The Innovation Trail

The Innovation Trail Audio Guide is a production of The Innovation Trail of Greater Boston, a grassroots nonprofit based in Boston. To learn more about the Trail, visit theinnovationtrail.org . If you enjoyed this audio guide, please consider making a donation to The Innovation Trail to help support our outreach initiatives — especially to schools in the Boston area. The co-founders of the Innovat...

810 Main Street, Cambridge   In the early 20 th 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 subsi...

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 Pol...

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 ma...

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 Apoll...

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...

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,...

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 ab...

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...

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...

355 Main Street, Cambridge The large buildings at 325 and 355 Main Street house more than 2,500 employees of Google, one of the world's leading providers of search, AI, advertising, mobile, web, and cloud computing technologies. Focus areas for the product teams here include search infrastructure, travel, web browsers, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. (Google has had offices in Ke...

314 Main Street, Cambridge The MIT Museum, not unlike the Smithsonian, began as "MIT's attic," a place for all of the artifacts, models, and documents the Institute had accumulated since its founding in 1861. It was long housed in a former radio factory on the northern edge of MIT's campus, near Central Square. Today, in its new location in the center of Kendall Square, the museum functions as a g...

Outside the Kendall Square Marriott, Cambridge, near the MBTA station entrance Installed in 2011, the granite plaques making up the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame are meant to celebrate the creators of organizations and innovations that changed the world, from Hewlett-Packard's electronics to Apple's computers to Microsoft's operating systems to Lotus's spreadsheet software. The Walk of Fame's instigat...

One Broadway and 101 Main Street, Cambridge One Broadway in Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Innovation Center, a "Switzerland for startups" where early-stage companies—often spun off by, or started by alumni of, local universities like MIT— can rent flexible space for their ventures and mix with peers and potential investors. Many well-known companies and technologies got their start here,...

1 Museum of Science Driveway, Boston Boston's Museum of Science began in 1830 as a natural history museum, and its original building was in the Back Bay neighborhood. In 1951, it relocated to the Charles River Dam Bridge, and today the complex includes exhibitions such as the Hall of Human Life, the Engineering Design Workshop, the Theater of Electricity (featuring the world's largest air-insulate...

2 North Grove Street, Boston Mass General Hospital built the Russell Museum of Medical History and Innovation in 2012 as a place to display and explain a range of remarkable artifacts from the hospital's two centuries of medical pioneering, from the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia (1856), to the identification of appendicitis (1886), to the first successful reattachment of a seve...

Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston On the top floor of the Bulfinch Building, the first and oldest building at Mass General, is the operating theater where doctors and medical students observed surgeries. (To find it, enter the hospital's main lobby and follow the signs pointing to the Ether Dome. The room is open to the public as long as there isn't a lecture or meeting going...

Outside the JFK Federal Building, Cambridge Street, Boston Here, a waist-high stone pedestal with a plaque entitled "Birthplace of the Telephone" marks the former location of Charles Williams Jr.'s telegraph instrument factory. In June of 1875, in the attic of this building, Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell and machinist Thomas Watson discovered that a weak electric current could cause...

Outside the Government Center T Stop An outbreak of smallpox in Boston in 1721 infected 6,000 people and killed 900, out of a total population of just 11,000. But this devastating toll might have been even higher if not for the actions of an enslaved person named Onesimus and his enslaver, the prominent Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather. Several years before the outbreak, Onesimus informed Mather th...

King's Chapel Burying Ground, Tremont Street, Boston King's Chapel Burying Ground dates to 1630 and is Boston's oldest cemetery. In the back right-hand corner you'll find several tombstones marked Tudor, including one for Frederic Tudor, who built an ice harvesting and shipping business in the early 1800s that made him one of America's first millionaires. In the days before refrigeration, ice was...

Tremont Temple, 88 Tremont Street, Boston Technicolor was a Boston startup that helped the movies evolve from a black-and-white medium to a rainbow of color. While the company's breakthrough year was 1939, with movies like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind," the company got its start in 1915. In 1917, this building was the site of the first public screening of a Technicolor movie, "The Gu...

30 School Street, Boston Welcome to the official Innovation Trail audio guide. If you're starting in Boston, this is the first segment to listen to. In this segment, you'll meet your guide and narrator, Carmichael Roberts. He'll tell the story of Lewis Latimer, a Black draftsman and inventor who spent part of the 1860s and 1870s working at a patent law firm located on the upper floors of the Bosto...

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