alexandria they doubled again in a matter of 20 years it really changed the department and staff vehicles and ultimately they had

to move to a new police station because they couldn't fit into the station house. one of the things i find interesting is how the officers began enforcing the speed limit because for the first 40 some years of the history they didn't have cars for emergency situations the horses, there were not motorized vehicles. once the cars started coming to alexandria, speed limits had to be put into place so the question is how do you stop somebody for speeding and today we have radar techniques that there is no way to do that. they are pretty forceful to read the had to officer's standing at one corner of one block and then at another corner they had somebody the no drive the posted speed limits so they knew what the maximum speed was and was covered in a certain number of seconds that is how they would determine if somebody was speeding.