Forget beer. Exhibition shows it was mastery of machinery that made Milwaukee hum.

Maybe beer made Milwaukee famous, but it was machinery — and the mastery of it that developed here — that made the city hum.

Electricity-generating turbines for Hoover Dam. Steam shovels to dig the Panama Canal. Forges that shaped casings for the space shuttle’s booster rockets. Diving equipment used to set depth records. Rheostats to control electric motors. The first commercially available telephone answering machine. The first successful outboard motor.

It all emerged from or was operated within the factories that filled the city and its immediate suburbs during Milwaukee’s great industrial age.

In the latter 19th and early 20th century, the Walker’s Point neighborhood was a sort of Silicon Valley of manufacturing innovation, breeding companies — Harnischfeger, Nordberg, A.O. Smith, Allen-Bradley, Allis-Chalmers — that eventually would employ tens of thousands.

A good deal of that has vanished, lost amid the migration of companies to lower wage locales and the creative destruction integral to an evolving economy.

But key elements of the heritage have been gathered at the Grohmann Museum on the Milwaukee School of Engineering campus in an exhibition spotlighting the city’s history of ingenuity.

“The Magnificent Machines of Milwaukee” opened Friday as part of a four-museum staging of exhibitions built around different aspects of locally generated creativity and collectively called “Milwaukee Made.”

Tom Fehring, a semiretired former engineer with We Energies, a lifelong Milwaukeean and author of a book also titled “The Maginficent Machines of Milwaukee,” curated the Grohmann offering. It isn’t large, but it is attractively presented and packed with opportunities for discovery.

“We were certainly looking to surprise people with some of the incredible things that have been made in Milwaukee over the years,” Fehring said.

So, while most everyone knows of Harley-Davidson’s motorcycles, the exhibition features not a Harley but a Flying Merkel, which beat Harley to the market and, in the early 1900s, was the better-known brand.

The Merkel machines are long gone, but in a shop in the Historic Third Ward, Desco Corp. still produces deep-sea diving helmets that look like something out of a Jules Verne story and cost thousands of dollars each.

“They’re restoring too,” museum director James Kieselburg II said as he stood beside the Desco display. “… When I was there looking at these apparatuses, they had 12 helmets from a collector in Singapore, and he was pouring close to 10 thousand into each one to get them refurbished.”

A figure outfitted with a diving suit and Desco helmet stands sentry over the display, not far from an item that was brought in just for fun, a Festivus Pole.

Turns out a Milwaukee metalworking firm, R & B Wagner Inc., is the self-proclaimed world’s largest manufacturer of the unadorned aluminum poles for Festivus, a holiday cooked up for an episode of “Seinfeld” and celebrated with airing of grievances and feats of strength. Who knew?

And who knew that the world’s largest and most powerful forging hammer, according to the exhibit, is in Cudahy?

Multiple stories tall, Hammer No. 85 was built in the 1950s at Ladish Co. to shape incandescent chunks of steel with incredible force between rams weighing 375,000 pounds each. The massive machine is still in operation at the former Ladish plant, now owned by Allegheny Technologies Inc.

While the Grohmann obviously couldn’t display the thing itself, the exhibition includes a dandy photograph showing two workers facing the hammer’s glowing maw like followers of some hellish god.

There's much more at the exhibition too, including one of Christopher Sholes’ first typewriters, one of Ole Evinrude's first outboard motors, and an early electric drill called the “Hole-Shooter” that a predecessor of Milwaukee Tool developed around 1918 for Ford.

Yes, Kieselburg said, visitors may well feel a twinge of sadness over once-innovative firms that are gone or diminished.

“But mainly I want them to marvel,” he said. “Like, ‘Wow, this was built here? This was invented here?' That’s really I think the resonance of the exhibition.”

“The Magnificent Machines of Milwaukee” will be on display through Dec. 22 at the Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway. Museum admission is $5 for adults, $3 for students and seniors, and free for children under 12.

The three other Milwaukee Made exhibitions are:

• Artworks of retired Harley-Davidson styling chief Willie G. Davidson and his son, Michael Davidson, at the UWM Union Art Gallery.
• A series of photographs called “Portrait of Milwaukee,” at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
• A look at Harley-Davidson’s formative years from 1910 to 1920 and the firm’s original Juneau Avenue factory, at the Harley-Davidson Museum.