85 results for: Innovation and Invention
Photograph
Inventor Dr. Les Babb with first kidney dialysis machine, Seattle, February 21, 1994
Dr. Albert Leslie (Les) Babb (1925-2014) was an engineer and professor of chemical and nuclear engineering at the University of Washington from 1952 to 1992. In the 1960s and 1970s, Babb let a team with Dr. Belding Scribner of the UW SchooL of Medicine to create several machines that improved the field of hemodialysis and the treatment of renal failure.…
ID Number:MP940201.8
Date:1994
Photograph
Automated salmon processing machine, "Iron Chink," Seattle, 1909
In 1902, machines called "Iron Chinks" started replacing the largely Chinese cannery workers who butchered and canned the fish. The use of a racial slur in the machine's name is one example of the discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants to the US. The name continued to be used into the mid-20th century. Today they are called butchering machines or iron…
ID Number:SHS10662
Date:1909
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Inventor Edmund Augustine Smith, Seattle, circa 1905
In 1903, Seattle inventor Edmund A. Smith (1870-1909) developed a machine that gutted and cleaned salmon for canning 50 to 75% faster than human workers. Most Northwest cannery workers were Chinese immigrants, and Smith, with "unselfconscious racism" (in the words of historian Carlos Schwantes), called his invention the "Iron Chink." The use of a racial slur in the machine's name…
ID Number:SHS12053
Date:Circa 1905
Photograph
Postcard of monorail test track, Seattle, 1911
In this image, a portrait of William H. Boyes appears above a test track he demonstrated in 1911 in the tide flats of Seattle. Boyes sold shares in his Pacific Railway Company for the proposed monorail electric system operating passenger and freight trains between Elliott Bay in Seattle and Commencement Bay in Tacoma. A groundbreaking ceremony was held on May…
ID Number:SHS16810
Date:1911
Photograph
Butterworth & Sons funeral wagon, Seattle, circa 1905
After moving to Seattle in 1892, furniture maker Edgar Ray Butterworth (1847-1921) went full time into the undertaking business, motivated by the $50 paid to take each dead body off the street. A pioneer of the modern approach to the business of undertaking, he built the city's first custom-built modern mortuary in 1903, the Butterworth Block at 1921 First Avenue.…
ID Number:SHS18953
Date:Circa 1905