 Good afternoon everyone, I'm Rebecca Dorge, I'm the Glenda Ries Dean of the Mellon College of Science. My office is just across the foyer. Thank you for coming today and today we're celebrating the digitization of the Mellon Institute Industrial Research Archives. I'd like to thank the Dean of the University Libraries, Keith Webster, sitting in the front row, for inviting me to speak today. Keith and his team have completed an incredible project, namely digitizing the records from the Mellon Institute. Today when most people think of the Mellon Institute, they think of this building as an impressive facade where Batman died, and they remember the large columns out front and I know that there are 52 freestanding columns out front. No matter how grand or impressive the exterior of the building is, it is far surpassed by the caliber of the work that has been done and is still going on in this building today. Prior to the merger of Carnegie Mellon to form, prior to the merger of with Carnegie Tech to form Carnegie Mellon, the Mellon Institute was home to fellows who conducted groundbreaking industrial research, and this research led to the creation of many companies and products that are still in existence today. Today's research in the Mellon Institute building is revolutionary science. It's biology and chemistry and neuroscience. Just as the work from the Mellon Institute many, many years ago, the work being done here today is dramatically impacting the future and will continue for many years. The Mellon Institute is a vital part of the Carnegie Mellon University history. It's a vital part of my life every day. By digitizing the institute's records, the CMU libraries have done a great service for everyone. They have not only preserved the important part of our history, but they've made that history available to all who are interested. So today, I'm happy to introduce our speaker, Ellen Sparrow. Ellen is a lecturer and a researcher from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies narratives of progress, academic entrepreneurship, and innovation ecosystems. She is also a social entrepreneur, co-founder and chief curriculum officer of station one, a nonprofit organization focused on socially directed science and technology. Elaine knows firsthand about how interesting and valuable records in the Mellon Institute are. While she was completing her dissertation on textile science, her advisor Walter Friedman suggested that she take a look at Mellon Institute to find more information out about chemical research. Several years ago, and we won't say how long because it wasn't that long, she explored the Mellon Institute collection and was struck by how overwhelming and interesting the records were. She sifted through the material and learned a great deal about the work that was done and the people who did the work in the Mellon Institute so many years ago. I'm excited to hear what Ellen has to say and the panel that will follow her talk and they know that they have a 10-minute limit because I talked to them about that. Without further delay, please join me in welcoming Ellen to the podium. Thank you so much for this invitation to join to celebrate and reflect on the history and legacy of the Mellon Institute. We might think about history as where we've been and legacies about how we might mobilize that history going forward. Many of you in this room bring your own history to the collective of the Mellon Institute, its people, its problem-solving ethos, and scientific and technological impact that this work has catalyzed across industrial sectors and scientific disciplines in the United States and internationally. As Dean George mentioned, I've studied the nascent stage of the Mellon Institute as a historian, but also the spirit of the Mellon Institute founders and envisioning new relationships with academic science and industrial and societal impact through collaboration also influences my work as an academic entrepreneur. Co-founding a nonprofit educational institution, station one, which she mentioned, is dedicated to socially directed science and technology with core principles of equity inclusion and inquiry-based learning. My work is about processes of envisioning and creation, what we might consider today as entrepreneurial thinking, how these processes are manifested through the institution's exhibits, buildings, and narratives about what our world is and what it might be through science and technology. And in many ways the task of a historian is to bring many of our unanswered questions of our present to the past as a place to think with history, not as a singular thing, just as an institution, even one with giant stalwart columns and sometimes concealing the fervor of scientific innovation, is a confluence of multiple parts. We may think of an engine or an orchestra, a tapestry, a city, or a living archive with many moving pieces that come together to produce something complex and dynamic. And so it's with curiosity and the importance of understanding context that we might ask, how did we get here in this particular organizational structure or a set of values or incentives? We may wonder about this often tension between fundamental science and the social impact of technologies out in the broader world. Going a bit farther still our task might even be to question those categories and to think about knowledge production as a gradient or overlapping spheres rather than a contest between rigid binaries. The practice of history is not just trying to accumulate a list of all the things that have happened in the past. It's about the questions that we bring to this distant and in many ways not so distant place, people, situations, their configurations and their decision-making. We might ask, are there particular types of institutional or industrial settings that are better poised to innovate than others? What are the institutional structures and organizational relationships that are necessary to catalyze the kind of change to be beneficial to society? What kinds of relationships are necessary to foster innovation? What do we mean by innovation? And how does discoveries become inventions and how do they transition from the laboratory into a broader societal landscape? A lot of questions are not only rooted in understanding processes of change over time, but also the context of networks, social and economic structures that underpin these developments and the narratives of progress that they represent. What Robert Kennedy Duncan may have described as, quote, the glorious interest that attaches to the doing of real things. So how might we tell a history of the Mellon Institute with this kind of multiplicity? It could be a story of innovation. Innovation is both a product and process of change. It transforms what might have been only possible into the pervasive or even prosaic through the scaling up of invention, a process that requires more than just technology per se, but the coordination of organizations and the infrastructure. Successful innovation goes beyond just turning dreams into reality. It is also a process by which ideas are transported from the cutting edge into the fully absorbed and thus remarkably invisible landscape of the ordinary world. Perhaps innovation is most widely defined through its tangible products, patents, inventions and other associated consumables or even the new industries and sub-disciplines that emerge from industrial science, topics that the members of our panel know very, very well. However, it's equally important to also inquire about the human systems of organization and knowledge creation that are embedded in a technological landscape of things and ideas. To look for the often invisible labor and infrastructures, both of people and things that are necessary to maintain institutions and their systems. So just as much as we're interested in the science and technology that arise from the fellowships, the influence of the leaders, both in the US and abroad, we should also look to these systems of information organization, logistics and communications, that in many ways give us the traces of the institutional history that we're able to study and are now able to study more widely through the digitization effort. We could also tell this story as one of pragmatism and entrepreneurship. Indeed, when Robert Kennedy Duncan arrived in Pittsburgh to translate this system of industrial fellowship that he had begun in Kansas, in the beginning of the 20th century, he worked out of his own attic with one employee, Lois Whittle, who would spend her entire 45-year career managing the administrative side of the Institute. Of course, we know that it eventually grew far beyond that single room. We know that this mainly postgraduate research center, a so-called quote, Armory of Applied Science, was founded in Pittsburgh in 1913. It played a foundational role in shaping the emerging American R&D sector. Within its first 25 years of operation alone, the Mell Institute had already served 3,600 companies from a wide variety of industrial sectors, either as firms or members of trade organizations, an unprecedented number at the time. Out of these collaborations came 500 novel processes and products, and from then 10 new industries were created. Over the quarter of a century that followed, the Mell Institute continued to shape the landscape of R&D as a collaborative fellowship projects came and grew into in-house corporate laboratories. Some large corporations had their own research divisions from early on, yet the majority of smaller companies began their research activities through collaborations with institutes and universities similar to the Mell Institute fellowship model. By that time that Mell Institute merged with the Carnegie Institute of Technology to form the Carnegie Mellon University that we know today in 1967, laboratories and large corporations had become more of the norm rather than the exception. By the 1960s, Mellon's researchers had contributed more than 4,700 papers and more than 1,600 patents to an academic research ecosystem fueled by substantial increases in government funding that began to shift away from applied and towards more fundamental science. There was so much going on and so many overlapping kinds of activities, but it's just to give a sense of scale that was quite large. Indeed, perhaps the end of the Mell Institute for industrial research as an independent entity in 1967, after successfully promoting the growth of industrial science, should also be read as a signifier of its success. At the intersection of science and industry, the Mellon Institute could find productive synergy in the attempt to make productive order out of a messy world. To find predictability in times of uncertainty and to rest efficiency from an excess of waste. We might also tell a story of the Mellon Institute about stories themselves. That's what the editor of chemical and metallurgical engineering, Sydney Kirkpatrick did in 1937 when asked to reflect on the legacy of Robert Kennedy Duncan to commemorate the opening of this new building, which is where we're sitting today. He said, in this story, the moral must come first. If you have a big idea, bigger perhaps than you can master alone, write a book about it. The chances are that somebody will read your book and if sufficiently impressed may do something about it. And that's exactly what Robert Kennedy Duncan had done. Not only did the Mellon Institute contribute to the field of industrial research through its scientific work, but also through popular writing aimed at a broad audience. In 1907, Duncan posed a deceptively simple question, quote, how can we utilize modern knowledge? For Duncan, who was then a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas and a prolific writer on science for popular audiences, the answer to this question called for an increase in role for science as a productive agent of efficiency and coordination and as a means to what he called, quote, an era of gracious living. Duncan's belief in applied science as a necessary and indeed urgent tool for progress echoed throughout his public writing in popular magazines such as Harper's Monthly and in three books, which he fervently advocated for the application of academic research to industrial problems. Duncan's work served as a powerful catalyst that caught the attention and garnered support from many industrial leaders, sparked the development of industrial fellowship programs and the creation of a model for academic industrial cooperation that would serve for the foundation of the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research. Mellon Institute leaders not only produced a wealth of papers and patents, but also powerful narratives of progress. These narratives served to both bolster the prestige of industrial science, this new type of work with their vision for an enhanced quality of life through applied science. Quote, problems having obvious and apparent answers have all been solved. Duncan wrote in his popular book, The Chemistry of Commerce in 1907. Today in 2019, amidst growing understanding of our interconnected global challenges, the health of our planet, geopolitical tensions, growing inequity, and the promise and peril of our emerging technologies, this sentiment is just as salient. So it's in this spirit today that I'm here in our exhibit and with our distinguished panelists to think about the living history of the Mellon Institute, its place in Carnegie Mellon University, and the questions that we can ask of this usable past to shape the future of the systems of science and technology, research and education that we choose to create out of this legacy. It's my pleasure to invite our distinguished panelists who I'll introduce together and then each will contribute brief reflections on their own extensive experiences working at the Mellon Institute. During our meetings preparing for this session with Emily Davis, who we owe a debt of gratitude for this event today, I learned so much from our panelists and hope that this can be the beginning of many more conversations both here in a formal setting and also in the reception where we'll have a lot more chance to chat informally. So Brian Zandy, after graduating from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1980, was hired as a technologist at Carnegie Mellon Research Institute where he worked on the St. Joe Minerals Fellowship investigating lead acid battery production variables. Once the St. Joe Minerals Fellowship ended in 1983, he worked as a scientist at the Materials Characterization Center at CMRI using X-ray defractometry and scanning electron microscopy to solve problems for industrial clients. In 1995, he went to work as a scientist for Advanced Materials Corporation until retiring in 2017. Guy Berry is an emeritus university professor of chemistry and is widely recognized as a leader in rheology and light scattering of polymers. Rheology, a branch of mechanics, is the study of those properties of materials that determine their response to mechanical force. Berry began his career in polymer science as an undergraduate laboratory assistant at the University of Michigan. After earning his doctoral degree in 1960, he accepted an appointment as a fellow at Mellon Institute to work on light scattering studies of dilute solutions of polymers. He became a senior fellow of the Mellon Institute in 1965 and joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon when the Mellon Institute merged with Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967. He was promoted to professor in 1973 and became a university professor in 2001. Alberto Guzman, former associate director of the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute, first came to the Mellon Institute as a research fellow where Essex International Corporation and United Technologies Corporation sponsored his work on innovative technologies for electric power and communication lines as well as the automotive industry. At CMRI, Guzman led a 45-member scientific staff and applied advanced technologies. He created a research team to develop intelligent instruments by merging gas-sensor technologies with micro computers. Guzman and his research team also conducted sensor research that has had impact both in the US and internationally through the creation of new products and processes, including the development of a powerful, accurate and transportable optical methane detector the gas industry now uses to detect natural gas leaks. Guzman continues to have a long career impacting sectors across the work ranging from material science, the development of sensors and the application of microwave processes to the treatment of industrial waste and the refining of heavy petroleum crudes. So you'll see that our panel has so much experience to share from their times here in transition in the contemporary Mellon Institute and I'm going to start with a few questions just to get some glimpses of their lives and experiences and then I will invite everyone to join in a rich informal discussion afterwards. So beginning with Brian, what was it like to begin your career at the Mellon Institute during this transition period? Well, I had just graduated college from IUP in May of 1980. My interview here was April of 1980, right before that. Just coming into this building, I was overwhelmed. I grew up in a small town, maybe 8,000 people to Catholic school, high school that had no money for chemistry labs and yet I made it through college, got my BS in chemistry and I was fortunate enough to have an interview here with Dr. Tony Parker who was a senior fellow with the St. Joe Minerals Fellowship. That was in April. He hired me. I started June 16th, 1980. I remember it very well to this day. I didn't have my parking card yet. I had to park in front on Fifth Avenue. I think an hour was a quarter, if you can believe that. It's what, now five cents for 12 minutes or something? I don't know, 25 cents. Anyways, I was still just getting my feet wet. As a scientist, chemist, yeah, I'd done undergraduate research. It just wasn't the same. Dr. Parker started me at a very low salary compared to several of my colleagues who graduated with me. He said, Brian, if you work out, we'll make arrangements for you. Well, within the first three months of my employment, I was interacting with the engineers at St. Joe Minerals Research Center. The Corporate Research Center was out in Beaver County at Monaca. St. Joe had a zinc smelter out there, but they also built the Corporate Research Center out there as well. They had just had a big bonanza as far as the research goes, as far as they had developed the alloy that led to the maintenance-free lead acid battery. You didn't have to add water anymore, and that sent the battery market through the roof. St. Joe developed a lot of money from the lead mining that they were doing, and the lead was their main thing there. So they were able to invest in the fellowship. Dr. Parker had never really had a full-time staff member. He had hired part-time people through the years to help him when he was the busiest. These people came from the staff of the CMRI building. I was full-time and immediately integrated myself into the research center, the industrial side at St. Joe in Monaca, and also the academic side here at Carnegie Mellon. It was just kind of there for me to do. So I did it. I mean, I was single, had no other things to do as far as my life. I was trying to make a career in science. So, yeah, I did whatever I could, and I would talk with the engineers at St. Joe. They had these exploratory programs that they put money into, and they used professors at CMU to help develop these programs, and I was kind of the interface, along with Dr. Parker. But he realized, eventually, that he could let me do a lot of it on my own. I eventually spent one day of a week out at Monaca, just doing research in their battery lab, talking with the engineers. They had programs with faculty in the metallurgy department at Wean Hall at CMU. I helped facilitate some of their data-taking and going over there to campus because that project was behind. Within the first six months, I think I met with Dr. Barry, along with my boss, Tony Parker. He doesn't remember, and that's excusable, but we had a problem with our rheology of our slurry solutions that we were working with as our research. So Dr. Parker said, let's go talk to Dr. Barry, and we did. And I think in the next six months, within that first six months, we had a project with Dr. Guzman's group. Dr. Guzman had acquired an implantation device. The St. Joe engineers were interested in what would happen if you implanted certain ions into the surface of lead alloys. How would that affect corrosion, the properties that are important in battery manufacture? Geez, I was involved in all of that. And I was still kind of getting into everything as far as the science. I did have daily routine, so to speak, and it was the kind of stuff that I thought, graduating as a chemist, that I would have to do for the rest of my life. Go into a lab, do two or three tests every day, the same thing, and that'd be done with it. Go home. The chemists I knew growing up, that's what they did. They worked for Kendall Refinery in my hometown, Bradford. And they went in, did routine tests, and went home for the day, played with their kids, you know, that kind of thing. I kind of thought that's what I was getting into. When I came to Mellon Institute, and I walked through those front doors with the marble and the granite and the quotes on the walls and everything, it was just amazing. And it just ballooned off after that, as far as developing a career in such a way. And then as the lead market fell out, people started recycling their old batteries, so the secondary lead market grew, the primary lead market, which is St. Joe's bread and butter, didn't. We lost funding. Tony Parker went on to teach at local College of La Roche or somewhere. I hooked on with the materials characterization center here, and I was able to use the skills I developed with St. Joe, as far as interacting with the engineers in the private sector and industry to do problem solving for them here at the university. Because the CMU people were nice enough to set up our group with some electron microscopes, high end x-ray equipment. People back then were sending me a vial of powder with the simple instruction, tell me what it is. If they found out what it was, then they could figure out maybe where it was coming from, because it was appearing in their process where they didn't want it to. I did that for about 10 years. It was one of the best parts of my job, career that I've ever had. I worked in the sciences for about 40 years, eventually starting with advanced materials characterization, where we were doing research in magnetic materials. And then I get into my routine, where I was doing the same thing all the time. But for the first 15 years, I was here at Mellon Institute. I had a great time. I remember so much of this stuff off the top of my head, because I know. I experienced it, and it was just an amazing thing for someone from a small town in Bradford. Just, you know, to do that, and to be here today to talk to you about it, I'm over the moon, as they say. Am I up yet? Thank you. We'll look over the moon to have you as well. Oh, great. Thanks. Thank you. So shifting gears, maybe a little bit more to think about what it was like during the merger. Guy, might you share some thoughts with us? Well, many things come to mind. One thing comes to mind immediately. Robert Kennedy Duncan's portrait is on the back wall. So when you go out, you can take a look at what he looked like at a stage in his life when he was writing that book or working here. Not in his building, but at Mellon. I had come to Mellon to work for three years. When I walked in the door and met the people and why I came, actually, it was like walking into a textbook in my field. Paul Flory, who later became a Nobel Laureate. Ed Casasa, who was in life-scattering like I, and Herschel Markowitz, also in biology like I, had come to Mellon before the 57 change. The 57 change brought a lot of change even before the merger. The Mellons had always had a kind of a funding for some independent research since the 20s. Not very much, a few projects. Maybe they were making too much money off of you guys. I don't know. But in 57, in 56, the Mellons could see that World War Two had changed the way research was being done in industry. And they began to worry that the model they had developed so successfully during the earlier years wouldn't any longer work. They had a committee looked at things and they said, well, maybe you should set up an independent research program with some endowment monies to work with federal monies or state or whatever, but not with sponsored research monies, not with industries. So that those groups were not allowed to go out and work with industry directly. Of course, we could send results to industry and discuss with industry what kinds of problems there were. We couldn't take any money. That was done. And they hired Paul Florey as the director of research. And Paul did not want to do any administration work. So they hired a trustee, member of the Board of Trustees named Matthew Ridgway, a general, to come in and do that kind of work. So we had a dual leadership in the in the student at that time. They hired Paul Florey, who then hired eight staff fellows, one for each of several or eight, I would guess to say, areas of research. My area was one of those polymers, metallurgy was another one. And like on on down the line. That was a structure. And that worked for a while. Paul Florey had thought he understood something about the funding of that long term, which the melons didn't think they had said. And eventually Paul left. He went out to Stanford and finished his career very effectively, again, getting a Nobel Prize for his work, much of it done here, but not all of it. Some was done before he got here. A lot of it was done before he got here. For me, I had become a senior fellow, which was a kind of a appointment with unlimited tenure, like a faculty professor at the university. In 65, I think is what you said. And the that meant I had responsibility for a few people working under me, had to help get the funding for that by writing proposals just like you do in any faculty member of any university. And knew nothing about the impending landslide that was going to hit me when the merger took place. The merger was arranged by the Mr. Mellon and the Board of Trustees, working with the presidents of the two institutions, Stevers for CIT and Cross for Mellon Institute. People, even the staff fellows right under Paul Cross knew nothing about the merger. I personally learned about it when I was in Japan when I visiting scientists who had worked with me here at Mellon, asked me what I thought about the merger. I says, what merger? I said, Well, Mellon Institute's merge was CIT. I said, Well, you've got to have something wrong. If we were going to merge with anybody, it would be pit because that's, you know, that's nearby. And that's where we came from. But he was right. So I came home back to Mellon and things were changing. There were 29 people from the Mellon Institute who had an appointment level that Meredith put them into the new university faculty in various departments. And that was the rub. We weren't a group that was spread over many, many areas. A lot of it was in chemistry, some in biology, some in metallurgy. So there were just two or three places they could go. At that time, at that time, CIT did not have a modern bioscience department. They had a biology department. So these no one wanted to go there particularly. A few went into metallurgy. The only member of these staff fellows that's still alive is Tim Masowski, who's over in metallurgy. And all the rest have just been going for several years now, most of them, including Paul Flory. Chemistry got the bulk of them. And chemistry became the size of a department that would be appropriate for a major state university with lots of students and lots of space. It was not appropriate for the program that had been existing in Carnegie Mellon or at CIT. And it wasn't clear to anybody how I was going to work in Mellon, CMU. Well, of course, the worst part of that was for the youngest members of the chemistry department who had not yet received unlimited tenure. Several of those decided it was not a good idea to stay here anymore. They moved on to other places where they didn't have to fight quite as heavy a level of senior people in front of them. Some of the senior people moved into the new biological sciences department when it was created. And of course, that helped a lot in two different directions. It meant that CMU would now have a department that was more modern and working in areas of independent from the chemistry department for sure. And it has become a very strong department for the university. Chemistry then had a more reasonable size. And I, myself and my Polymer Science colleagues, four of them, had not gone into chemistry at the first movement. We had decided we wanted to stay together and the university had several of these misfits didn't know what to do with this. So they created a center, a center for special studies they called it. I think they probably called it something else in private, but that's what they called it. Well, I was a member of that department, that center, and I went to Japan again and was talking with someone else. And when I came back home, I was told I was in the department of chemistry. Dick Sartre wanted to get rid of the center and resolve that issue. So he put some here and some there and the four of us went into chemistry. Tom Fox, our staff fellow, was really not doing anything in chemistry. He was working with the governor as governor of science advisors. So he was hardly even not here all that often. Ed Casasa and I went there with Heschel Markowitz. Ed was the only one of us, I think that was delighted with that. He was a chemist. Herschel and I were not chemists. I was trained. Well, I would say I went to university as a chemical engineer. I wouldn't say I was trained as one because about halfway through I decided I didn't like chemical engineering. And I started doing applied chemistry, physical chemistry at that point, which a lot of chemical engineers do. Herschel Markowitz had come here in 49 and began rheology early on. And he was more physics than anything, as I was actually. But we were all in chemistry. So we all decided to buckle down into our jobs. So we tried to create a polymer program in chemistry. And I see I have reached nine minutes, which probably means I should stop pretty quickly. The only thing I would have to say on top of that was it's been a like I was already been commented on. It's been an interesting career. It's been a lot of things that have been very good. Some things I wouldn't want to repeat. But you know, that's what life is like. And that's what life was like here. Thank you so much. So there's a lot of lore of mystery about what is behind these columns. Could you give us a glimpse into what it was like to lead and to do research during this important period? And were many of the things that you did were by necessity confidential? Thank you very much. I'm trying to see if I can summarize 30 years of life at the Institute in 10 minutes. And that is a very hard task. I remember having a senior vice president of research of a company that we were doing research in a consortium with other companies, it was a petroleum company based in Canada. And he was presenting a lot of ideas and see if we can really do what they normally do in petroleum processing in 10 steps, one single step. And I said, John, why do you want to torture me? You know, you are asking me for a miracle. You are asking me to walk on water. And let me tell you, I'm not Jesus. So you always get this challenge because you have unique expertise, a team of people that have been highly educated. At the same point, I have about 50 PhD in my group. And how do you excel in a way that you can attract funding from different organizations? The Melon Institute for years, they have these fellowships that were supported by corporations. They are senior fellow and the fellows working in a subject of interest to the company. There was a long fellowship here that lasted, I don't know how many years, supported by the Melon Foundation on the preservation of artist materials. How do you preserve the treasure of arts that in the particular case were the Melon Collection that is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. That was a senior fellow, Bob Feller, Bob Feller. He did such a good work. I remember being in Paris one day, went to a museum in Forze, and I was going to have lunch. And the cafeteria was full. There was no empty seat, except one table. So I came with my tray, sat down as the lady that was there, may I sit here. And she says, of course, please sit down. She was from Vienna. And she asked me, where are you from? I said, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And she said, ah, Bob Feller. I said, how do you know that? Oh, he's an authority, his work known for his work in the preservation of artist materials. The problem that we have is that you can do research as long as you have money to do it. And funding has become very competitive. You are head to head in a competition that is either you get the contract or you die. And that puts you always in high gear. It's a lot of fun to do very interesting work. But in order to do the work, you have to have the money. So after my years being a postdoctoral senior research engineer at CIT, I said, where am I going? And I look at various opportunities I could have gone to GES, Connecta, the research laboratories, some place in California that looked like a high tech. It was not yet called the Silicon Valley. But I look into the Melon Institute, which recently has merged with Carnegie Tech. And there's a fellowship sponsored by a company from Fort Wayne, Indiana that was acquired by United Technologies, a giant in the defense area. And these people created a very large fellowship here at the Melon Institute because they wanted us to join the group. But they wanted a separate group from their very large, very well known research center in Hartford, Connecticut. But they wanted somebody that was away from the manufacturing. Remember, they were making helicopters. They were making jet engines, Platt & Whitney and a bunch of other things for the defense department. So they wanted a group that was isolated from the manufacturing area. But forward-looking, thinking about what technologies are coming and how do we prepare ourselves to be involved in these technologies. You are being paid to think. You are being paid to develop ideas. Look at the trends. What is coming? So for a few years, we were here at this building. And we had an automatic group that was looking into the use of microelectronics into the automobiles to control the engine. And our group developed the first two prototypes in conjunction with Ford Motor Company. And then we provided them with a series of units that we installed in the Lincoln Continental Mark IV. So think about innovation. Nobody was doing this kind of work. We did that. I was very proud of working with this group. I was a scientific advisor within the group. But the United Technology, one day, said we are going away. We are canceling the fellowship. And that was the time when Carnegie Mellon had been running short of money. There was a lot of cleanup by President Sire. And United Technology was not too happy with the services that were provided. So they decided to move out. What happened with us, indeed, Carnegie Mellon had no chance to offer us jobs. But I was offered a job with United Technologies in a group that was installed here in Pittsburgh that was doing all kinds of microelectronics work. And as a consequence of that, we were able to produce dedicated chips to put into the microcomputer that was installing the automobiles. It was a very interesting period because I was interacting a lot with the people at Hartford, where the research center was developing their own research work. But at the time, we were talking about 1973-1974, President Sire has hired a new president of the Mellon Institute. That was Dr. Ted Herman. He also came from Kansas. And Dr. Herman came to visit our facility that was in RIDC in Blonox. And after the visit, he said, I'm going to talk to President Sire. I want you back at CMU. I said, well, that depends what you can offer me. And indeed, later on, I received a letter from Dick Sire saying, Alberto, we would like to offer you a position back at Carnegie Mellon. You would be doing this kind of work. You are going to all the seniority, getting back to all the seniority, and so on and so forth. So I returned to Carnegie Mellon in February. No, that was July of 1978. And that was a period of changes. The old fellowship idea was kind of a phase out in terms of, as a modus operandi of this institute. But a new way of doing research was get counter-research with industrial responses, federal government, or any group that is interested in spending money with ideas that you can offer, solutions to their problems, new technologies. And so it's a phase of evolution that really created a new approach. And we put together new groups at the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute. There was a group in computer engineering, a group in rail transportation looking into high-speed rails. My group that was involved in advanced devices and materials. And there was a battery group also. So we started to work in a different way. We were looking for sources of money, including venture capital. That was the name of the game. People that had money that we are trying to sponsor work. So at the time when we started looking at who we can work with, we traveled quite a lot with State Herman. We went to what was later called the Silicon Valley. We met with three guys working in a garage operation. One of them was Dr. Robert Noyce, founder of Intel Corporation. So we had tremendous opportunity to get in the ballgame of new technologies. And that was a very fruitful time for us to develop ideas in conjunction with some companies who are interested in the capabilities that we have developed at the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute. And so it was a golden period of R&D. On the other hand, there were people that were being phase out of their place of work, including the Westinghouse Corporation Research Center in Churchill. And many people wanted to move into the Mellon Research Institute. They came to see me and I got about 10 top scientists from the Westinghouse laboratory. We also had the change because a change of location because we moved from here, from this building, into the newly created Technology Center on Second Avenue by the river. The government of Pennsylvania provided money to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon to create two anchors in that old steel mill land. One was Pitt, the other one was CMU. And when I said CMU, I meant Carnegie Mellon Research Institute. We moved in 1985 with beautiful facilities, state-of-the-art, everything was working very fine. Some of the work that I was able to capture was a major contract with the Department of Transportation. The Department of Transportation asked me to do some work for them and for $50,000 we delivered some product that was worth perhaps millions of dollars, bearing the potential legal problems which also is a problem. Anyway, but this contract I got for about $7 million for three years was a very strong competition between our institution, the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute and Battalion Institute in Columbus, Ohio. And we competed and we won the award. That opened the door to me and to my group to look into what is going to be now the future and the future is now here, intelligent automobiles, intelligent highways. The work that we did for the Department of Transportation was an evaluation of technologies that have been developed for other applications, particularly the military, where the Pentagon will pay for a gadget $10,000 and dealing with automotive industries that won the same gadget for $1. How do you do that? How do you, you know, have to deal with mass production and make the numbers and so on and so forth. But some of the things that you see now in the new cars, the anti-collision devices, the lane departure alert system, the autonomous driving, we set the basis. I got after three years another $7 million and we continue working and we develop our own systems. The idea here is how you can make use of the knowledge to transform something that is potentially good into a product that somebody can use it. And out of this product comes the potential of creating a spin-off companies. And Carnegie Mellon as well as the University of Pittsburgh have been very good in spinning off companies. We spun off four companies. We did some work for the Department of Defense, developed a very important camera for target detection identification. The camera was tested and it was a success. We created the company, the company did some work and finally the company was acquired by another company that was in Rochester, New York and then finally acquired by a Canadian company. So the idea of entrepreneurship, very valuable for the creation of jobs. That's where we were. How we can open opportunities for people to create new companies where the public is going to benefit, the investors in the company are going to benefit and of course the owners and the people that work in the company will benefit. I was trying to do something else before my retirement and that was the creation of an operation where we could retain the talent that we get out of our schools at Carnegie Mellon rather than the people leaving Pittsburgh and going to some other places generate a center where the newly graduated people can get some seed money to develop the idea, continue the development of their doctoral thesis into something that eventually can be a product, can be manufactured. The retention of talent for the area is very critical and that's something that I was working on and finally one day I said hey Alberto, why, what is the difference between you and the guy in the corner in downtown Pittsburgh who's a little kind of coke and a few coins saying would you spare a few change with me and Alberto was a big bucket to the Pentagon taking it and saying would you spare a few million with me. It's a very demanding process with you in high year you are working very hard every day even at night and finally I said it's time to retire so in 2001 I retired and then I entered in doing consulting and after my retirement I was working more than before in consulting that's a time when I said no more but anyway I'm still linked to Carnegie Mellon I'm teaching at the Osher program the Long Learning Institute and I have given lectures on energy and the environment, green sources of energy and sing of interest at this time when we see a lot of serious problems for the future and the health of the world that's my story. Thank you so much so I think one connecting theme is really so much of this energy and the multiplicity of history in this place that we can continue to explore both in the living history and in the projects in what's preserved in the archives so now I would like to invite the dean of the libraries to give some remarks before we recess to talking informally together. Thank you. Thank you Ellen good afternoon ladies and gentlemen I'm going to try and cope with this microphone that I think has got a some sort of tachycardia. I'm Keith Webster, dean of University Libraries. I'll be brief you'll be pleased to hear. First thing I would like to thank Ellen and Guy, Alberto and Brian for their fantastic participation in this afternoon's event. Please give them a warm round of applause. I was going to thank Rebecca as well but I think she left with her sick dog. Maybe she left the dog behind I'm not sure. I'd also like to acknowledge my predecessor Gloriana St. Clair Dean Emerita of University Libraries. Welcome Gloriana. I'm delighted Guy to learn that university communications has improved fastly since the day of the merger. Everyone knows everything that's going on all the time these days. Well I wouldn't say that. I really enjoyed hearing you know this thread about the role of Mellon Institute and today Carnegie Mellon in transforming research that is good into things that are useful and the potential to create companies that build a drawcard in Pittsburgh one that attracts and retains the very best talent. That is very much at the heart of the university's role today. Further thanks to the American Chemical Society who provided financial support for this event as well as the Mellon College of Science for their financial support. We've already heard Emily Davis being mentioned. Emily thank you for your work in creating the exhibition in building the digital archive that I'll mention in a moment. Colleagues from the Libraries Digitization Projects Division I see Ann Marie at the back. I don't know if any of your team are here. You came alone. The rest are digitizing a number of my colleagues also who made this event possible. Andy, Heidi, Shannon. I'm grateful to them. I really do feel that this event also symbolizes something important about the library. I spend a lot of time talking about the evolving scholarly record which is a a kind of clunky metaphor to talk about how today we see scientific research produce a variety of digital outputs data algorithms observations as well as papers reports and other things and this collectively reflects a body of work that is amenable in a digital world to capture and to reuse and to verification and so on but it also I hope if we sort out the digital preservation bit builds a record that tomorrow's historians will be able to refer to to understand the evolution of research and disciplinary practice in today's world and just as we hope we have that future aspiration today we can look back on the evolution of this institute and our university through the records that our libraries and archives are building up to tell the story of not just the evolution of an institution but given the distinctive research at this place the evolution of scientific disciplines during the 20th and the early part of the 21st century with that in mind I did want to mention the work that Emily has done to organize 347 boxes of records and I'm told they're not like the small boxes you might have at home but big boxes a tremendous amount of stuff there the records of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research two bodies of that material have been digitized by Ann Marie and her team representing 26,800 pages and your reports of the Mellon Institute from 1914 to 1967 and the institute's newsletters from Toot Toot which was the first title in 1960-1917 through various different titles up to Mellon columns in 1975 and through to 1980 and to gather these tell the story of that evolution that I mentioned they have been OCR'd for those who care about these things so that the text is searchable and for people that can be cuttable and pasteable into slides for presentations so do look at the website there's a link to that from the library's homepage library.cmu.edu I would be told off if I didn't remind you to fill out your survey card if your Facebook plugins haven't filled it out for you already the one thing we don't have here is a sign pointing to the exhibition but please do take time to look at it it's really fantastic I had a good chance to look at it this morning it is through there on my right and take a right please do take time to look at that take time to talk to our panelists take time to talk to Ellen take time to enjoy the refreshments enjoy the rest of the event thank you