RECALLING THE MOST HISTORIC PART OF HIS CAREER , when he led the team that first identified the HIV virus and determined that it caused AIDS, Luc Montagnier says, “It was frustrating to us at the time.” French health officials were withholding badly needed research funds because they didn’t recognize the need to find a fast solution to the puzzling deaths caused by the new disease. After speaking in the past tense for several minutes, Montagnier stops and explains that the work he started in 1983 is not yet finished.

BEFORE THE 1930S , shopping carts didn’t exist because nobody needed them. With virtually no home refrigeration except iceboxes, shoppers purchased a day’s worth of groceries at a time, usually at a number of different stores : the fish monger, the greengrocer, the butcher, the baker, and so forth. If you bought more than you could carry, you had it delivered.

VALLEY CITY, NORTH Dakota, takes its bridges seriously. And well it might, for the municipality of 7,000, covering a bit more than three square miles, has no fewer than 14 of them, dating back as far as 1901. Crisscrossing the Sheyenne River as it wiggles through town, they amount to a working museum of bridge technology. And for nearly eight decades, one of the most cherished was the Rainbow Bridge, which served as a gateway at the city’s eastern entrance.

SOME THINGS WERE INVENTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. With others, the motivation is less clear. Consider, for example, the electric guitar. When guitarists first crudely electrified their instruments in the 1920s, what were they trying to do? Why change something that had been successful for hundreds of years? Could they have envisioned that the instrument that inspired some of Vivaldi’s and Boccherini’s most beautiful compositions would one day be used by Motörhead and blink-182?

AS EDITH FLANIGEN EXPLAINS IT, THE STORY OF ZEOLITES dates back to 1756, when a Swedish mineralogist, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, discovered that a certain type of natural crystal possessed a remarkable quality. When Cronstedt held the stone in a flame, it began to sizzle and froth as water inside the stone came to a boil. He combined two Greek words to name the crystal: zein , meaning “to boil,” and lithos , meaning “stone.”

The Wrights’ Stuff

PERHAPS ONE OF THE most amazing statements in the chronicle of aviation development (and for that matter modern technology in general) is a quote made in the summer of 1901 from the discouraged Wilbur Wright (“The Wright Brothers: How They Flew,” by Richard P. Hallion, Fall 2003) to his brother that man wouldn’t fly “for fifty years.” We marvel at such quotes as they reveal the frail humanness of the very pioneers of modern technology. Inventors are real people too. Inventors fear.

HOWARD HEAD IS KNOWN TODAY FOR REVOLUTIONIZING TWO SPORTS. He didn’t set out to do this; it grew out of his enthusiasm for skiing and tennis as recreation, which led him to use his natural inventive talent to try to make them better. When a reporter asked Head how he invented, he said: “I invent when it’s something I really want. The need has to grow in your gut. People who go around trying to invent something generally fall on their tails. The best inventions come from people who are deeply involved in trying to solve a problem.”

HERE IN OHIO WE’VE BEEN IN A CELEBRATORY MOOD since the start of 2003. This is the bicentennial year of Ohio statehood as well as the centennial of the invention of powered flight. Two Dayton residents invented flight, and they did almost all their research and development right here in Ohio, leading some folks to feel a bit grumpy over the claims that come from a certain state that shall only be identified as encompassing a small community known as Kitty Hawk.

PERHAPS ONE OF THE most amazing statements in the chronicle of aviation development (and for that matter modern technology in general) is a quote made in the summer of 1901 from the discouraged Wilbur Wright (“The Wright Brothers: How They Flew,” by Richard P. Hallion, Fall 2003) to his brother that man wouldn’t fly “for fifty years.” We marvel at such quotes as they reveal the frail humanness of the very pioneers of modern technology. Inventors are real people too. Inventors fear. Inventors struggle with depression.

WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE CLEAN AIR Act of 1970, Congress threw down a gauntlet similar in spirit to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Both were bold strokes that placed a burden squarely on the shoulders of the nation’s scientists and engineers. And both looked impossible.

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1956, MORE THAN A YEAR before the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, a four-stage Jupiter-C rocket stood on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. It had three stages—sections that fire in turn and then are jettisoned. The rocket was almost identical to the one that would lift America’s first satellite into orbit 16 months later, and Wernher von Braun, director of development for the U.S.

IN OUR WINTER 2003 issue the historian and photographer David Plowden called the Kinzua Viaduct a “truly heroic nineteenth-century railroad bridge.” He went on to say, “It has stood rusting in a remote part of northwestern Pennsylvania ever since the Erie Railroad abandoned it in 1959, but its future is far happier than that of most unused bridges.” So indeed it seemed, for the majestic viaduct, towering 300 feet above Kinzua Creek, formed the centerpiece of a popular park, and the W. M.

THE PHOTOGRAPH AT RIGHT DEPICTS A SCENE THAT AT FIRST glance may not seem remarkable. A woman is sitting in front of a computer terminal; another computer is in the background. Scanning the walls, we see a Boston Red Sox pennant behind her and some drawings next to the terminal. Along with the small, high window, these suggest that she is in a basement rec room. In any case, she is not in an office.

HE COULD HAVE BEEN A CONTENDER. AS A teenager growing up in Cincinnati, Thomas Fogarty was a Golden Gloves champion who yearned to turn pro. That dream died after his first professional match. “They told me I won,” he says, but the losing fighter had hit him harder than anything he’d experienced as an amateur. A single punch knocked the desire to box right out of Fogarty. To this day his professional record remains at 1-0.

YOU PROBABLY FIRST ENCOUNTERED PINBALL AT A LOCAL drugstore or a boardwalk arcade, drawn by the lights, the bells, the balls, the colors. How could you resist a game where a skillful bat of a flipper could send a metal ball hurtling 90 miles an hour toward a dazzling array of targets? For a very long time many people couldn’t.

ASK ANYONE I KNEW PROEESSIONALLY DURING my 18 years as a public relations man for U.S. Steel, and I’m sure they’ll tell you they’d consider the exploits of movie Stuntmen to be spectacular and lucrative, but no more impressive than what high-steel workers do every day. A case in point: the construction of what has been called the world’s longest single-span freight tramway, which covered much of the majestic width of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona.

FLYING AT 300 KNOTS, CAPT. ALTON (“BOOTS”) McCORMICK FEELS A SLIGHT bump in his F-15C Eagle as he passes through the bow wave behind a KC-135 tanker. He stabilizes his fighter jet about 500 feet back and then accelerates toward the boom, a rigid, telescoping 50-foot pipe coming off the rear of the tanker.

FORREST BIRD WAS A TEENAGER WHEN HE ENCOUNTERED THE mystery that would engage him for his whole life. The son of a World War I flying ace, he began getting flying lessons years before learning to drive. As he contemplated the motion of air over an airplane’s wing, he marveled at the physics that governed all those invisible molecules, keeping the aircraft aloft. It led him to get degrees in engineering and then to go on to medical school when his interest in airflow turned his attention to the physics of breathing.

IS THE LIE DETECTOR CONTROVERSIAL? ITS MAIN INVENTOR denied that he had invented anything. Its early developers admitted that it could not detect lies. The United States government has published many studies critical of its performance, yet key elements of our national security rest on its reliability. Lie-detector advocates say the device is virtually infallible; detractors say it is grossly inaccurate. Police embrace the technology; scientists scorn it. It’s widely used in the United States and almost unknown in Europe.

ANYONE WHO HAS TAKEN FRESHMAN CHEMISTRY KNOWS THE CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics . Its origins go back to 1907, the year Arthur Friedman graduated from the Case School of Applied Science (now part of Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. While an undergraduate, Friedman had a part-time business making rubber aprons for laboratory use.