INHERITING SOUTHERN TIER INNOVATIONS AT BINGHAMTON'S TECHWORKS

At the north end of Water Street, past the parking garage, beyond the Lost Dog, a little farther than the Double Tree, and under the train tracks to the left, stands an innocuous brick building with smoky windows that let through just enough light to spark curiosity. Standing outside of the old ice cream factory, you would never know that someone could be standing inside a room-sized pinhole camera, looking at a projection of your image against a wall. If you find yourself there, you’ve arrived at TechWorks!, a name you know you should be excited about, though you might not be sure of exactly what it is.

“We’re not a museum,” says Susan Sherwood, who has directed the center since 2003. “When people think of museums, they think of being- well, bored. You can’t touch anything in a museum.” She opens up an old McIntosh record player and moves the needle, starting an old tune. If you remember the frustration of being a kid at a museum, constantly berated for touching things when you weren’t supposed to, then going inside of TechWorks! can feel like a second chance.

TechWorks! is a project of the Center of Technology & Innovation, which formed in 1996 to tackle the first part of its mission- to document and preserve technologies of the Southern Tier. In 2003, the center started TechWorks! to set forth on the second part of that mission: to share these technologies with the public.

My first visit was on the occasion of flight simulation event that took place in January. Knowing next to nothing about flight simulators, I entered the building and to my delight, a group of antique Link flight simulators were spread out around the floor. So engrained in me was the “look, don’t touch” policy of museums that I was pleasantly puzzled to see a young man taking his turn in one of the planes.

It’s a little blue buggy of a plane, sitting on a round rubber accordion base, which allows it to rotate in every direction except for upside down. I try not to be too eager- you know, keep it cool. I grab some cheese and crackers before scurrying to get my turn. I climb in using a stepping stool and pretty soon, I’m lifting off. It takes a little while to get a feel for the machine, but it’s the closest I’ll ever let myself get to flying a real aircraft, and it feels pretty darn close!

Multiple languages can be heard around the room. The event has attracted a group of PhD students from the University of Leeds who have come for a short flight simulation workshop at BU. The professor and some of the students are from the UK, but others are from Iran, Japan, and Eastern Europe. One says he wish he could have spent his whole visit here.

Once I’m off the simulator and the next giddy adult takes his turn, I scan the room and one thing is immediately obvious: there are no kids around. And yet I can’t help but feel like I’m on a school field trip, and soon it’ll be time to break for PB&J (the refreshments table actually featured pesto and beer).

This one event is hardly representative of TechWorks! as a whole. Children make up a great many of its visitors and are of utmost importance to its mission. Preservation is not an end in itself; the point is to provide young people with an understanding of the technologies produced here in the Southern Tier so that they may be inspired by them, and use that inspiration to generate new ideas. In the words of Susan Sherwood, they aim “to document and place in context the inventions and industrial innovations of NY's Southern Tier.”

To Susan, the wealth of innovation and technology that has grown out of this area in the past 115 years is a phenomenon so remarkable that it is perplexing. “It’s a goal to figure out why this area is so creative, has been for more than 100 years, and continues to be creative,” she says. “The patent rate today is double the national average- the second highest in the United States.”

The Link flight simulators are among these innovations. The Link Trainer was produced by Edwin Link, whose home and family company were in Binghamton since in 1927. Link sold the simulators to the Air Force in 1936, and in the field, they are considered the beginning of modern-day flight simulation. Ansco was another team of innovators based in Binghamton, whose claim to fame was film that was faster than Kodak’s.

Down the road in Corning, as is well known, a whole host of important inventions came about. When Edison invented the lightbulb, a glass blower could only make two bulbs a day. The machine that could blow glass into a thousand lightbulbs a day was invented by a man in Corning. “Now you can light up the world,” Susan gleams.

After playing with the simulator, everyone makes their way over the other end of the center (it is huge), following the sound of a self-playing piano into a room whose major focus is antique IBM technology. There are only six places in the world that have a working vintage computer, and one of them is right here. It’s a messy looking thing to someone who hasn’t studied computers, with thousands of tiny wires weaving in and out of it. This isn’t off limits, and a staff member demonstrates how to use it. Also in this little IBM world are working printers, and machines which punch and sort cards. (For you non-computer wizzes, this is how all programming was done back in the day.) Their prized IBM printer is capable of printing 1,300 characters per second; its debut demonstration will be on May 16th.

CT&I doesn’t only contain material vestiges of past innovations. The center is staffed by some of the very people who worked on such machines while they were first in production. Several of the men walking around used to work the Link flight simulators, and others worked at IBM. Towards the purpose of discovering what makes this area is so inventive, there’s no one better to talk to than the people who took part in the creating.

“We owe it to the thinkers and creators in this community to celebrate what they’ve done and show it to future generations,” says Susan. Here is where the definition of TechWorks! lies. It’s a meeting point for the old and the young, the old and the new. The childish excitement this place brings to adults is not a regression, but a bridging of the gap. These technologies are fun and exciting, no matter how old you are.

One way in which young people are brought into the conversation is through employment. Interns and apprentices are hired and learn by doing, right alongside the senior staff. One of a current intern’s projects was to write the code in Python that would provide instructions to a robot designed to take commands. The robot is red and looks like one of those self-directing vacuum cleaners. When the intern sets her program running, the robot moves forward, turns, and takes a picture, which then appears on the computer screen. Four photographs are standing around the table, and if the program is correct, it should snap a picture of them all. It does, and then it beeps the tune of “Oh My Darling, Clementine”.

The plan is to take the little bot around to all of the local elementary schools in order to spark the children’s interest in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) as they make their way up through the grades. They are particularly focused on young girls who are statistically less likely to choose STEM careers. Seeing the robot respond to lines of code shows kids how coding is interesting and rewarding in a way that looking at lines of code cannot.

CT&I juggles projects like this throughout the year, from buying and restoring equipment to hosting events such as Annual Pinhole Photography Day. In this workshop, you are given the opportunity to build your own pinhole camera and take a long exposure photograph with it, and guests are also welcome to go inside of the giant pinhole camera. It’s a square room that is completely dark except for a small hole, which points to the street and projects its image onto the wall, as a lens does to a frame of film.

Several other events take place throughout the year, including an antique car show in May, displaying cars from the Southern Tier that are up to 100 years old, and a beer and food festival in October where you can get tastes from all around Upstate New York.

The old ice cream factory will soon take a big plunge into the future with its upcoming renovations. The south entrance will be redesigned, and solar panels, wind turbines, and other energy-tracking and -saving technologies will be installed. There will also be a second floor river view terrace and a rooftop sculpture visible from three highways.

If you can’t wait to check out TechWorks!, the next big event is Technology of Music from the Heart of NY on March 8th. Here, you can see master thereminist Eric Ross perform with the ERA avant-garde ensemble, which includes a dancer and musicians on theremins, synthesizer, didgeridoo, guitar, and bass. If you’ve not heard of a theremin, it’s an electronic instrument which is played without physical contact by the musician, who controls frequency and amplitude by moving his or her hands different distances from two antennae. These hand motions are ghostly and strange, and they produce a sound to match the image. In other words, it’s quite a sight to see, and this is a performance you don’t want to miss.

If you’re looking for a more casual encounter with the center, you can visit TechWorks! at 321 Water Street on Tuesdays between 12 and 4pm, or by appointment. Admission is $5 and groups are welcome. You can also visit their website at ctandi.org.