Eli Whitney Museum

Charles and Ray Eames designed everything: toys, chairs, houses, films and museum exhibitions. They were practical visionaries. They found new uses for new ways of making things.

Alec Bell invented the telephone and much more. One of his secrets: Mabel of Benin Bhreagh, a houseboat to which he retreated to think and fill notebooks with his ideas.

100 years ago in New Haven, A.C. Gilbert invented a small place for invention: the Erector Set. It's heart was the electric motor. He put the first flexible use motor into the hands of a generation of young inventors.

Alexander Calder was an engineer and an artist. Watch films of him working in his Roxbury, CT studio. Calder brings to life everything he touches with play.