Calvin Bridges’
Fly Room Innovations

Elof Axel Carlson describes the practical changes that Bridges made in how things were done in the Fly Room: “When Calvin Bridges came to Columbia University in 1909, he initially worked as a food preparator and dishwasher for T.H. Morgan, but he soon became Morgan’s assistant. Bridges quickly changed how the laboratory worked. Morgan worked standing up; he looked at flies using a jeweler’s loupe; he isolated a fly he wanted by halving the population of flies through a series of empty bottles until only the desired fly remained in the bottle. When Morgan didn’t want the flies he looked at, he mashed them with his thumb on wads on paper. Bridges decided it was more efficient to use a dissection microscope. It was more efficient to sit. He designed an etherizer using a veterinarian’s gelatin capsule perforated with holes by using a heated frog pin to punch the holes and introduced ether to knock out the flies. He prepared a standard cornmeal and molasses medium to replace seasonal bananas. He introduced an incubator to keep the flies at a constant temperature so that flies could be collected and virgin females isolated in sufficient numbers for each of the experiments that the Fly Lab designed.” ↑ Calvin — Inventor