From the MIT grads who directed the first technicolor film in 1917, to Frederick Tudor aka “The Ice King’s” multi-million-dollar ice shipping business, these are the Bostonians who change the way we live completely. With Innovation Trail Boston tours you can learn all about them on a 21-stop excursion from Downtown Boston to Kendall Square.
The Innovation Trail highlights dozens of breakthroughs that changed the world as we know it. Destinations include Boston’s first clinical trial, a response to a smallpox epidemic in the 1600s; the place where Thomas Edison launched his career as an inventor with a complete flop, and where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone; how a company founded in a railroad car in Cambridge led to “The Wizard of Oz.”
You’ll also explore the seedlings of the last candy factories, the instant camera, the start of the Apollo spacecraft mission to the moon, and the first surgery under anesthesia. Known as “the most innovative city in America,” the trail is run and operated by Cambridge Historical Society Tours. Guided tours are $20 per person and may be reserved online. Prefer to take the tour for free and on your own time?
Easy, just use this website or download the online map and app and follow along each stop. Here are some of the incredible history making leaders you’ll come across on the Innovation Trail tour in Boston:
- The telephone: Boston University professor Alexander Graham Bell and the story of the first telephone
- Ether Dome at MGH: home of the first surgery conducted with anesthesia
- Entrepreneur’s Walk of Fame founded in 2011
- Draper Labs where the software that sent people to the moon was invented
- Lab Central: home of the world’s first instant cameras
The entire trail tour takes about 3 hours, and you’ll learn about pioneers across diverse sectors from art to science and medicine!