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HOW SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY HAVE SHAPED THE STATE

Science and Technology in Minnesota

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Computer designed by Control Data Corporation

Computer used for weather calculations, air traffic control, etc., designed and manufactured by Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, 1970. Photograph by Control Data Corporation.

The history of science and technology in Minnesota is the history of both how people have perceived and organized the world and how they have brought these worldviews into practice. They have defined science and technology in different ways over time, often according to their social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances.

To discuss the history of science and technology in Minnesota is to discuss an immense cross-section of human thought and occupation. People living in different times, places, and societies have created many different scientific systems in order to meet their needs. Science and technology in Minnesota have been influenced by the unique characteristics and histories of the state: its natural resources, such as forests, rivers, lakes, and plains; the intersecting histories of Indigenous and settler-colonist communities; and the unintended consequences of scientific and technological development. Often, developments in both fields have been driven by, and in return have influenced, changes in other arenas of human action, including religion, industry, and war. Indeed, science and technology are integral parts of human culture.

Science and technology are enormous categories, and to provide a comprehensive overview of their history in Minnesota would be impossible. Instead, this essay explores scientific and technological developments as cultural expressions; reveals their entanglement with industry, politics, and the university system; and describes some of the unforeseen consequences. Ultimately, science and technology have influenced the history of Minnesota just as Minnesotan science and technology have influenced the larger world.

Indigenous Science: Dakota and Ojibwe Ecological Management

The Dakota people have inhabited their homeland (Mni Sota Maḳoce, part of which is the region that we now call Minnesota) for hundreds of years. Indigenous Dakota science and technology were and are place-based, shaping and shaped by the prairies, forests, and waterways that make up the land. The Dakota practiced sustained-yield planting of fruit and nut trees; used fire to drive game, improve pastures, and facilitate travel; and developed transportation technologies such as canoes to navigate the region. Dakota astronomy combined detailed knowledge about celestial bodies and events with a cosmological worldview of human relationships to both natural and spiritual worlds.

Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe people moved into what is now northern Minnesota from the eastern United States in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. They settled in the forests along the southern shore of Gichi Gami (Lake Superior), where they assumed a lifestyle centered around seasonal rounds of fishing, ricing, hunting, maple-sap harvesting, and small-scale horticulture. In order to thrive in their environment, Ojibwe communities also practiced careful resource management to sustain yields by keeping count of game animals, re-seeding wild rice, and managing forests through controlled burning. They manipulated and managed local ecosystems with techniques developed through close observation and experimentation.

Both Dakota and Ojibwe technologies of resource management strategies or what some scholars call traditional ecological knowledge were and are systems rooted in Dakota and Ojibwe worldviews. Both include understandings of mutual responsibility or kinship between human beings and the ecosystems in which they live. Many Dakota and Ojibwe communities continue to develop resource management strategies informed by Indigenous scientific knowledge. That knowledge informs, for example, the fishing and forestry practices of the Red Lake Nation’s Department of Natural Resources and energy production at Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s Koda Energy Plant.

Sciences of Exploration: Collecting and Mapping Minnesota

European and Euro-American people came into present-day Minnesota beginning in 1659 with the French fur traders and explorers Médard Chouart de Groselliers (1618–1696) and Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636/1640–1710). Like later explorers, Groselliers and Radisson hoped to determine whether trade in the region would be profitable for European countries. To do so, they produced scientific knowledge about the environment of Minnesota. They also created accompanying resources, such as maps, that recorded local geography, lists of plants and minerals, and commentary on Native people.

Such knowledge was all part of what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans and Euro-Americans called “natural history.” Natural historians collected specimens and mapped territories to sort the natural world into a comprehensible, accessible, and consumable whole. Mapping, in fact, was an essential technology for Europeans exploring the Great Lakes region. They created maps not only to explain what the land looked like and how to navigate it, but also to understand how it came to be that way.

Explorers, who were often also natural historians, used their knowledge to support their agendas for travel and trade. For example, Radisson successfully petitioned for the support of the Royal Society, a British scientific organization, in his explorations of the Great Lakes on the grounds of both economic and scientific potential. The Royal Society’s advocacy helped secure the backing of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The company, while predominantly a fur-trading enterprise, also contributed to the natural historical exploration of the region.

The expeditions of French natural historian and cartographer Joseph Nicolas Nicollet (1786‒1843) further entangled natural history with commercial interests. Nicollet made detailed, scientific maps of the Mississippi River basin and wrote accounts of the people, plants, animals, metals, and minerals located there. His expedition in 1836 from Fort Snelling to the headwaters of the Mississippi River was funded by the American Fur Company. Among his companions on that trip were Chagobay, a leader of the Leech Lake Ojibwe, and Chagobay’s nine-year-old son.

The US Senate published Nicollet’s magnum opus, the Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi, along with an accompanying report in 1843. It was considered the most accurate map yet produced by cartographers of European descent. It showcased Nicollet’s contributions to the growing fields of geography and geology with its depiction of the layout of land and striation of rock as well as speculations on how the land had formed. His notes included detailed accounts of the Native people he had met as well as speculation on the possibilities for agricultural development in the region.

Science and Technology in Resource Extraction: Logging and Mining

Enlightenment-era Euro-Americans believed the natural world could be categorized, extracted, and consumed. By using science and technology to manage extraction processes, they transformed natural resources into economic ones. As new industries arose that fueled this new economy, Euro-American settler-colonists developed specific technologies to suit their needs.

On the heels of nineteenth-century land- and resource-cession treaties with Ojibwe and Dakota nations, land ownership in Minnesota shifted dramatically—and sometimes illegally—from tribal to federal control or into private hands. Supported by national expansion and the development of railway technology in the 1850s, federal bodies such as the Commission of Public Lands and the General Land Office sponsored surveys to assess lakes, streams, forests, and soil before land was sold to individuals or territorial governments. Many of these surveys were of trees—in particular, the great white pine forests in northern Minnesota. Logging white pine and other trees was a lynchpin of industrial development in the new state, which by 1900 had the largest lumber market in the world. Technological innovations, including steam-driven sawmills and hot ponds, powered the timber industry and defined the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and later Duluth as centers of industrial development.

Like logging, the development of mining in the state depended on exploratory missions, through which land and resources were surveyed, and on improving the efficiency of extraction and transportation technologies. The volume and rapid expansion of mining made the industry particularly influential in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Mining in Minnesota, however, already had a long history. Dakota communities in southwestern Minnesota mined pipestone (catlinite) at sites like Pipestone Quarry to make pipes for religious and diplomatic use. The pipes entered economic trade systems through which they were distributed across North America.

As Euro-American immigrants began to settle in the region, they too quarried material for building technologies like houses and forts. The US Army built Fort Snelling in 1820 with limestone mined from southeastern Minnesota, and the same stone was used to construct buildings in St. Paul and Minneapolis. The US government’s desire for mineral-rich lands prompted mid-century treaties between Ojibwe nations and the United States, including the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe.

An ill-fated gold rush in 1865 and 1866 at Lake Vermilion hastened the development of railroads and brought an influx of prospectors into northern Minnesota. While they found little gold, they did discover an abundance of iron. The desire for expanded shipping and travel coupled with railroads and technological developments in steel-making increased national demand for iron, making mining a lucrative industry.

Starting in 1884, iron ore mined from open pits in the Vermilion Range began shipping out from Two Harbors on Lake Superior. Iron was mined in Minnesota in the Mesabi, Cuyuna, and Vermilion Ranges, often in open pits, using processes that were developed in Minnesota and adopted elsewhere in the country. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Iron Range was the primary supplier for the booming steel industry in the United States. As supplies of more accessible iron ore in hematite declined over time, mining companies collaborated with scientists to adapt extraction processes to obtain iron from taconite ore.

Taconite mining was developed over the course of several decades. It was begun in 1913 by mathematics professor Edward W. Davis (1888‒1973) in partnership with the University of Minnesota and several mining companies. Their innovative processes, in which magnetic force was used to separate out the iron ore, kept the iron industry productive through the 1960s. While the taconite industry kept the Iron Range economically viable long after high-grade ore had been mined out, mining byproducts caused serious environmental damage to the region’s lakes.

Many scientific ventures spun off from Minnesota mining networks. Most notable was the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, later known as 3M. Founded in 1902 in Two Harbors by businessmen interested in mineral mining, 3M developed sandpaper products for industry and later for domestic use. Over the twentieth century, the company produced such iconic consumer products as Scotch Tape and Post-It notes, as well as a variety of audio-visual equipment, medical products, and reflective coatings. In the 2010s, 3M is a multinational Fortune 500 corporation.

Technological systems such as mines contributed materially to the development of late-twentieth-century scientific initiatives, including aerospace engineering and particle physics. In the 1950s, Portsmouth Mine in Crosby, Minnesota, became a launch point for Project Manhigh II, an Air Force investigation into the effects of altitude on the human body. Soudan Mine, which closed in 1962, served as the home to one of the leading particle physics research laboratories in the United States from 1980 to 2016.

Scientific Partnerships: Agriculture, Computing, and the Medical Device Industry

Partnerships between industries, academic institutions, and government agencies have often been essential to scientific investigation and technological development. As seen above, mining technologies in Minnesota were guided by partnerships between academic and industrial institutions. Networks were also essential in milling, agriculture, computing, and medical technology—industries that ushered in some of the most significant scientific and technological developments in Minnesota’s history.

Alongside logging, milling and agriculture were among the most important industries in the state in the late nineteenth century. These industries benefitted from the same natural resources that make Minnesota distinct: rivers, forests, and prairies. The first grist mill in Minnesota was established in 1823 by the United States government at St. Anthony Falls (Owamniyomni) on the Mississippi River to provide flour for soldiers stationed at Fort Snelling. Other mills served lumbermen and, later, the developing urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Mills also provided hydroelectric power to some parts of Minnesota.

Changing water levels and flooding in the rivers endangered mills and made river navigation dangerous. In 1881, in response to requests by Congress, the US Army Corps of Engineers began the first dam in Minnesota, at Pokegama Falls. It was completed in 1885. Electrical power provided from hydroelectric dams, such as the Coon Rapids Hydroelectric Dam in Anoka County, incentivized immigration through job creation even as it supported milling and other industries.

The same land-cession treaties that had influenced the development of the timber industry also influenced the development of agriculture in the state. Coupled with an influx of northern European immigrants, an expanding railway system, and technological innovations in flour milling in the 1870s and 1880s such as the middlings purifier and the Berhns Millstone Exhaust System, many Minnesota farmers quickly adopted large-scale, mono-crop wheat production. By 1880 Minneapolis was the leading flour producer in the nation.

The importance of agriculture for the state’s industry meant that agricultural concerns ranked high in the growing university structure. This emphasis created a research and educational environment that fostered innovation. The University of Minnesota was founded in 1851, and in 1867, under the Morrill Act, it became the state’s land-grant institution. Two years later, the university started its College of Agriculture, complete with an experimental farm for conducting trials of farm crops and garden produce as well as for providing formal agricultural training to Euro-American immigrants. Researchers and students at these stations conducted basic and applied science in dairy chemistry, animal nutrition, agronomy, and plant genetics.

An exemplar of successful agricultural research at the university was the Honeycrisp apple. Developed in 1961 and released in 1991, the Honeycrisp is widely heralded as having changed the national consumer market for apples. Consumers of designer apples like the Honeycrisp proved willing to pay upwards of four times as much per apple. Another important contributor to plant genetics research, University alumnus and professor Norman Borlaug (1914‒2009), was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his development of high-yield wheat in the so-called “Green Revolution.” Borlaug’s work, like that of other researchers, relied upon government and philanthropic funding, industry buy-in, and the knowledge and labor of non-university farmers and ranchers, reflecting the importance of networks to scientific and technological development.

Government‒industry partnerships in Minnesota fed the development of science and technology in other industries as well. Computing and the medical device industries are two notable examples. The computing industry in Minnesota got its start in 1946, when a group of former Navy cryptographers formed a company called Engineering Research Associates (ERA) to build code-breaking machines. While ERA was relatively small, the company benefitted from multiple large government contracts through which ERA technicians developed the first magnetic storage drum (1947) and the Atlas computer (1950). Building on government, industry, and academic networks, ERA’s success spurred a cascade of computing development in Minnesota. In 1952, ERA merged with Remington Rand, a national conglomerate. This organization benefitted from the government-industry networks formed by ERA and became deeply involved in the development of military technology during the Cold War. In 1957, top researchers at ERA left to form their own company, Control Data Corporation (CDC, 1959‒1975), which became a global leader in computer manufacture and design and ultimately specialized in building supercomputers.

The story of computing in Minnesota is a story of successful government, industry, and academic partnerships. For example, CDC’s success depended on the University of Minnesota’s production of trained technical workers during World War II as well as partnerships with other Minnesota companies like 3M and General Mills. Following CDC’s lead and benefitting from the many trained personnel in Minnesota, other companies, such as IBM, established research, development, and manufacturing centers in Minnesota. Even the State of Minnesota entered the computing industry with the development of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC, 1978–1999). MECC, in partnership with Apple Computer, Inc., made computers available to K‒12 students in the state. It developed software to integrate computing technology into the learning process—technologies such as the hugely popular Oregon Trail game.

Skilled labor from the computing industry as well as from University of Minnesota graduates fed Minnesota’s nascent medical device industry. This industry also relied upon an established history of health sciences research in the state. Maverick surgeons at the University of Minnesota such as Owen H. Wangensteen (1898–1981) and his students invented a number of devices and techniques, including the Wangensteen suction apparatus (1931), techniques of open-heart surgery (1952), and the disposable bubble oxygenator (1955). The success of these inventions depended on a supportive network of university surgeons, researchers, and administrators.

The particular needs of these surgical science networks intersected with other professions, such as electrical engineering, to spur the development of the regional medical device industry—what would be called Medical Alley. The rapid development of Minnesota as a center for medical device innovation is most often linked to the collaboration between heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei (1918–1999) and electrical engineer Earl Bakken (1924–2018). Bakken was a mechanic at the university when Lillehei asked him to create a wearable, battery-powered heart-regulating device while Lillehei improved techniques to repair holes in the heart. Bakken’s invention, the pacemaker, became one of the most significant products Bakken’s company, Medtronic, ever made. Former Medtronic employees later founded many other companies, including St. Jude Medical and Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc. In 2019, over 500 companies in Minnesota fall under the trade organization of Medical Alley.

Unforeseen Consequences of Science and Technology

Scientific pursuits and technological developments have changed the people and ecology of Minnesota in many ways. Some of these changes have not been altogether positive. Innovations in logging practices led to the loss of much of Minnesota’s old-growth forest, which national, state, and Native agencies have since been attempting to restore. Mining tailings in Lake Superior have affected both the ecosystem and human health, leading to multiple lawsuits since the late 1960s. Dams along the Mississippi helped control flooding, enabled boat traffic, and produced hydroelectric power, but they have also endangered the homes and livelihoods of Ojibwe people living alongside the river and promoted the spread of invasive non-native species like zebra mussels and Asian carp.

Some scientific advances have been controversial. Indigenous groups in the state have long protested genomic research by the university on wild rice, fearing that engineered rice could contaminate the wild rice native to the region. These competing social priorities are often framed by competing scientific worldviews. In particular, the history of science and technology in Minnesota has often privileged the development of new products and new ways to use natural resources, while environmental integrity and scientific development have been framed as competing interests.

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© Minnesota Historical Society
  • Bibliography
  • Related Resources

Fitzharris, Joseph C. "Science for the Farmer: The Development of the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station 1868-1910." Agricultural History 48, no. 1 (1974): 202‒14.

Korostyshevsky, David. “Beyond Cardiac Surgery: Owen H. Wangensteen and the University of Minnesota’s contributions to mid-century surgical science.” Minnesota Medicine 101, no. 1 (January/February 2018): 22‒25.

LaDuke, Winona. "Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures." Colorado Journal Of International Environmental Law & Policy 5 (1994): 127.

Manuel, Jeffrey T. Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915‒2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Misa, Thomas J. Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
http://gallery.lib.umn.edu/exhibits/show/digital-state/introduction

Rhees, David J. “‘Medical Alley’: The Rise of the Medical Device Industry in Minnesota.’” In Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual International Conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE’s) Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), 6588-6589. N.p.: IEEE, 2009.

Stearns, Forest W. "History of the Lake States Forests: Natural and Human Impacts." In Lake States Regional Forest Resources Assessment: United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service General Technical Report NC-189, edited by J. Michael Vasievich and Henry H. Webster, 829. St. Paul: US Department of Agriculture, 1997.
https://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/gla/reports/history.htm

Stewart, Omer Call. Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Watts, Alison. "The Technology That Launched a City: Scientific and Technological Innovations in Flour Milling during the 1870s in Minneapolis." Minnesota History 57, no. 2 (2000): 86‒97.
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/57/v57i02p086-097.pdf

Related Images

Computer designed by Control Data Corporation
Computer designed by Control Data Corporation
Native Americans quarrying pipestone at Pipestone Quarry
Native Americans quarrying pipestone at Pipestone Quarry
Ojibwe mortar and pestle
Ojibwe mortar and pestle
Map of Canada, including parts of present-day Minnesota
Map of Canada, including parts of present-day Minnesota
Patent-model dust collector
Patent-model dust collector
Lighting tower at Bridge Square, Minneapolis
Lighting tower at Bridge Square, Minneapolis
Students in biology laboratory
Students in biology laboratory
Chemistry laboratory at the University of Minnesota
Chemistry laboratory at the University of Minnesota
Iron ore shaft, Eveleth
Iron ore shaft, Eveleth
Cloquet Lumber Hot Pond
Cloquet Lumber Hot Pond
Students in science class
Students in science class
Researchers at the University of Minnesota
Researchers at the University of Minnesota
Chromotherm advertisement
Chromotherm advertisement
Honeywell employee
Honeywell employee
Science lab at Villa Maria Academy, Frontenac (Goodhue County)
Science lab at Villa Maria Academy, Frontenac (Goodhue County)
Surgical clamp designed by Owen Wangensteen
Surgical clamp designed by Owen Wangensteen
Cosmic ray research at the University of Minnesota
Cosmic ray research at the University of Minnesota
Scientist with turtle
Scientist with turtle
3M hazardous material disposal team
3M hazardous material disposal team
Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s Mines Experiment Station
Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s Mines Experiment Station

Chronology

1600s

Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe people move into northern Minnesota, where they meet Dakota people indigenous to the region. Both Dakota and Ojibwe peoples developed scientific land management practices based on an understanding of mutual responsibility.

1843

Joseph Nicolas Nicollet’s Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi and its accompanying report are published by the US Senate. The map, a kind of technology, was considered the most accurate of its time.

1867

The University of Minnesota becomes the state’s land grant institution. Initiatives within the university and collaborations with industry, government, and non-profits would broadly shape the state’s contributions to science and technology.

1881

The US Army Corps of Engineers begins the first dam in Minnesota at Pokegama Falls. Dams in Minnesota ran mills, created power, and improved river navigation but also spread invasive species and impacted the land and livelihoods of Native Americans.

1902

The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, later known as 3M, is founded by businessmen in Two Harbors, Minnesota. Along with companies like Honeywell, 3M became an important commercial developer of technological products for consumer and industrial

1913

Mathematics professor Edward W. Davis, in partnership with the University of Minnesota and several mining companies, begins developing processes to extract iron ore from taconite. Taconite mining would extend the mining economy well into the twentieth ce

1931

Surgeon Owen H. Wangensteen invents the Wangensteen suction apparatus. Medical apparati and processes developed at the University of Minnesota are among the state’s most notable innovations in science and technology.

1946

The computing industry in Minnesota begins when former Navy cryptography experts form a company to build code-breaking machines for the Navy. Engineering Research Associates, later Control Data Corporation, developed the world’s first supercomputer.

1957

Earl Bakken, in collaboration with heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei, develops the pacemaker, jumpstarting the state’s medical device industry.

1991

The Honeycrisp apple is released on the consumer market. The Honeycrisp is a beloved agricultural product and is widely heralded as having changed the national consumer market for apples.