1 Earl Bakken Narrator David Rhees Interviewer August 26, 2000 The Bakken Library and Museum Minneapolis, Minnesota DR: Earl, how did you become interested in electricity? Tell us a littleIndustry bit about Frankenstein. 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 Medtronic, 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. 3 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.