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Earl Bakken Narrator

David Rhees Interviewer

August 26, 2000

The Bakken Library and Museum ,

DR: Earl, how did you become interested in ? Tell us a littleIndustry bit about .

EB: Well, the theater nearest my home is the Heights Theater, and one of my chums and I often went to the show, particularly on Saturday afternoons, when kind of Projectthe science fiction stuff was on, and one day we saw Frankenstein, and I was inspired by it. My friend laughed through the whole thing. But to me it was inspirational in that hereDevice was a doctor that was using electricity to reanimate the creature that they had put together from stolen body parts. Society In the book, Mary Shelley didn’t use all that electricity,History but she talked about the spark of life, imbuing the creature with the spark of life. So that was an inspiration to me. I said, “That’s what I want to do for my life, is to help peopleMedical to better, fuller lives through the use of electricity.” Oral So I hung onto that idea as I went through the rest of grade school and high school and college and into the service, and then endedthe up doing that Historicalsort of thing in , in terms of pacemakers and particularlyof defibrillators, which put out a big jolt of electricity and jar a patient back to life whose heart may be fibrillating, not pumping blood. So I kind of fulfilled that dream.

Of course, there were a lot of steps along the way in building robots and other things that simulated life, but I’m gladMinnesota that I ran into that Frankenstein movie. Now I have Frankenstein movies everywhere I go at home and at The Bakken [Library and Museum], and look at them fairly frequently.Pioneers Justin last nightMinnesota I happened to be tuning around—I was awake in the middle of the night tuning around and ran into The Bride of Frankenstein. Again, Frankenstein’s monster killed itself before the end of the film, but I guess he does that in every film and then is alive in the next Frankenstein film.

It’s a great story. It’s a social commentary on what engineers do or don’t do when they don’t follow their projects to the ultimate application of them, and it’s interesting that an eighteen- year-old girl would write a story that had such a social commentary to it, not just a ghost story. So it’s kind of interesting to look at from that angle rather than the horror part of it.

DR: Could you talk a little bit about the influence of your mother and your teachers in helping you learn more about electricity and realize your dream? 2

EB: Well, when I was about five or six years old, I began playing with electricity. In those days, in the twenties, electricity in the rooms ran around the edge of the room on porcelain insulators because it was generally run in a house that already existed, and they didn’t put the wiring in tubing or anything. So it was easy to get at and easy to get at the light fixtures that they would screw into the ceiling and have a pull chain.

I had an uncle who was an electrician back then, who was starting to do wiring of houses, and he told my mother that she had to stop me from playing with that electrical stuff or I would kill myself. She didn’t listen to him and just continued to buy parts and pieces as she could in the basement of hardware stores or wherever she could find something that was applicable to what I was doing. So she was a big help in accelerating my growing interest in not just electricity, but in electronics and radio and television and building robots and so forth.Industry So I credit her a lot for helping direct me.

Then I had a few teachers along the way that were very helpful. I hadProject a science teacher at high school that was helpful and had me repairing movie projectors and amplifiers and things like that in high school. I happened to be there when we neededDevice to put together a radio and an amplifier for the declaration of war by [Franklin D.] Roosevelt in 1941, and I got it put together in time for his speech. Shortly after that, I went and enlisted in the Signal Corps.Society History DR: You built a lot of robots when you were growing up, didn’t you? Could you talk about the robots? Medical Oral EB: Well, I built a few, and I built one, well, probably about this time of year, that I wanted to use at a Halloween party. It wasthe a robot that smokedHistorical and did a lot of the common things, blinking eyes, and I had a remoteof loudspeaker in it so I could talk through it. But one of the things I had it doing for Halloween was swinging a knife, not a very complex motion, but interesting enough. One day when I was at school, a little neighbor boy who was pre-school came into my house, as he often did, and went into my bedroom where I had the robot and turned on some switches, and theMinnesota robot started, moved forward and started waving its knife. After that, my mother and the other little boy’s mother insisted I take the robot apart and destroy it. So I don’t evenPioneers have a picturein of thatMinnesota robot except in my mind. And I probably make it fancier than it really was, but it was a robot.

DR: Could you talk a little bit about how The Bakken Library and Museum came to be founded? How did that get started?

EB: Well, in Medtronic we were still a pretty small company, but we did have a library, and we had a head librarian and then we had an assistant, [Dennis Stillings], a man who was an assistant to the head librarian. I think her name was Joy. I wanted to collect some of the papers on pacing that preceded or were contemporary with our work, to gather as much as we could [of the] complete work that everyone was doing in pacing back then and previously.

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He found some work that went back quite a ways, in fact, back into the 1920s with Dr. [Albert] Hyman and then back into the twenties with Dr. [Mark] Lidwell in Australia. Then he began to find some that referred to pacing back in the 1800s, not necessarily pacing, but stimulating the heart.

So then the head librarian, Joy, came to me and said, “I've got Dennis doing this job for you, but I can’t get him to stop. He just keeps collecting these old papers, and I think what you want is more modern papers.” She said, “He won’t stop, and I’m going to have to fire him.”

I said, “Well, let’s keep him on, and I will cover his cost, not his salary necessarily, but his cost of doing the collecting that he’s working on.” So we had him doing that, and then he found a few papers on other electrical devices back in the late 1800s. Industry Dennis Stillings found some papers on a defibrillator in the late 1800s from Russia. It was getting really fascinating, some of the stuff he was finding. Then he traced papers in pacing back to the early 1800s and finally started collecting some of the equipmentProject back then that some of the researchers were using, and he put together what could have been a pacemaker in about the 1850s, a metronome which would dip into mercury poolsDevice each time it would rock, which means you'd get twice the frequency of where you set the musical rate. They used that as a switch and then a coil to step up the output of a chemical cell enough to stimulateSociety externally 100 volts or more on the chest. So that’s the kind of pacemaker thatHistory they were using, or physiologic stimulators they were using in the 1800s. Medical Then he found some vibrating-type Faraday appaOralratus that was useful for stepping voltage up with a built-in vibrator. They were using that for breaking runaway pulse. It was, in effect, a pacemaker for slowing fast heartthe rates. They wereHistorical doing it pretty knowledgeably. They would just set the vibrating rate soof that the rate of the output was about the heart rate and presumably would take over the heart, then stop it suddenly and the person’s fast pulse would break and come back to a normal range.

So he collected a few piecesMinnesota of apparatus here and there and began to collect more, and it got to the point where we couldn’t maintain him in the library and we took him out of the library and gave himPioneers a room in thein same Minnesotabuilding, and he finally filled that room with books and electrical apparatus, and then we finally gave him a whole floor of another building over in the Earle Brown Farm area, and within a couple of years he had pretty well filled that room, but had it laid out fairly nicely for tours from the beginning of life, you know, in the primordial ooze, to the latest equipment that we had in terms of X-ray and other apparatus.

It reached a point where that space was not big enough for what we were doing, and we wanted to get it out of Medtronic because it didn’t seem right to me to be spending any of Medtronic’s money for space or other simple things. So we looked around.

Our CFO knew of a family that had this particular house that we’re in now. We followed through and finally bought the house from the owners, and that was the start of The Bakken. It wasn’t 4 started with a plan. It kind of grew and fascinated me on what Dennis Stillings was doing. He stuck with it for quite a few years and built up a pretty good collection of books and instruments, and then moved on to running my Archaeus Project. That was the beginning of The Bakken.

DR: I know that you’re very fond of some of the rare books and the collection here. Could you talk about a couple of your favorites?

EB: Well, David, of course I’m interested in the Vincent of Beauvais books, which were science encyclopedias of the day, and that day was about 1280, and they were manuscripts penned by, I believe, a monk in a French monastery. We have two of them and the University of Minnesota has the third. They were a set of three, and they talked, amongst other things, about electrical fish and how electrical fish would throw something up the line that the fisherman had them on to narcotize the fisherman. That was some of the first writing about conductionIndustry of electricity through a wet line, whatever it was.

Then I’m fond of the first edition of Frankenstein: The Modern PrometheusProject that we have in three volumes. It’s nice to have a first edition, because she rewrote the story in 1831, which is the story that’s mostly printed now in the bookstores. Device

Then I’m very fascinated by the T. Gale book that we have, [Electricity,Society or Ethereal Fire, Considered (1802)] because it’s in English. I’m sure thereHistory are just as fascinating books in the European material, Italian and German and French. But in Gale, he talks about curing disease and practically every disease by using Medicalelectricity, from madness to hysteria and dropsy and you name it. He had a number of shocks to send throughOral a certain portion of the body.

This was about 1802 or somethingthe like that, I think,Historical and he has one chapter in there that I like very much where he talks about,of you know, here’s this wonderful therapy of electricity that’s useful for curing essentially everything you can think of, and yet there are still physicians that poison their patients with drugs instead of using electricity. It’s a chapter on electricity and how many physicians hate it. And yet we’re doing it today. We’re still giving people drugs, expensive drugs, when we could beMinnesota doing most of those things electrically without all the side effects and without all the cost of drugs. Pioneersin Minnesota There are thousands of other books that I love, and it’s quite a wonderful collection that David Rhees has extended since he came here, but we’re looking way beyond the collection now into the social environment in which the creators or inventors lived and how they came to create their creations, and we like to look at these people as mentors for our young people today. In a sense they’re dead mentors, but we have enough material on most of them that if someone of today wants to know what their mentor, dead mentor, would do, they can go back and study the life of that mentor and figure out what it is they would have done to solve the problem that the student has today. So we’re doing quite a bit of promotion of the deceased mentors and think it may have some real value to encourage people to study history.

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DR: Could you talk a little bit more, Earl, about the education programs here at The Bakken? That was a somewhat later development that came in the nineties. What are your hopes and dreams for the education programs here? What do you hope that we can do for the young people that we bring here?

EB: Well, one of the needs we have in a center like this, there’s a lot we can do for the adults. We can offer a lot of review information that they can use to look up some of the fairly modern stuff in cardiac and other disease states, but I feel the need to do something for the young people, something that would in some way duplicate what I went through in my basement, then when I had a lab in the Army, or a workshop.

I think it’s important to get young people occupied with something that grips their mind, keeps them out of gangs, although I had a pretty good gang. We did good Industrythings and not all bad things. We did some bad things, too. But I think that there’s a lot to help kids get interested in electronics or electricity, so here in The Bakken we have tried with a workshop. We have a very nice workshop. We have quite a few mentors working with the kids,Project teaching them first some basic electricity, batteries and simple circuits and light bulbs, and then getting more advanced into the use of wave forms in oscilloscopes and some Deviceof the mathematics of electricity.

But the role is trying to get kids interested at a young age in what is Societythis magic stuff, this ethereal fire that still, even today to me as an engineer, is still amazing-typeHistory stuff.

Let me just make a few more remarks Medicalabout the kids we have here working in the lab. I’d like to create in their minds something of the romanceOral of that kind of work. I remember when I first built a radio and I heard Morse code, I just about went through the roof. All my life I had been listening on a crystal set to regularthe AM, amplitudeHistorical modulation, stations, but to hear Morse code coming through on the shortof wave band was a big step forward. And I want kids to have some of that same thrill, and I think a part of it is the smell of burning flesh from soldering irons or the smell of a burned-out resistor.

Those odors that are typical.Minnesota You come to know just what’s going on by using your nose and eyes and look for smoke and all of that. That’s an exciting part of something you learn. You learn howPioneers to solder ain joint so Minnesotathat it’s conductive. I hope we can do those things and get more kids interested in electronics to the point where they will follow it and then go into trade school or college or something to learn a profession in the field of electronics or digital work that we can certainly learn here.

DR: Great. Could you tell us a little bit about what your hopes and dreams are for The Bakken Library and Museum in the future? Where do you think this institution can go and what service can it provide?

EB: Well, I want to make sure that we find ways of using the collection. I don’t want it to be just a dead archive. I want to see the collection used, both the instruments and the literature, and then I want to see The Bakken used as a learning center. We have a rathskeller for having intellectual 6 conversations with some wine and cheese for many hours at a time, trying to replicate what happened in the Middle Ages. People would go at night into a rathskeller and have some prolonged discussions and come up with some answers, and I want to do more of that.

But I want the Bakken used in many ways for intellectual conversations and not just necessarily on electricity or electronics or magnetism or medicine, but in the whole broader field of science and intellectual pursuit, even into social science and architecture and so on, so we cover the spectrum of learned people from every profession, finding something of value when they come to The Bakken, because there are so many things that cross disciplinary lines. And I think in the future, as we look to the future from first looking at the past, we’re going to have to be broader than just electricity, and I know we’re thinking of those plans and how we can do more of that. But we have such wonderful facilities here now to have a meal together with an essay of some importance. What do you call it? Industry

DR: A conversazione. Project EB: A conversazione. And we can amplify on that so that it’s a regular thing for societies that meet here. It’s certainly one of the nicer centers for intelligent,Device high-level conversation in the Twin Cities, and we have the wonderful gardens which can bring conversation. I just like to think that it has a role to play in helping society in the future based onSociety the past, a way we can learn from the past, and doing it right next time. History

DR: Thank you very much. Medical Oral the Historical of

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