HARTFORD, CONN.: In the late 1880s, when Mark Twain began his tale of a time traveler who brings modern technology to the Middle Ages, he had to decide what sort of character would work best in the central role. He did not choose a steamboat pilot, despite his own experience in that capacity. Nor did he choose a railroad man or a telegrapher or an electrician. Instead Twain used the chief of a firearms factory as his agent of transformation. And when he called the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , readers knew instantly what the mention of Twain’s adopted state signified—not antiques shops, as today, but machine shops.

Few Connecticut Yankees were more prominent than Samuel Colt, whose revolver did as much to shape the American West as covered wagons and barbed wire. As a measure of his importance, Colt was the only American inventor to give his name to both a major-league baseball club and a malt liquor. The Houston Colt .45s became the Astros in 1965, in a move symbolic of America’s shift to high technology. Meanwhile Colt 45 empties litter the streets of inner-city neighborhoods left behind by smokestack industries.

Now the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Colt’s hometown of Hartford, is presenting an exhibition devoted to the inventor and his wife, Elizabeth. The show, which opened in September, includes part of the Colt collection of firearms, with a section showing the genealogy of repeating arms; a re-creation of Elizabeth Colt’s picture gallery; and a large assortment of the knickknacks that once filled Armsmear, the Colts’ Hartford mansion. A section is devoted to Coltville, the inventor’s idealized factory village.

The Wadsworth Atheneum is located at 600 Main Street, Hartford, CT 06103 (telephone: 860-278-2670). It is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. The Colt exhibition will run through March 9, 1997. A companion volume, Colt: The Making of an American Legend , by William Hosley, curator of the exhibition, has been published by the University of Massachusetts Press. For those interested in a different sort of look at the foundations of nineteenth-century America, an exhibit called “Petticoats and Pantalettes: Victorians Undressed,” exposing typical undergarments of the period, will run through March 2. And of course, the Atheneum’s collections of paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts are worth a visit in themselves.

WINDSOR, VT.: While the Colt trademark still brings Western gunslingers to mind, the name Robbins & Lawrence suggests nothing more dashing than a law firm. Yet in its brief ten-year existence R&L did as much as any company to convert the American System—the mass production of interchangeable parts—from an ideal to a shop-floor reality. This year the American Precision Museum, which occupies the old R&L building in Windsor, is celebrating the firm’s 150th anniversary and its own 30th. As part of the commemoration the museum’s newsletter has published a history of R&L written by its editor, Carrie Brown.

The story begins in 1844, when Samuel Robbins, a businessman, proposed to expand the custom gun shop of Richard Lawrence and Nicanor Kendall (who left for Iowa in 1849) to mass-production levels. His plan was riskier than the usual business expansion because manufacturing large quantities of interchangeable parts cheaply had never been done before.

True, as far back as 1813, Army firearms contracts had specified interchangeability. When Simeon North of Berlin, Connecticut, achieved that goal (more or less), it was a major advance. But most of the labor that went into his pistols was still done by hand. That made the interchangeability less than absolute and kept the prices high enough that only the government could afford them. For private buyers the old one-at-a-time methods worked just as well.

R&L’s achievement was to meld the mass-production processes of North and others with the latest advances in machine tools. The firm built water-powered milling machines that virtually eliminated hand filing and chiseling. Barrel boring and rifling, tapping and threading, and wood shaping for gunstocks all were mechanized, with metal patterns ensuring uniformity and R&L-developed gauges, jigs, and fixtures achieving tolerances previously unheard of.

Like Silicon Valley today, the Connecticut River Valley was at the forefront of technology in the 1800s because of its concentration of firms—R&L, Colt, and many others. When the newly established R&L needed a skilled supervisor, it simply hired one from a gun shop in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts. As its business grew, a large supply of gunsmiths was readily available. After the firm broke up in the 1850s, R&L alumni applied the techniques they had learned to a variety of industries, from sewing machines to machine tools. The devices and techniques they developed can be seen today at the American Precision Museum—and in thousands of shops and factories across the nation.

LONDON, ENGLAND (This item was written by the editor of this magazine, Frederick Allen) : The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), becoming ever more cosmopolitan, held its 1996 annual meeting in London. Participants delivered 190-odd papers covering a kaleidoscopic range of subjects, including Dutch beer making, women engineers in Communist East Germany, bowling balls, cardiac pacing, Alpine holiday traffic, the evolution of bourbon distilleries, Brunelleschi’s architecture, metal halide lights, and a device called the Orgasmatron.

At least one paper notably altered the historical record. John D. Anderson of the University of Maryland reported his discovery that on their way to inventing the airplane, the Wright brothers did not, as has been widely believed, disprove Otto Lilienthal’s earlier aerodynamic findings. Rather they misinterpreted Lilienthal’s perfectly good numbers—a serendipitous error, since it led them to carry out their own invaluable wind-tunnel tests.

But the most startling paper was the chilling contribution of Michael Allen of Georgia Tech called “‘Because That Was Most Natural’: Nazi Conceptions of Women’s Work and Flexible Production at the Concentration Camp Ravensbruck.” Allen found that “while almost all other SS industrial ventures ended in abysmal failure … the Ravensbruck textile works ran at a profit from their conception. Several key factors made Ravensbruck industries different. First, the SS managers involved shared a long-standing sense of both community and commitment in which Nazi ideals formed a key component of consensus.… Ravensbruck also adopted techniques of flexible production capable of adapting to fluctuations in the labor force.” The lesson: “That ideological cohesiveness is as much a part of what engineers and managers do as the application of technical skills.” A strange example indeed for illustrating the virtues of “ideological cohesiveness.”

The society’s Dexter Prize, for the year’s best book about the history of technology, went to American Plastic: A Cultural History , by Jeffrey L. Meikle of the University of Texas. The Leonardo da Vinci Medal, for lifetime achievement in the field, was awarded to the economic historian Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University. Readers of Invention & Technology may recall his articles “A Good Crystal Ball Is Hard to Find” (Spring 1986), about the perils of prediction, and “America’s High-Tech Triumph” (cowritten with Ralph Landau, Fall 1990), about the chemical industry.

Conferees had to resist the temptation of London’s many attractions to catch the meeting’s events. That included tearing themselves away from the Science Museum, a London institution that goes back to the 1851 world’s fair (and which, incidentally, sponsored the conference).

On first entering the museum, you are greeted by the gleaming seventeen-foot-high main landing gear of an Airbus A330 airliner. With its ultra-high-tensile steel and alloys, flashy gray enamel, four-foot-wide tires good for three hundred landings, and bright yellow cables between its retracting arm and its articulated bogie unit, it’s a ravishing piece of high-tech sculpture. It sets the mood for the riches ahead, a celebration of the wonders of science and technology more triumphal than any museum in America would dare present today.

A hall given over to power technology includes, among dozens of other machines, Boulton and Watt steam engines from 1788 and 1797 and a Trevithick high-pressure engine from around 1806. In the land-transport area you can see the Puffing Billy locomotive of 1813, Robert Stephenson’s Rocket from 1829, an 1888 Benz automobile, and the world’s oldest Rolls-Royce, from 1905. Unfortunately, this gallery will be closed until 1999. The ship galleries offer hundreds of fully detailed models from the ages of sail and steam to today. The flight area contains not only a cross section of a 747 and Frank Whittle’s first flight-worthy engine but also an actual flight-training simulator that you can climb inside of for a genuinely unsettling simulated roller-coaster ride. The medical-history area re-creates whole wards and operating rooms from different eras. Even the chemical and petroleum industries come to life; an audiovisual theater inside a full-size replica of part of an oil refinery manages to hold small children rapt for minutes on end.

In other words, one thing this attendee learned at the 1996 SHOT meeting was that anyone interested in the subject matter of this magazine should consider the Science Museum as essential to a visit to London as the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, or even Harrods.