BELGIUM’S EBEN EMAEL WAS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE strongest forts in Europe before it fell to 78 German troops in May 1940.

IT LOOMS OVER FLORIDA’S BANANA RIVER LIKE A MANHATTAN skyscraper over the Hudson. As you approach it, you realize that there is nothing nearby remotely similar in size. One writer declared that as he came closer, it seemed to grow “in great spurts, as though it were being shoved up out of the ground.” It is NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, and it amounts to a box nearly as tall as the Washington Monument. For a time it was the world’s most voluminous building.

1954: THE SOVIETS HAD JUST EXPLODED their first I l-bomb; the McCarthy hearings had come to an ignominious end in Washington; Stalin had died and Khrushchev had risen to power in Moscow. And in Damascus, Syria, Harris Peel had a problem.

A FEW DECADES AGO ALMOST EVERY CHILD RECEIVING A diagnosis of leukemia died within six months. Such a diagnosis is still frightening today, but parents now have hope. Because of Gertrude Elion, the inventor of 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), nearly 8 out of 10 children are cured.

HOW MUCH CAN A SIN gle inventor change your life? Utterly, according to the experience of at least one person at the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s induction ceremonies this year, on May 13 and 14. The 2005 inductees included C. Donald Bateman, for his groundproximity warning system, which has made aircraft landings far easier than before and saved countless lives; Robert Gundlach, for being the lead inventor who took xerography from an almost completely impracticable idea to an everyday necessity; Dr. Leo Henry K.

I Faked A Nuke

I READ WITH GREAT INTER est “The Atomic Cannon” (by James Lament, Summer 2005). My first active-duty assignment after I’d been commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers was to carry out simulated nuclear explosions. This was in the summer of 1958 at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The purpose was to show groups of VIP military personnel and congressmen how tactical nuclear weapons could be used with an armored division on the battlefield.

AN ARTICLE IN THIS A issue tells how the microwave oven faced many difficulties on its way to becoming accepted. One problem the article doesn’t mention is that both the technology’s name and its original trademark (Radarange) refer to radiation. There’s nothing unusual about a household device producing radiation, of course; a light bulb does that. But by the early 1970s anything associated in the public mind, however imprecisely, with “the atom” had come to seem sinister and dangerous.

BY THE 1860S A LOT OF PEOPLE ERRONEOUSLY thought the submarine was an idea whose time had come. The historian (and owner of a two-man sub) Mark Ragan describes some two dozen Civil War-era projects in his book Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War . But in most cases nothing survives beyond tantalizing glimpses—the names of people involved, ledger entries at an ironworks, a few cryptic messages in military archives.

I ENJOYED THE ARTICLE “Pinball,” by Linda Barth, in your Spring 2004 issue. It mentioned that in 1942 “a delighted [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia posed for photographs while smashing the machines with sledgehammers and watching their remains get dumped into the East River.” Fortunately, not all the remains ended up in the river. Some of the smashed machines were given to New York’s science high schools for parts. I was a student at Stuyvesant High School at the time, and we welcomed the donation.

BEGINNING IN LATE 1943, THOUSANDS OF MEN IN LOCA tions scattered throughout Britain were busy building huge, strangely shaped objects so shrouded in secrecy that their purpose was a mystery even to the workers assembling them. The most striking of these objects were dozens of vast gray blocks, each 60 by 60 by 200 feet, which looked from the outside like concrete bricks the size of apartment buildings. Inside, however, they had a hollow, cellular structure, which allowed them to float.

TO SOME FIRST-RATE ANALYTICAL MINDS, HAVING INTELLEC tual elbow room in which to carry out advanced research can be a greater lure than money, power, or position. Academic institutions understand this, as do certain sectors of the corporate world. But military organizations, with their emphasis on hierarchy, discipline, and protocol, have traditionally been the least likely to provide the necessary freedom.

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK YOU ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGICAL marvels of Coney Island, the roller coaster might first come to mind (it was born there in 1884) and then, perhaps, the blazing amusement parks that dazzled turn-of-the-century crowds with their prodigal use of electricity. As it turns out, though, the wide sandy shore itself is perhaps Coney’s greatest engineering innovation.

RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTI tute (RPI), in Troy, New York, has a longer history than any other American engineering school. It was founded in 1824, when electricity was a parlor trick and canals were the latest thing in transportation. Little surprise, then, that RPI’s Web site has perhaps the most extensive history section of any engineering school’s, one that has just been augmented with page-bypage scans of five rare books on the institute’s history.

I READ WITH GREAT INTER est “The Atomic Cannon” (by James Lament, Summer 2005). My first active-duty assignment after I’d been commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers was to carry out simulated nuclear explosions. This was in the summer of 1958 at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The purpose was to show groups of VIP military personnel and congressmen how tactical nuclear weapons could be used with an armored division on the battlefield. A large grandstand held the dignitaries in front of an open field that extended for miles.

IN THE MID-1950S CHARLES MORTIMER, PRESIDENT OF General Foods Corporation, urged the company’s Post division to think outside the cereal box. Mortimer’s push to diversify Post’s breakfast-food offerings led to a number of culinary milestones: Brim, a breakfast-in-milk product that is now remembered mostly as the inspiration for Carnation Instant Breakfast; Tang, the powdered orange drink that the astronauts drank; and, most important, the world’s first toaster pastries.

WHEN DROUGHT THREATENED NEW YORK City in early 1950, and official pleas for conservation failed to stem the drop in reservoir levels, the city’s water commissioner, Stephen Carney, decided to take a risk. On February 15 he traveled to one of America’s foremost industrial R&D centers, the General Electric Research Laboratory, in Schenectady, New York, to investigate a controversial new technological fix. He conferred with the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, inventor, and former associate director of the laboratory, Irving Langmuir.

WHO NEEDS THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY? WE ALL DO, historians in the field believe; it’s a central part of the story of the making of our world. But getting the word out hasn’t been easy. A major step forward came recently in the form of a new college textbook, Inventing America , published, in two volumes, by W. W. Norton.

I ENJOYED THE ARTICLE “Pinball,” by Linda Barth, in your Spring 2004 issue. It mentioned that in 1942 “a delighted [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia posed for photographs while smashing the machines with sledgehammers and watching their remains get dumped into the East River.” Fortunately, not all the remains ended up in the river. Some of the smashed machines were given to New York’s science high schools for parts. I was a student at Stuyvesant High School at the time, and we welcomed the donation.

DURING WORLD WAR II ADOLF HITLER CALLED Andrew Jackson Higgins “the new Noah.” After the war Dwight Eisenhower called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.”

IN THE DEEP SOUTH, LATE SUMMER WAS THE SEASON FOR PICKING COT ton. The day’s work started at sunrise and continued, with a midday break, until dusk. Children worked with their parents, with everyone making their way down the long rows, kneeling or bending at the waist, taking a firm grip on each fluffy puff, and giving it a pull. Thorny sheaths at the base of every boll, or tuft, of cotton, as rough as splintered wood, turned the workers’ fingers red and sore and sometimes bloody.