whether we teaching our kids the right things and a lot of people how come i get some offense. back into the schools, but i would argue it's not about teaching kids how to tinker. those kids know how to tinker if you give them things to play around with it will play about with them and see what they could make out of them. we become a test taking culture and teachers teach the test because they're under pressure to show higher scores for their district, but i don't think we really need how we seem to make sure we don't squash the team. too early. my book begins with my own tinkering experience and that's when i sat on my. i was getting into the car and realized pretty quickly i damaged the screen. i realized i was working but couldn't read anything on the screen, so i took it to the local phone store, naïvely thinking they could fix it and turn in for another one relatively cheaply. it is my favorite part of the job that they don't let us do that anymore. he could sell me a new one. i said great. he said it's $450. so i went home and out of frustration did a google search and found a group of -- videos on youtube maybe i can't get this to work. sorry. it's a technical difficulty here. in any case, i'll explain it to you. there's a video that told me how to take apart my very, remove the screen and put in a new screen. so i went online and got a special site and ordered a new screen for about $20 followed the video to the latter. to my surprise when i opened it up, there were about five pieces. the screen, a circuit board and a keyboard and it works like new. that was my tinkering realization that we live in a culture now, where we are today needed by these high-tech devices we have an feel like we're not supposed to open them. companies tell us you're not supposed to open them because he'll void the warranty. if i was going to throw the thing out anyway, might as well give it a shot. turns out it wasn't difficult. humans made these in the first place, so theoretically it should be that difficult to figure out how to replace the screen. the book came out of the time after the big economic crisis of 2008, 2009. there's a lot of white-collar workers losing their jobs and worrying about what they actually did it, realizing we had become a huge service economy. the united states used to be a country that could make things and we don't make anything anymore. the united states still is a huge manufacturer. most of the things they make our high-end electronics items. the differences of course it these days we don't need as many people to make all of those things. we certainly are still manufacturing hub and there's been a trend of a lot of big companies like google and apple trying to manufacture some of their devices on american shores again. since that turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. i tried to pare down what tinkering men, but also to think about whether we as a country have lost this tinkerings. -- there we go. or whether it was something that just needed to be refreshed or reawakened. as i've mentioned before, tinkering is not so much a specific set of technical skills. they tend to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. he picked up enough about textiles and models, programming to figure out how to do what you want to do and try to come up with something new. certainly skills are important, but they are means to an end. mastery isn't the point i guess. the point is coming up with something new. before i start itself back into history a bit to talk about tinkering, i want to point out a few things right now that showed renaissance and tinkering. most people here have been to a maker fair. mark mathias has arranged some for the westport library. they're really wonderful festivals of all sorts of tinkering and electronics in art and music. another thing going on these days are these so-called hacker spaces are tinkering, workspaces where you essentially go when and there's all sorts of high-tech equipment you can play around with. it tries to address the problem that some people have mentioned, which is in the old days when tinkering wasn't so high-tech, most people had a workshop in their basement and it has the tools they needed to do anything. today, a lot of people can't afford the more high-tech names that might be needed to do different kinds of tinkering, but you can certainly go visit one of these tech shops for a day or however long you need and try out some of the equipment. hackers are obviously something that i've come up a lot in contemporary culture. the one i focus on in my book is a young guy named george chauncey famously roped into an iphone in a few years later into a sony playstation and in particular tried to sue him, but eventually they hired him. to help him out and figure out. i guess my point is hackers can be tinkerers too. there are some that are more at ease than tinkerers, but they certainly enter at some level. i think the main thing that's most important about tinkering is there's a certain amount of humor to it. i believe this mouse was dead by the way before they made it to a mouse. receipts. i've tinkering. all the best tinkerers will tell you they did what they did and developed innovations they did because they were enjoying what they were doing. i think that is the key element. now i'm going to go back because in my book i sort of try to get to the campaigns and we can talk later how american tinkering differs from tinkerers around the world. but there's something about this country and founding fathers they seem to bake tinkering and to our original history. obviously, ben franklin is sort of held up as the original rate american tinkering and inventor. he invented the lightning rod, bifocals, hermione a monoceros another thing. he was also considered a huge source of wisdom, which is great and the really interesting figure. the only thing is he raised the bar kind of high kind of early. i mean, he made tinkering sound like a daunting thing. another thing interesting about franklyn and this is the way to open things up in the book a little bit in the sense that as i understand it, tinkering is as much a mindset as a result of what tinkering on her. i argue in the book in some ways the u.s. postal service has the greatest tinkering project because it had such an impact on american society and was something he had to work out and he a long period of time before it ever goes into reality and those kinds of virtual tinkering can be a sizable as the physical tinkering as well. the other thing that is interesting about franklyn is that it wasn't the only founding father. if you look at a lot of time, many of the original founding fathers of this country were sort of lifelong tinkerers. george washington been the biggest of all. as a young man, he pursued cutting-edge framing techniques. he wanted to find the best fertilizer come in the best way to prevent plant diseases, the best method for cultivation. he on that lot of land, said there was a real need for it. this is something he pursued throughout his life. his other passion product was the building of the potomac canal. he was obsessed with this through his presidency, through the rest of his life he actually died with the canal not finished. he had ideas about it. he wanted to hire engineers to help him build it. at that time in the country, there were no trained engineers. they had to consult engineers in anchoring. in fact, the techniques he used to develop it ends up being kind of wrong. eventually it was built with a totally different technique, but was something he pursued because that's what he was interested in. of course thomas jefferson invented the tilt site pile, the macaroni machine. james madison invented a walking stick with a microscope to observe organisms on the ground. i think it didn't catch on because he was about five foot two. it didn't really catch on. alexander hamilton found that the federal reserve. the point is clearly these are men of wealth and leisure in some ways, but they were found in the country. it had a lot of other things to do, but at that time they pursue tinkering is figuring out solutions to problems throughout their lives. i don't know if television changed that are sent name, but benjamin franklin was not the only tinkerer at this time -- great tinkerer at this time. to jump to contemporary tinkering, identifying the book dean kamen has been sort of the contemporary tinkerer. for those of you who don't know who he is, he's a serial inventor. he made his original fortune with a series of infusion pumps that allowed patients to receive medication around the clock without having a nurse price and, but he also invented a walking wheelchair, which never caught on, but he built this gyroscopic technology and the idea was he met upon a wheelchair to climb upstairs, so he invented -- came up with this ingenious technology to do that. it didn't catch on. they were very expensive. he's probably best known for the segue, built on the same technology as the walking wheelchair. i guess the segue eventually became a running joke. at a party or member when the segue came out a number of years back, it was hailed as the future of transportation. it was going to change the way we lived. unfortunately, a lot of cities and their use on sidewalks. they are still in use obviously. i know a big warehouses they use them. amazon uses them in the warehouses and there's a lot of segue tours around the country. if you are in a city come you can take a tour on a segue. the technology is around and maybe we'll have some bigger use in the future. the point is that he obviously became wealthy off of his inventions, but if you look at how they track over time, you couldn't necessarily put them together and say he knew exactly what he was doing. in fact, the way he first got in was building the slideshows that that were synchronized to music and he eventually was able to install some of that technology as a teenager at the planetarium in new york. so you know, tinkerers don't necessarily know where they're going, but they can still end up doing great things. i also talk about thomas edison in the book. of course the inventor of the century. he was held as the wizard of admiral park. again, probably the same issue is that he raised the bar so high in terms of what people thought of tinkering that he almost seemed otherworldly. but i tell the story of my book at the mention of the device in this photo, which demanded being a novice take haitian machine. it was actually the photograph. he came up with the first photograph that was workable and relatively easy to produce, but edison hated music and he couldn't fathom why anyone would want to listen to this debate and spend their leisure time listening to music. so he spent a number of years pursuing what he thought was the midmarket for this device, which was in office dictation machine. it didn't work out that well for him. he obviously had other success is, but he never really made much money. it's interesting also to think about the time and people didn't understand how electricity works very well at that point, so a lot of things they disregarded his magic. they actually thought he was a wizard, but he represents the connection between the origins of tanker in the u.s. and the contemporary version of it because he was sort of -- he was a great man. he had these great ideas in a spewed out of his head so the legend went and he would have his assistants figure out how to make them work and that became the new archetype for how to tinker and innovate. in fact, you could argue that his lab was the first research and development operation in the modern sense. but again, he just couldn't understand why people would want to listen to a photograph for entertainment purposes. the company that eventually did commercialize the phonograph called american crop of phones included alexander graham bell is a partner, which was particularly upsetting because he didn't see the telephone is being a worthwhile device either. so i guess my point in all of that is just saying it if it didn't always get it right, he was always smiling through everything, then surely it's okay for all of us as well. i mean, if you read the accounts of how most of his most famous inventions are realized, it is composed was very frustrated assistance in midnight dinners. it wasn't particularly easy. back to the idea of tinkering as something conceptual, starting in the world war ii era, i started became intrigued with a guy named thomas mcdonald, who was really by most people's understanding a career bureaucrat. a guy who grew up in the midwest in iowa and a farming community and watched throughout his childhood, as farmers struggle to =tranfour their props on dirt roads so muddy that sometimes they would stay home for weeks at a time until the rosewood dry up and they could go out again and transport their crops. after go into agricultural college, he came under the spout of a guy named anton mark jen, who was 15 at iowa state agricultural college, who is a proponent of the good rose movement. the good rose movement was promoted the use of bicycles because cars were around when it started. the idea was to build more public roads so people could ride bicycles more. eventually, cars became popular and he went on to become the head in washington and later created the higher education board and highway officials. the reason i think of him as a tinkerer was because he over a period of years pursued this idea that there had to be away to construct and facilitate the construction of the interstate highway system throughout the country. the big revelation he had eventually was it had to be a federal state highbred and the idea was to build roads for people were going to go over they wanted to go as opposed to where they were already going. before the, most roads rebuilt to see there was a lot of corruption and misdeeds and nothing got done and in fact it, it was really this conceptual idea that he came up with they made the interstate highway system happy. the only other two great programs in history or that of the roman empire under julius caesar and that of napoleon's france. so of course the u.s. was the only one built under a democracy. but there's something about the idea of bringing, working a series of highway spending treats me and made me realize a lot of the innovations in the latter part of the 20th century going in today's society started with tinkering with ideas and hopefully does that sometimes they now been two natural physical things that would change our lives. so i talk about the rant corporation, which of course is the originator of game theory. brand was an organization founded during the cold war and the idea was to protect national security. but they came up with all these intriguing ideas about how to tinker with ideas that would somehow protect us better than the ideas we are jihad, so game theory was one of those trying to apply mathematical approach to probability into human behavior. later on in the 70s, the 60s and early 70s, xerox famously, which is based in sanford, connecticut at the time, famously created the palo alto research center known as part and palo alto, california. this was known as being one of the great research and development experiences. experiments, i'm sorry. the idea that they would fund research without any product in mind. they were going to see what came out of it and that was unheard of at the time. there was something you didn't know what would happen if it. it is a very hurtful experiment. they hired mostly former academics. not many people who have lived in corporations. one of my favorite stories about park was their version of pizza dealer, which was an old winning strategy for the game of 21, but they use it in terms of tossing around ideas and would sit in these mustard colored beanbags in the 70s and somebody would present their idea assertive explained why it was wrong and this is a big departure from edison did in his lab, or at a or at a synod had the idea and say you guys do it. some great things came out of it. the most famous one is probably what most consider the first personal computer. in a lot of ways, it similar to what we think of as a computer that had a mouse or windows, software alleman and this came out at these tinkering sessions. when they showed it to the seats and stanford, they said it didn't make any sense. at the time, most computers typically would be an operator and you would submit your request and the operator of the computer could execute it for you. so they didn't see a point for it. steve jobs famously wheeled his way into the labs. he traded some shares in his young company, out o. java look at what they're doing. so xerox never made much of the alto, but obviously steve jobs did. the point airwaves in a corporate sense, it is not enough to have an idea. there has to be a climate in which those ideas can become realized and become commercialized to make it all happen. so there is some serendipity to it and i think that is probably worth acknowledging. another tinker that i spoke to for the book is the sky, nate denver followed, microsoft's chief technology officer. he left in the early 2000. obviously did very well and when not to do interesting things after that. some people might know him from the scope bookie put together as he's known to develop this whole school of scientific cooking, so he applied science and the book i think it's a $450 book or something. but as a whole new way of cooking. the other thing he found -- found dead with intellectual cookers, which is interesting because he was trying to address the issue that it was such a problem in the 70s, which is how do you commercialize these great ideas that tinkerers, points without either having them go elsewhere to develop them or just not develop them because the corporate climate isn't right. intellectual adventures is not a venture capital firm. it's an intellectual or venture capital firm. the ideas he gets all different types of innovators, inventors together in a room and they try to brainstorm and come up with solutions to the world's big problems. my favorite one is a laser bug zapper they developed to help fight malaria in the bill and melinda gates foundation has gotten involved and hope to find it because apparently it's very effective, but they have come up with some novel solutions for addressing climate change and archives of power solutions. so it's an interesting model. it's still a little early to see whether it will really grow into something big, but it is interesting. i mention alexander hamilton's original tinker. people don't think about what happens a couple years back if you think of it in a positive sense. there's obviously a lot of horrible things that came out of people on wall street. the point i make in the book is things like credit defaults loves collateralized debt obligations were initially invented to solve problems, not to create one's and in the case of the debt obligations, for example, two people at jpmorgan looking for new ways to offset risk for some of their clients. and so that's what they were trying to do and they're putting together these mortgages and slicing them up inside them as securities because it. made sense. unfortunately, there can be a dark side to tinkering obviously. and in fact, probably the darkest part of that financial tinkering with most people, other than the people who came up with it in the first place didn't understand it. so that is something we deal with a lot in contemporary society. when you tinker at a high level with financial tinkering or technology, when there's a gap to train understanding what is being done about the average person can comprehend sometimes creates problems. remember back to edison, they thought electricity was not shaped. as a learning curve. not