Museum of Industry & Technology

The Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry & Technology is a compact but surprisingly dense museum that documents how a small Wisconsin city helped shape global industry and computing. Inside, exhibits trace the evolution of local manufacturing and innovation, from Mason shoe production and Leinenkugel’s brewing history to hands-on displays explaining early counting machines and industrial processes. What makes the museum stand out is its focus on how these industries connect, showing Chippewa Falls not just as a manufacturing town, but as a place where practical craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology developed side by side.

The centerpiece is the Seymour Cray supercomputer collection, one of the most significant public displays of early supercomputing hardware in the country. The museum houses rare machines, including early Cray systems such as the iconic, circular Cray-1 with a bench (jokingly called “the world’s most expensive loveseat“) and components tied directly to Cray Research, the company founded in Chippewa Falls in 1972. These machines represent a turning point in computing history, when processing power leapt forward and made modern scientific modeling, weather forecasting, and advanced research possible.

Notably, the 1984 film The Last Starfighter, one of the first movies to extensively use realistic 3D computer-generated graphics, was rendered on a $15 million Cray X-MP supercomputer.

The museum itself grew out of Cray’s original corporate collection and was formally established in 1998 to preserve the region’s industrial legacy.

Seymour Cray, often called the “father of supercomputing,” was born in Chippewa Falls and built many of the fastest computers in the world during his career. Known for his unconventional thinking, Cray reportedly dug tunnels beneath his home, a process that helped him think through complex engineering problems. He joked that elves solved his problems while he was away digging his tunnel. That detail, strange but well-documented in stories about his life, reflects the same mindset that led to radically new computer designs. At this museum, his work isn’t presented as distant history. It’s grounded in place, tied directly to the city where those ideas were conceived and built.