 So we're talking about Fruitvale Follies and this is the original spelling of Fruitvale here in Oakland and six generations of tinkerers and scientists in various Failed experiments in this great town. So just to get us started you may have absolutely no idea where Fruitvale is It's a part of Oakland. It's probably a part of Oakland. You don't frequent very often But you know, it's cool. It's there. We're up here. I think I have a pointer. Yep. I do awesome So why are we talking about Fruitvale? That's a really great question It's kind of interesting for a couple reasons It was one of the last areas to get incorporated into what we think of as Oakland today It used to produce a lot of fruit hence the name so they you know had orchards of various cherries and Citrus and that sort of thing these days. It's pretty much known for crime This is a two-month snapshot of the neighborhood But really we're talking about it because I have a story and it's set there And it starts like most stories in kind of modern, California with once upon a time someone found gold in California And it convinced this guy who's named Alfred Andrew Cohen and these folks the Brays To move on out here from the East Coast and risk cholera and oxen to make the journey To make it rich and just to give a really quick overview of who these people are and why I should care about them. I don't know whether you'll ever care about them, but why I do So Alfred Andrew actually was born in England. He didn't come over by oxen. That was a lie I just said I never lie, but apparently that's not true So he was hanging out in Jamaica. He was around 16 years old at that point He'd left England at 14 by himself and the gold rush happened and he was like that sounds like a good idea So he came through the Panama Canal moved here Tried a whole bunch of things got really rich doing them Married this woman Emily Gibbons and built himself a palatial mansion in what is now Alameda So that's pretty cool. Emily was actually from an older family of Quakers who were here in San Francisco a little bit before the gold rush So that's also kind of cool. They had a son also named Alfred Alfred Henry Cohen Now the Brays also came from the east side of the world They were in New Jersey and they came out here to Be merchants because actually mining for gold was not a terribly good way to make a fortune So they got quite rich as well and built themselves a really big house in In true fail, which is part of why we're talking about this their daughter Emma Who is who I'm named for it's a little sneak peek? Married Alfred and for her their wedding present Emma's parents built them a really big house Right next door. So this was the house they moved into and his parents furnished it for them They had a daughter Marion She married this guy Charles Gilliland and they moved into the house next door again They had a daughter Nancy who got married to the minister's son and moved all the way to Berkeley They had a daughter Patricia who moved into the house next door again And that is where me and my sister were born So that's how all of these people are related to me Now lucky for my family or unlucky depending on how you feel about sitting on nonprofit boards This woman Emilita was emin offered youngest daughter And she lived to the age of 90 and never married and stayed in the house her whole life And so it is now an existing historic landmark in Oakland and all of the interiors are Exactly the same and actually the current caretaker in residence is with us in the Ozzadians today Which is kind of exciting So because all of that we have a lot of history based in this town And it turns out and I was doing research for this that a lot of the history of the United States can actually be told through the history of Oakland It's really a microcosm except for you know all those things that can't but we're not really going to talk about those So the things that can be told through Oakland I think there are a lot of really interesting ones that I came across through my family Immigration was obviously a really big story. These are just some of the countries that we've come from Child mortality was actually a really big deal. There were a lot of lost kids This is actually a mountain view cemetery, which is another really big part of Oakland history The kind of how land use was done in cemeteries Interior decorating people might not think this is that big a deal, but it's actually pretty cool These are interiors of the house though that is still here by the way Changing neighborhoods. So this is a picture of Oak Tree Farm, you know back around 18 60 or so maybe 1870 this is the neighborhood now Kind of almost the same view it's looking at the house would have been the side of the house So this picture the street here would have been the side street over here So you can tell it's urbanized a lot This is the original map of when the failure was here. This is the Oak Tree Farm plot This is where the house that's still standing is the rest of Watson Bray's property is all around here. This is Sather's property who gave Sathergate to Berkeley And this is kind of what the map looks like now So you can see the Fruitville Barts station is here Fruitville Avenue Foothill Boulevard Again, you probably don't hang out in this part of Oakland since probably doesn't mean very much to you. It's fine We had some incest which is always fun. So John and Susanna Bray in 1716 Well, that was when he was born they had two kids Andrew Bray and James Bray who politely named their children after their Parents so one of them had a son John the other one had a daughter Susanna who then got married and had their own son John First cousins wasn't that weird in the 1700s though The fact that some of the second and third cousins have had to hook up since is a little bit stranger But we're not gonna go there Education for women was a big thing Mills College was a huge advancement in women's education and we had a lot of family members that went there Natural disasters and how everyone responded to that I think some of the stories coming out after the 1906 earthquake are really touching This one was actually Alfred Andrew Cohen's railroad station that fell down in 1868 So that that was a personal one for us and this is a newspaper that we still have in the house Which isn't that old but trust me we have some older ones Love I think is one of the great stories that you can always find in in history So I all kinds of love these are my grandparents. These are my parents Another side of grandparents. This is one of my favorites. This is actually my my cousin once removed in 1961 I believe she wrote that she's been going with her boyfriend for nine months And she's really excited about it and then she wrote again that they'd broken up after a year and a half and then Which was kind of sad and then her sister is right next next to it 40 years later when she finally got married for the first time which I thought was really charming Anyway, so love war I you know is is a big part of any story This is my grandfather and where we're on this is the unexpected heir to the family fortune and where we're to apparently We don't have very many people that watch that TV show in this audience Poor name choices. I think every family has these don't name your child Heldred. It's just not a good idea Animal husbandry, you know, it was a rural kind of community. This is my grandfather hanging out with a hedgehog I Baby boomer divorce rates is kind of a big one for me So this is a whole bunch of my family here up to my great-grandmother and these these are all of their failed divorces But what I think is really really interesting both from my perspective as as an engineer and scientist and also For this particular crowd of nerd night. It's the scientists and tinkerers that we've had over the years and so starting kind of early we had My great great great great grandfather Dr. Henry Gibbons was Emily Gibbons father and he was the first recorder of meteorological data here in San Francisco and one of the founding members of the natural Academy of Natural Sciences Alfred Andrew Kono as we already mentioned I built a railroad He built a railroad that went from Hayward to the edge of Alameda and then a ferry service over to the rest of San Francisco That was really later bought by the the larger railroad tycoons the big four Medicine this is I'm particularly proud of this is my grandmother founded the Department of Medical Photography at Herrick So it's my grandfather my grandmother and my mother from graduating from nursing school in 72 What I think is really interesting is how short their skirts were But anyway, I Early computers I think is always an interesting one for this neighborhood. So my Great uncles I believe is how These people were related to me. I'm getting a nod for my cousin once removed in the back here. I Had this electronic shop in there in there in the back of the big house that that it still is with us today And they built a whole bunch of really interesting electronic equipment. They had a bunch of contracts with NASA Ames in the 50s So that's great the story that really really caught my attention was my great grandfather's obsession with With wireless telegraphy or otherwise known as radio and I think that this is one of the great stories because radio has been such a Grabber of attention for tinkerers throughout history, you know kind of since it it formed it was a group of amateurs that really got going with it Marconi Marconi the the kind of father of radio arguably Depending on whether you choose Tesla or logicide Whatever was an amateur really knew nothing about physics and it's one of those great Kind of things because you can get into it as amateur But there's so much to learn about it and it just keeps going and going so I don't know a lot about how Alfred Henry Cohen got into radio, but I can only imagine that one of the things that kind of sparked his interest was in 1899 One of the first big trials of radio was the broadcast of the America's Cup Which we're all hearing about again now but the America's Cup was being held in New York and the the big thing was Marconi took a ship out and Followed the races around and and radioed the results back to shore in New York, and then they were telegraphed all over the country So everyone had up to the minute Information and so this is actually a picture of the the newspaper the call in San Francisco had a big canvas up on their building and they had people up here Moving the boats around as they got updated information on what was happening So here in San Francisco, everyone was watching the America's Cup race happen in San Francisco And it was the first time this could ever happen And it was really exciting So I I can only imagine that being in Oakland at the time that this was something that that caught his attention and got him Really excited and just to think about what was kind of happening in his life at 1899 You know his father offered Andrew Cohen had moved from England alone at 14 Dabbled in a huge range of activities and made a huge fortune by building a railroad selling it to the big four becoming their chief council And then he built himself this palatial mansion Alfred Henry Cohen he went to Harvard. He had a mediocre law career that he kind of didn't like very much as far as I can tell He was happily married with four children and he lived less than five miles from home So even his beard was a little bit less impressive in a lot of ways So he became really obsessed with radio and I can only imagine that this was kind of he thought this was gonna be his his invention You know, he thought he was gonna live up to his dad's true worth And just so we have a little bit of context about what was going on in California at the time It's not like it was actually that isolated so I in 1960 the pony or 1860 excuse me there 1860 the pony express Got initiated in this shorten the mail route down to to ten days, which is ridiculous They just had guys literally galloping horses across the country. It's amazing But in 1861 the telegraph line was put across and so you had almost instant communication with the East Coast The transcontinental railroad had already been completed in great. Thanks to the the big four and actually Alfred's father And the first telephone conversation already happened here so to radio wasn't exactly You know, it wasn't this huge revolution It wasn't that you could reach places that you hadn't been able to reach distance wise they before but it did hold a lot of promise and and those promises were related to a couple of things they were It was rapid communication to places that couldn't have a static telegraph line So ships trains the emerging idea of automobiles Those were all really big ideas about what radio was going to enable and for a merchant town like San Francisco That's really important even knowing that your your boats going to come in, you know within 24 hours changes Vastly waiting for it to come through Panama and having no idea when it was going to arrive that really changed commerce And then the concept of personal wireless communication, which is actually one that I really love So here are some choice quotes that I found from the early 1900s The Los Angeles Times reports in 1901 that some day men and women will carry wireless telephones as today We carry a card case or a camera and you can imagine what their cameras looked at like at that time. So In 1902 Marconi himself said the system is handy a thing for automobiles in general I had a breakdown in England and was able to send a wireless message to my base asking them to That dinner be kept hot on another trip I thought two English policemen were after me and I was able to notify friends to be ready to bail me out If the Bobby should catch up with me So already they were thinking of the amazing things that they were to be enabled to do with personal wireless communication Also in 1902. This is one of my personal favorites The cosmopolitan says obviously the different difficulties of chaperone age are going to be tremendously increased The young man on the 20th floor of a Broadway building will be subjected not only to the charms of the stenographer is elbow But to those of the stenographer in the upper stories of all the high buildings around about so, you know, how was personal communication going to change flirting and Relationships and that sort of thing and this is actually a picture of a man being a Wireless lead radioed by his wife to remember to pick something up at the grocery store From that 1902 paper, which I think it's kind of fabulous. So there were some really thorny issues And we're back to pictures of my grandfather with the the porcupine there I'm Distance was a big one though the less necessary for kind of the the communication that people were thinking about in terms of personal communication The distance was really for ships. How far into the water could you get that wireless? Transmission energy requirements the original type of transmitters required a huge amount of energy to be able to travel that distance And that got changed over the years and then reliability issues You'd have a system that worked one day and it wouldn't work the next day And if it got a little damp something would blow up. I mean, there were just lots of problems Which made it a ripe field for both hackers and amateurs. So one of my favorite things is a only This was four years after the original America's Cup success the 1903 America's Cup was a total epic disaster for Marconi and Radio because he had been claiming that he had a system that made his wireless Tunable so that no one could interfere with it and it wouldn't interfere with other stations and These guys didn't believe him and so they sent out really strong signals from shore that totally swamped his entire broadcast and They received Instead of receiving reports of the position of the odds they got a lot of meaningless gavel varied by harsh obscenity profanity and sentimental poetry So this was one of the early hacks in Technology, I'm not saying it's a first by any means, but I thought it was a pretty good one I and one of the so kind of what was going on at the time technically and I won't spend a ton of time on this both because I Don't think I actually have a ton of time and frankly Well, this science I get some of the stuff I'm gonna have to read more on but the general idea is that you had a Wrong you had a power source here that would charge up this capacitor and when it got to a highest high enough voltage It would break down how it would cross the breakdown voltage of this here and I nice the air and create a circuit I went across here and created electricity which induced an antenna to send out a wave And that would happen a lot of times because as soon as it discharged this gap would stop sparking and It would turn off and then it would charge again and it would do it again and again So while you're holding down your telegraph key you're providing electricity as soon as you let it off It would go away But this caused a lot of problems because the signal Oh, I keep doing that looked something like this and you can see here It's a damped oscillation which means not only the amplitude goes down but the frequency changes as time goes on here So between each spark you got this wave that changed in frequencies and it kind of covered the entire range of Frequencies so it was great if you only had like one, but if you tried to have like a couple in the same area They just totally swamped each other There was no way to tune it around each other and then the receivers were kind of interesting too They had on these things called co-heirs I don't actually know how to pronounce it But basically they had this little tube that had metal filings in it and when it picked up a signal It would cause the metal filings to form a continuous Connection and transmit electricity But then you had to knock the thing to make them disconnect again to be able to pick up the next signal So they developed this really ingenious little knocker that would like Dislodge the metal filings between each signal that happened like a second apart. It was Clever, but not really sustainable And part of this is their understanding of the science at the time was approximately this there was one Box be it black or otherwise I get transmitting to another one and it sometimes put out worse code And I'm not saying that there weren't scientists that understood electromagnetic radiation at the time But they certainly weren't the ones working on on the wireless stuff mostly. This was just amateurs Who were experimenting and trial and error and it was it was open to trial and error But that particular system required a lot of electricity to transmit over any distance So it was kind of open to rich amateurs because you needed to have your own source of electricity Which Alfred did put in a generator in the back shop Some 20 years before they actually electrified the house, which I think shows some of his priorities So now luckily we know a lot more about the electromagnetic system. We know that Google's sinister projects are over here Um Slinkies are over here and the area that they were working on was in radio So ham radio and kosher radio being obviously big parts of that system Yeah, so Advances that that Alfred was probably working on at the time In fact, we know he was were transmitting voice Amplification and tuning and so things like amplification let you reduce the power that were required both for the transmitter The beginning there was no power on the receiver side. So on the transmitter side. You could have a Lower energy there if you were able to do amplification Tuning again was important because you wanted to be able to have a lot of people communicating in the same area And so they came up with a couple really interesting things including crystal receivers which involved an actual piece of Galena which was a natural diode it only transmitted electricity in one direction and so it was able to do this to a Frequency so it would take the radio frequency Cut off the negative side of it and you were able to pull out voice transmission This was really important for being able to do things other than Morse code because it allowed This is actually what am radio looks like so amplification modification is what this is you take your your wave that you're transmitting Everything on and then overlay it with the wave of the actual voice or noise that you want to transmit And then your receiver is able to pull that out on the other side using this kind of early diode from crystal receivers And then the next thing after that were these much more advanced diodes and triodes which were in vacuum tubes Which is what Alfred was really passionate about in probably the 1920s So he wasn't exactly Marconi jr. There's not a lot of Evidence of how far he got in this he was one of several Radio operators in the Bay Area at the time, but this is a couple hints So this is actually a news people article from 1914 Where the mayor Mott and mayor Rolf of San Francisco in Oakland? talked to each other sort of from the Fairmont Hotel to The 1440 29th Avenue property, which is this house that still exists today And they didn't actually quite talk to each other because they got their timing off and one of them had already left by the time The other one got there, but they both spoke and heard things so it kind of counted And this is kind of a big deal because 1914 was actually pretty early for this voice Transmission was was not super far along at this point and he also was listed in The radio service Bolton of 1921 along with the Westinghouse Electric manufacturing company So I feel like that's a pretty good competition to be up against So he clearly was making some progress was really passionate about it this time He was one of about 34 people who had licenses in the Bay Area Unfortunately, he managed to Blow himself up basically while trying to make a vacuum tube so there was a fair amount of Various different solvents involved in the process and he's managed to ignite some of them and cause himself really severe burns And he didn't die immediately, but it seriously hurt his health and he died a couple years later So it wasn't the most successful story of tinkering in our family, but I did think it was an interesting one To this day, I don't know if you would be a little chagrined But the the TV in the kitchen and this is a reenactment because we didn't get an actual picture of this But the the reception still has rabbit ears with foil on it So he might be slightly embarrassed about that But I think he would be happy to know that wireless has come so far that I was able to receive this text from my Sister this morning who lives in Spain that said I just saw a nun in a lingerie shop, and it must be a good sign So I you know I think he would be proud to know that he was part of the the science that made this particular communication possible So anyway, so that's the the main part of that story And I just you know for for us the family motto is kind of basically if you keep it long enough it becomes history and And So, you know, I really encourage you the house is still here. It's a historic landmark. It's something that we share there are tours This is just so you can see the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition book which we have upstairs This is the workshop in the back that my my cousin was kind enough to take me through has an incredible Array of historical machines. This is a newspaper from 1875 Anyway, there's lots of fun stuff in there. It's a great treasure And I want to give special thanks to to Ken Gillan for family history Florian for helping me take pictures and my mom for just being awesome