my book. the westport library has been a real innovator in terms of agreeing it was just sort of a coincidence that brought us together thank you to bill for helping make this all happen. as was mentioned in the introduction, my book is -- it is partially about what is going on in tinkering right now in the contemporary world. but it also touches on history. but more specifically talks about what the ideas behind being a tinkerer on her. and what is it tinkerer? and how is that different from being a hacker? typically the term has a negative connotation. you kind of think of the old crackpot not really knowing what they were making in the basement, but you are sort of having fun with your parts. but in fact, that is kind of the heart of what tinkering is about. we tend to think of them as trained engineers or specialists in their field, but historically in this country, they were really not specialists. they were generalists. certainly engineers can be tinkerer, that is typically what they're doing in their spare time when they are not at work. i have met a lot of these people talking to other groups about this book. it is looking at the things around us and thinking about the things we can make. it is about keeping one's eyes and ears open to the possibility. sometimes try to solve problems but oftentimes they saw completely different problems. that is okay. it is really about them pursuing their personal passion initially. making an emphasis on the corporation one day. that is typically not how they first got into it. and we talk about education these days. and whether we are teaching our kids the right things, a lot of people wonder how can we get some of that spirit back into the schools. but it's not about teaching them how to do this. i think most kids know how to do this if you give them something to play around with and able do so and try to figure out how it works. seeing what they can make out of them. i think that we have become a culture in a lot of ways and we sometimes forget that. teachers teach the test because they are under pressure to show higher scores for their districts. but i do not think that we really need to teach kids how to do this. we need to make sure that we don't squash their spirit to early. my book begins with my own tinkering experience, if you will. that is one i've sat on my blackberry. i was getting into the car and i realized pretty quickly that i had damaged the screen and the phone was still working but i couldn't read anything on the screen. so i took it to the local phone store thinking that they could fix it i could turn it in for another relatively cheap phone. the salesperson told me, i wish i could fix that, i used to do that, it was my favorite part of the job. but they don't let us do that anymore, actually. so he said he could summon anyone and i said, that's great. and he said it's watered $50. and i said, well, okay. so i went home and out of frustration did a google search. and i found a group of videos on youtube. maybe i can get this one work. sorry about that. a little bit of a technical difficulty here. just one moment. >> in any case, i will explain it to you. it was a video on youtube that literally told me how to pick apart my blackberry, remove the screen, and put in a new screen. i went online and got a special set of screwdrivers for a couple of dollars and ordered a new screen for about $20. i saw the video. when i opened it up, there were about five pieces. a screen and a circuit board and a keyboard, put the old one out and got the new one in and work like new. so that was my tinkering realization that we live in a culture now where we are sort of intimidated by these high-tech devices that we have. we feel like we are not supposed to open on. companies say that we are not supposed to open them because you will void the warranty. but the truth is, frankly, i figured i was going to throw the thing out anyway, i might as well give it a shot. it turned out it was a very difficult. humans may be things in the first place. theoretically, it should not be that difficult to figure out how to replace the screen. the idea for this book came out time after the big economic crisis of 2009 the united states used to be a country that could make things. i learned in my research that the united states is still a huge manufacturer of most of the things. many are high and electronic items. the difference is these days we just don't need as many people to make all of those things. we are certainly still in manufacturing hub and there has been a trend since i started working on the book of a lot of big companies like google and apple trying to manufacture some of the devices on american shows again. it turned out to be a little bit of a misnomer. i tried to boil down what this meant in terms of putting the book together. but also just to think about whether we as a country have lost this, this tinkering spirit. as i mentioned before, it is not so much a specific set of technical skills. it seems to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. but you just pick up enough knowledge about electronics and textiles and metals, programming, doing what you want to do. many try to come up with something new. >> skills are important, but there are a means to an end. mastery is not the point. the point is coming up with something new. before i delve back into history a little bit, i just want to point out a few of the things that are going on in the culture right now that show that there is a renaissance of sorts going on with this. i don't know if anybody -- most people have been toymakers there. there are really wonderful festivals with all sorts of tinkering in electronics and art and music. another thing going on these days, the so-called tinkering workspaces where you can go in and there is all sorts of high-tech equipment can play around with in trying to address the problem in the old days when it wasn't so high-tech, most people had a workshop in their basement and they would have all the tools that they needed to pretty much do anything. today a lot of people can't afford that. and certainly visit one of these technology shops for a day or however long you need and try out some of the equipment. hackers are always with something that has come up a lot in contemporary culture. the one that i focused on in my book is a gentleman who famously broke into an iphone and a few years later into a sony playstation and was sued by sony. but eventually they hired him. [laughter] to help them figure out certain things. they certainly intercept. i think the main thing that is most important about this as there is there is a certain amount of humor to it. [laughter] >> there is a spirit of fun. they developed innovations because they were enjoying what they were doing. i think that that is the key element that is important. now i shall go back a little bit. in my book i sort of tried to get through the beginnings of american tinkering. we can talk about how this differs from tinkerers around the world. there was something about this country and our founding fathers seemed to be right in to our original history. obviously, ben franklin is one of the great american tinkerer and inventor. in school we learned the story about the lightning rod, bifocals, all sorts of other things as well. he was also considered a huge source of wisdom. which is great. he is a very interesting figure. but the only thing is that he raised the bar kind of high and early. he made it seem like a very daunting thing. another interesting thing about franklin is this is a way to open things up. we are looking at the results of what the tinkering is about. had such an impact on american society. it was something that he had to work out in his head over a long period of time for became a reality. there are a couple of examples as to how those things can be as valuable as the actual thing as well. the other thing that is interesting about franklin is that he wasn't the only founding father that was a tinkerer. many original founding fathers were lifelong tinkerer. george washington included. he wanted to find the best way for cultivation and to prevent plant diseases and he owned the lot of land, so there was a real need for it. but this was something that he pursued throughout his life. the other project of his was building the potomac canal. he was obsessed through the rest of his life. he actually died before it finished. he had ideas about it. he wanted to hire engineers to help them build it. at that time there actually were no trained engineers. they had to consult engineers in england. and, in fact, the techniques that he used to develop a, it ended up being kind of wrong and they didn't work out. eventually it was built with a totally different technique. but again, it was something that he pursued. he invented the plow and the macaroni machine. james manderson -- james madison created a stick that you could look at books for what they magnifying glass. alexander hamilton was the original financial tinkerer. it is clear that these are men of wealth and leisure. at that time they had pursued it and figuring out solutions to problems throughout their lives. i don't know if television change that or something. but benjamin franken was not the only one at this time. ben franklin is a serial inventor for one. he made his original fortune with a series of infusion pumps, including insulin pumps that allowed stations to receive medication around the clock. without having a nurse present. he also invented the wheelchair. he built this gyroscopic technology into it. and they said you might want a wheelchair to climate curbs or stairs. so he invented this very ingenious technology to do that. he's probably best known for the segway. it was built on the same technology as the wheelchair. i don't love you remember when the segway came out a number of years back, it was hailed as the future of transportation and it was going to change the way we live. unfortunately, a lot of big cities banned the use of them on sidewalks, for one. in warehouses they used them, i think amazon uses them in their warehouses. there are a lot of tours around the country. the technology is around. maybe it will have bigger use in the future. he obviously became wealthy off of his invention. but if you look at, you know, how they track this over time, he knew exactly what he was doing. in fact the way that he first got into it was like shows that were synchronized to music. eventually he was able to install technology as a teenager in new york. so some of them don't know where they are going, but they can still go on to do great things. i also talked about thomas edison in the book. of course, the inventor of the century. he was hailed as a wizard and again, the same issue with ben franklin. he raised the bar so high in terms of what people thought of tinkering that seemed almost otherworldly. i tell the story in my book of the invention of the device in this photo. this was actually the phonograph. and he really, he came up with the first photographs that were workable and relatively easy to produce. but edison hated music. he could not fathom why anybody would want to listen to this device and spend their leisure time listening to music. it did not make any sense to him. so he spent a number of years pursuing what he thought was the real market for this device. it was an office dictation machine. it did not work out that well for him. but he never made a lot of money off of it. you know, at the time people didn't understand how electricity works very well at that point. a lot of the things that he did, he regarded as matter. they actually thought he was a wizard. but he represents a connection between the origins of tinkering and the contemporary version of it. he was a great man. he had these great ideas coming out of his head and he would have all kinds of assistance trying to figure out how to make them work. that became the new arc type for how to tinkerer and innovate. you could argue that his was the first in research and development operation. again, he could not understand why people would want to listen to a phonograph for entertainment purposes. the irony is it was an entertainment device that included alexander graham bell as a partner, which was particularly upsetting. my point is edison was muddling through everything. surely that is okay for all of us as well. you know, if you read the accounts of how most of his inventions were realized. it was composed with frustrated assistance and midnight dinners and, you know, it was not particularly easy. but he was having fun. back to the idea of tinkering is something conceptual, it started in the world war ii era. i became intrigued with a guy named thomas macdonald who is really by most people's understanding. a career bureaucrat. the guy grew up in the midwest in iowa in a farming community. he watched throughout his childhood farmers struggle to transport their crops on dirt roads so money sometimes they were would just stay home for weeks at a time. so the roads would dry up so they could go out again and transport crops. after going to agricultural college, he became under the spell of mr. marston, who was 18 at the agricultural college and proponent of the good roads movement. it was actually intended to promote the use of bicycles because cars were not really around when it started. the idea was to build more public roads so that people could ride bicycles more. eventually cars became popular. he went on to become the head of the roads in washington and later created the highway education board and the american association of highway officials. the reason i think of him as a tinkerer is because over a period of years, he pursued the idea that there had to be away to construct and facilitate this interstate highway system throughout the country. the idea was to build roads where people were going to go or where they wanted to go as opposed to where they were already going. before that, most roads were built by the state and there is a lot of corruption by the states. a lot of back roads. and it was really a conceptual idea that he came up with. it made the interstate highway system happen. he liked to say that the only other two great programs of road building in history were that of the roman empire and that of julius caesar and that of napoleon of france. so the u.s. was the only one built under a democracy. but there's something about the idea. it made me realize that a lot of the big tinkering innovations in the latter part of the 20th century going into today's society, it sort of started with tinkering with ideas. hopefully those would spin out into actual physical things that could change our lives. so i talk about the originator of game theory. it was founded during the cold war and the idea was to protect national security. they came up with ideas to protect us better than the idea that we are to have. later on in the 70s, xerox famously, which was based in stamford, connecticut at the time, they famously created the palo alto research center. this was known as being one of the great experiences. the idea was that they were going to fund research without any products in mind. they were just going to see what came out of it. that was kind of unheard of at the time. why would you spend corporate money on something that you didn't know what would happen with? but in fact, it was very fruitful as an experiment. they hired former academics. one of my favorite stories was their version of beat the dealer. and they used it in terms of tossing around ideas and they would have these mustard colored beanbags. it was the 70s. someone would present their idea and they would sort of a bad that idea and explain why it was wrong. this is a big departure from what edison did in his lab. would where he would have this idea and say, you guys do it, this was actually like this. some great things came out of it. the most famous was probably a personal computer. in a similar to windows like software elements. it came out of all of these sessions. but when they showed it back in stamford, they just said that they didn't see an application for business at the time. most computers typically would submit your request and the operator of the computer would execute it for you. they didn't see a point for it. steve jobs famously went in and wanted to have a look at this. .. another person does but to for the book was this guy nathan our fault. and he was biker sauce first chief technology officer. he left in the early 2000's. obviously did very well. he went on to do some really interesting things after that. some people might know him from his modern cuisine cookbook. he is known as sort of -- the developed this whole school of scientific cooking. he applies science. in the bucket is like a $450 book or something. you can -- you know, it is all new way of cooking. but the other thing that he founded was a company called intellectual ventures, which ito was very interesting because he was trying to address the issue that it was such a problem in the 70's. how'd you commercialize this great idea that tinkerers can come up with without either having to go elsewhere to develop them or unjust not develop them because the corporate climate is right. and so intellectual ventures, it is not devonshire -- venture capital firm. it is an intellectual or in venture-capital firm. the idea is that he gets all different types of innovators, inventors from all different fields together in the room, and they try to just sort of brainstorm and come up with solutions to the world's big problems. my favorite one is a laser bugs separate that they developed to help fight malaria. in fact, the bill and melinda gates foundation has gotten involved in it and helped fund it because apparently it is very effective. they have come up with some really novel solutions for addressing climate change in all different kinds of power solutions. so it is an interesting model. it is still early to see whether it will really grow into something big, but it is interesting. i mentioned alexander hamilton's financial tinker. now, people don't usually think of what happened a couple years back as tinkering if you think about them positive sense. you know, there obviously are a lot of horrible things that came out of the tinkering of some people on wall street. but the point i make in the book about this kind of tinkering is that credit the fall swaps and collateralized debt obligations were initially actually invented to solve problems, not to create wants. and in the case of the collateralized debt obligations in the for example, there were two people, built in check and blythe masters looking for new ways to offset risk for some of their clients. and so, you know, that is what they were trying to do when there were pulling together all these mortgages and slauson them up and selling them as securities. in theory it made sense. unfortunately, you know, there can be a dark side to tinkering, obviously. and in fact, probably the darkest part of the financial tinkering was that most people other than the people who came up with in the first place didn't understand it. and so that is something i think that we deal with a lot in contemporary society. when you are tinkering and a high level, whether it is financial tinkering or tinkering with technology, when there is that gap between understanding what is being done and what the average person can comprehend, it sometimes creates problems. of course, remember back to edison. people fought electricity was magic. so, you know, there is a learning curve. that's not to say that people can't catch up. this was another guy that i interviewed for the book. really interesting young tinker, professional adventure who was trained at mit. actually originally from australia, but he liv