ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE WE EXPLAIN HOW WlLLIAM Coolidge figured out how to make ductile tungsten after watching his dentist prepare a filling. Some years earlier, a similar epiphany had led to the establishment of America’s data-processing industry. One day in the early 188Os, the inventor Herman Hollerith noticed that his railroad ticket was perforated with a peculiar pattern of holes. Each hole, he learned, had been punched in a specific place to correspond to a specific physical characteristic: height, eye color, size of nose, and so forth. Conductors did this to keep someone from picking up a discarded ticket and pretending it was his own.

With the 1890 federal census approaching, the conductor’s “punch photograph” gave Hollerith an idea. What if data about each person in the country were encoded with holes in a card? Suitably designed machines could process the information automatically at much greater speed than humans. Hollerith’s system—which expanded on an 1801 invention for textile weaving by the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard—was adopted by the Census Office and formed the basis for the company that eventually became IBM.

That’s how Hollerith remembered the genesis of his system in 1919, though there is much evidence that he actually got the idea from a Census Office adviser named John Shaw Billings. Still, besides being an example of creative thinking, the punch-card story shows how the government can stimulate technological innovation. Private industry would have been slow to adopt punch cards, which were untested and required a large initial investment, but the Census Bureau was big enough and had enough money to try something new. In the same fashion, over the years the military has underwritten important advances in areas ranging from shipbuilding to interchangeable parts to global positioning.

Recent events with punch cards, though, have shown how the government can also perpetuate old technology. In the latest presidential election, many observers found the continuing use of punch-card ballots almost as archaic as the creaky machinery of the Electoral College itself. After all, Hollerith’s methods have long since been superseded by better, faster ways to record and process data (and it should be noted, speaking of elections, that the first big step after punch cards, the UNIVAC magnetic-memory computer, proved its worth by accurately forecasting the 1952 electoral vote—a test that the computers of 2000 had much more trouble with).

On a similar note, readers may recall our article a few years ago about how a lack of funds forces New York City to maintain hundreds of antiquated coal furnaces in its school buildings. So while America’s military gets all the latest gadgets, elections and schools limp along with century-old technology. It would be easy to make a cheap point about where our society’s priorities lie, but there’s more to it than that, because another example can be found in air-traffic control, where obscure 1960s computer languages and plastic tokens with handwritten labels remain in widespread use.

Public or private, new technology will be adopted when the cost is moderate, the benefit is clear, and the risk is manageable. For America’s military, money has rarely been a problem since World War II, except with a few high-end projects of dubious utility, such as ultrafast planes. That’s why so many postwar technological projects have relied on military funding. But the cost of instituting modern computer voting would be quite high, and the benefits are unclear. Would any other system be less confusing to Palm Beach’s senior citizens? Before you say yes, try ordering something online.

In the case of New York’s coal furnaces, the cost is similarly prohibitive, because with no paying customers, little competition, and no tax incentives, the government has a completely different set of financial considerations from a private business. As for air-traffic control, risk is the overarching concern: Who knows how many planes would be crashed by a few bugs in the new software?

If the Florida fiasco makes Americans think seriously about how we manage our elections, it will be all to the good. Yet it is important to remember that punch cards were themselves once the latest advance in voting, with the promise of eliminating all the flaws of paper ballots. History strongly suggests that in elections, as in anything else, changes should be undertaken because they make sense, rather than because they seem to fit the spirit of the times. It’s not always right to retain an old technology simply because it works, but by the same token, it is not always right to adopt a new one simply because it exists.

One of the government’s best means of promoting innovation, of course, is the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). A patent is a monopoly, but the word patent means “lying open” or “unconcealed,” because in order to receive a patent, one must specify in precise detail what the invention is and how it works. Patents, therefore, trade a private privilege for a public benefit, and last fall the PTO expanded the public side of this bargain by putting every one of its more than 6.5 million patents (except about 8,000 that were destroyed in an 1836 fire) online.

Text and drawings for patents issued from 1976 to the present can be accessed by patent number or searched in a variety of ways, including application or issue date, inventor’s name or place of residence, references to other patents, words in the claims or abstract, and many others. Those granted before 1976 are accessible by patent number and classification number only, though the PTO plans to extend the other search categories to cover them.

As an example of the power of this database, a search of abstracts from 1996 to 2000 yields 232 patents having to do with cheese. Among them is patent 6,139,889, “an apparatus and method for quantifying the stretchability of molten cheese, typically mozzarella cheese, on a pizza pie.” It was developed by government researchers in Ireland, of all places. “At commercial level,” the patent explains, “this property is largely assessed by lifting the cooked cheese with a fork. While this method has merit in that it simulates consumer behaviour, it is very subjective as a quality control tool, as the stretchability depends on the depth to which the fork is embedded in the molten cheese mass and the rate at which it is lifted.” To learn how modern technology has surmounted this problem, and to find the many other steps, large and small, that make up the inexorable march of progress, see www.uspto.gov .

”Essentially unchanged in function and form / Since 1952 / How many things can you say that about / That you can still buy new?” What are these song lyrics referring to? A thermostat, of course—specifically, Henry Dreyfuss’s timeless masterpiece of industrial design, which is extolled in the song “Honeywell Round Thermostat” by the New York City alternative rock band Vehicle Flips. If this were the 1960s, you would suspect that the singer smoked an ounce and a half of marijuana a day and assumed all his listeners did too. But since it was recorded in the late 1990s, you know he’s being ironic.

The song, which appears on the band’s recent album Premise Unraveled , is yet another example of the natural affinity between technology and rock music. The two disciplines are especially compatible because rock ’n’ roll, unique among musical forms, could not exist without electronic technology: Take away the distortion from any rock song and you’ve got the Kingston Trio. To be sure, long before Les Paul hooked up his guitar to an amplifier, classical composers such as George Antheil were writing electronic orchestral pieces. Yet only in rock does technology indispensably define the genre; you’ll never see an album called Chicago Symphony Orchestra Unplugged .

The connection goes back a long way, even setting aside the hundreds of car songs. The sight of the word Telstar in a recent issue’s table of contents was enough to set the Tornadoes’ chart-topping 1962 instrumental of that name running through many of our readers’ heads. Other rocketrock highlights have included David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (1973) and the 1992 They Might Be Giants album named for a nonexistent space flight, Apollo 18 . Alien visitors, too, have made numerous appearances, from the Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop” (1963) to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “It Came Out of the Sky” (1969) to H’fcsker D’fc’s “Books About UFOs” (1985) and Dan Bern’s “Talking Alien Abduction Blues” (1997). And although the Soviet dog that flew in Sputnik 2 ended up dying for socialism, her name lives on today in the form of a Finnish instrumental group called Laika and the Cosmonauts.

Back on earth, technological museums have also gotten their due, from Captain Beefheart’s “Smithsonian Institute [sic] Blues” (1970) to They Might Be Giants’ as-yet-unreleased “The Edison Museum” (“The Edison Museum / Not open to the public … It is a wondrous place / There can be no doubt / But no one ever goes in / And no one ever comes out”). On the subject of Edison, few rock fans will ever forget (try as they may) the Edison Lighthouse’s 1970 gold record “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes),” while for Edison haters, the band Life in a Blender sides emphatically with Nikola Tesla in the two inventors’ longtime feud with its 1997 song “A—hole From Menlo Park.”