Bakken Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary

In the West Winds mansion on the west shore of Bde Maka Ska sits the Bakken Museum. What started as the passion project of Earl Bakken, co-founder of Medtronic, has grown into a museum that turns 50 this year. After a half-century of education, the organization is marking the milestone with a gala, birthday bash, and STEM book fair this weekend.

The museum’s history centers around its namesake. After starting Medtronic (the company that sponsored this weekend’s marathon), a power outage on Halloween night in 1957 inspired Bakken to create the first external wearable, battery-powered pacemaker. With his new company and invention, Bakken started to compile the knowledge that would soon become his museum.

“It all started out with Earl Bakken initiating a collecting program at Medtronic in the 1960s,” Adrian Fischer, head of collections and exhibits at the Bakken, wrote in an email to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. “He gathered a small team that started acquiring rare books and early medical devices. The intended purpose was for anybody interested to be able to look back in history and learn about what had been done, written about, and tried. Earl believed these old books and medical instruments might be…