Spanning The Golden Gate

As someone who well remembers the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and who walked it on the first day and now is involved in the celebration of its fiftieth birthday, I must tell you that without a doubt your article “A Bridge That Speaks for Itself,” by Margaret Coel (Summer 1987), is the finest I have ever seen on the subject.

Robert F. Christian
Christian Engineering
San Francisco, Calif.

Spanning The Golden Gate

Your article on the Golden Gate Bridge was interesting, even though I found the subject familiar—twice annually for the past fifteen years I have enthralled my technology students by showing them a classic movie, How the Golden Gate Bridge Was Built .

About the statement that “concrete-mixing trucks, new at the time, moved out onto the top [of the south-pier fender] to build the new sections”: Those trucks, resembling heavy, mobile artillery mortars, were pioneered by a relative of mine, a Danish civil engineer named Kristian Hindhede. As his fleet of trucks began rumbling through the streets of Copenhagen, in 1930, they were quickly dubbed “cement cannons.” The Depression and resistance from trade unions combined to prevent Hindhede from widely marketing his invention in the United States during the thirties.

Uffe Hindhede
Associate Professor, Engineering Related Technology Department
Black Hawk College
Moline, Ill.

Spanning The Golden Gate

In assembling the towers of the bridge, the riveters drove rivets; they did not bolt the cells together using hot steel rods. Also, the floor system consisted of trusses ninety feet apart, not girders, and they, too, were riveted, not screwed together.

Victor Darnell
Kensington, Conn.

Mixed Signals

I think your publication is excellent. However, I wonder what lesson we are to learn from two consecutive articles in the summer issue that tell us the following things: On the one hand, “We can find important lessons about invention in [Paige’s] fall from genius to failure … that perfection conflicts with the exigencies of commerce” (“Anatomy of a Fascinating Failure,” by Judith Yaross Lee); on the other hand, “One reason Kodachrome was, and is, such a success is that the first motivation of the inventors was not commercial but artistic. Godowsky and Mannes were uncompromising in their quest for a truly excellent and convenient film.… They could have allowed an inferior film, such as the two-color version, to be marketed years earlier” (“Color It Kodachrome,” by Laurent Hodges).

Are we to strive for quality or compromise? I would opt for quality, but the American way over the past few years seems to have been compromise.

Eugene V. Kosso
Professor Emeritus, Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Nevada
Reno, Nev.

Of Maestros And Men

Hal Bowser’s “Maestros of Technology” (an interview with Arthur M. Squires, Summer 1987) reminded me of my 1964 encounter with Gen. William DePuy in Vietnam. I was at a meeting where people were trying to sell him on the M-16 rifle and I kept shooting it down. A day later 1 was working for him, for he respected an upstart major who was prepared to give facts and figures against the miracle weapon and didn’t mind lining up against mom and apple pie if the apples were no good. Ten months later, after I had left Vietnam, the weapon was sold to our armed forces, and I felt as if I had won a battle but not the war.

I have been fortunate in knowing a couple of maestros of technology. One of them did his magic in my hometown, Meadville, Pennsylvania, and because of him I can generally win a bet whenever I meet someone for the first time: “I bet you’re wearing something from my hometown.” That something, which almost everyone is usually wearing, is a Talon slide fastener, the zipper. Gideon Sundback invented the machinery that could mass-produce those gadgets even before World War II.

Thomas P. Strider
Miami, Fla.

An Inventor Of Radar

I read with great interest “The Road to Radar,” by James R. Chiles (Spring 1987). I was a radar officer for a division of destroyers in the Pacific during World War II. When I returned from the war, my father mentioned that he held a patent or two on the “magnetron,” a device used in our surface-search radar on destroyers. After I read in Invention & Technology that “a General Electric scientist had invented the first one in 1921,” I went to my father’s records and found the two original patents. The first mention of the magnetron I have found is in two letters from my father, Edward F. Hennelly, to Willis R. Whitney, director of the General Electric Research Laboratory, in Schenectady, New York, dated December 24 and 30, 1920. Two patent applications were docketed December 30 and January 6. The patents were granted in 1925.

I merely would like to give my father a place in the history of radar, rather than have him referred to as “a General Electric scientist.”

Edward J. Hennelly
Aiken, S.C.