The Innovation Trail – Details, episodes & analysis

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

The co-founders of the Innovation Trail are Scott Kirsner and Bob Krim. The executive director is Anna Dunbar.

The narrator for the audio guide is Carmichael Roberts, founder and managing partner at the Boston-based venture capital firm Material Impact.

Wade Roush wrote and produced the guide, with editing from Scott Kirsner. The music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

The guide was created with help from a grant from MeetBoston, a visitor services organization promoting tourism, meetings, and conventions in Boston and Cambridge.

Special thanks to:

Bob Krim

Ron Robinson

Shervone Neckles

Luci Marzola

Jim Utterback

Gavin Kleespies

Jazz Dottin

Rosalyn Elder

Charlotte Gray

John Herman

Sarah Alger

Tim Rowe

Bill Aulet

John Durant

Tali Sasson

Rich Miner

Debbie Douglas

Namrata Sengupta

Ruth Lehmann

Phillip Sharp

Walter Gilbert

Tom Leighton

Julia Austin

Peter Kachmar

Noubar Afeyan

Victor McElheny

Susan Benjamin

810 Main Street, Cambridge 

In the early 20th century, this stretch of Main Street and nearby Massachusetts Avenue was home to so many candy companies that the neighborhood was affectionately known as Confectioner’s Row; the factories employed thousands of people and filled the air with a chocolatey aroma. The big white building at 810 Main Street is the last relic of that era. It houses a subsidiary of Tootsie Roll Industries known as Cambridge Brands, maker of beloved candies such as Junior Mints and Charleston Chews.

Look for a mural across the street from 810 Main, toward Toscanini's Ice Cream and Central Square, that tells the story of candy manufacturing in Cambridge.

If you are starting the tour at this stop, please refer to our website for Google Maps that can help guide you from place to place. 

Guest speaker

Susan Benjamin, Founder, True Treats Candy, Harper’s Ferry, WV; author, Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America’s Favorite Pleasure (2016)

355 Main Street, Cambridge

The large buildings at 325 and 355 Main Street house more than 2,500 employees of Google, one of the world’s leading providers of search, AI, advertising, mobile, web, and cloud computing technologies. Focus areas for the product teams here include search infrastructure, travel, web browsers, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. (Google has had offices in Kendall Square ever since it acquired Android in 2005.)

The lobby is public, and you can go in and sit down while you listen to this segment. Or, if the weather is nice, take the outdoor stairs near the Marriott and the Kendall Square T station to the Urban Park Roof Garden, a public space where you can see into some of Google's office.

Guest speakers

Tali Sason, Engineering Director and Site Lead, Google Cambridge

Rich Miner, Co-founder, Android; Advisor, Google/Android

314 Main Street, Cambridge

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

Guest speaker

John Durant, Director of the MIT Museum from 2005 to 2023

Outside the Kendall Square Marriott, Cambridge, near the MBTA station entrance

Installed in 2011, the granite plaques making up the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame are meant to celebrate the creators of organizations and innovations that changed the world, from Hewlett-Packard’s electronics to Apple’s computers to Microsoft’s operating systems to Lotus’s spreadsheet software. The Walk of Fame’s instigator, Bill Aulet, says the purpose of the installation is to help give budding entrepreneurs role models to celebrate.

Guest speaker

Bill Aulet, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

One Broadway and 101 Main Street, Cambridge

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

Guest speaker

Tim Rowe, Founder and CEO, Cambridge Innovation Center

1 Museum of Science Driveway, Boston

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

Guest speaker

Tim Ritchie, President, Boston Museum of Science

2 North Grove Street, Boston

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

Guest speaker 

Sarah Alger, Director, Russell Museum of Medical History and Innovation

Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston

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

Restrooms are available inside Mass General.

Guest speaker

John Herman, MD, Associate Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital

Outside the JFK Federal Building, Cambridge Street, Boston

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

Guest speaker

Charlotte Gray, author, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention (2011)