THE STORY OF THE computer modem begins in the late 1940s, when Cold War concerns caused the United States military to reconsider its defense against longrange bombers. A key component of this system was an automated collection of hundreds of radar earlywarning stations, which would detect possible intruders and send information about them to commandand-control centers. The plan was to transmit these radar images using microwave relays, but building such a network would take many years and vast amounts of money.

POLITICAL WRITERS OF A CERTAIN stripe like to assert that the institution of marriage creates many benefits for society. That’s true, and one of the most important of them has nothing to do with morals, economics, or stable family relationships. Instead it lies in marriage’s main byproduct—waiting time—and its beneficial effect on creativity.

AS CAN BE SEEN ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE, GUANO HAS THE power to stir men’s souls. There are virtually no lengths—or heights—to which adventurous types have not gone in pursuit of the dried excrement of bats and birds. Centuries before Columbus, Peru’s Inca rulers divided the Chincha Islands among the empire’s provinces and assigned certain times when guano could be harvested from them. They also prohibited killing the islands’ birds or disturbing them while nesting. The penalty was death.

DRIVE THE MAIN ROAD THROUGH THE FLORIDA KEYS, AND you will come to a stretch where you are out of sight of land. You can see nothing but water, sky, the highway you’re on—and, alongside, the Seven Mile Bridge, formed from hundreds of sections of railroad viaduct set atop concrete supports that rise directly from the ocean. Constructed nearly a century ago, the bridge continues to stand as a memorial to the even vaster work of which it was a part: the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway.

LAST YEAR A NEWS PHOTOGRAPH showed Jacques Chirac, the president of France, greeting George W. Bush on his arrival in Evian with the same degree of enthusiasm that usually accompanies “Welcome to Burger King.” While recent events have exacerbated tensions, such coolness has a long history between two proud countries that have always insisted on going their own way—and not just in world affairs.

ONE OFT-CITED EX ample of technology imposing social control involves the seemingly prosaic subject of highway overpasses on Long Island. As Langdon Winner pointed out in a famous 1986 study, during the 1950s Robert Moses, New York State’s planning czar, deliberately built them too low for buses to fit underneath. This decision, while cloaked in the language of engineering necessity, reflected Moses’s hope that poorer residents who did not own cars would be unable to visit Jones Beach, which he envisioned as a middle-class resort.

I ENJOYED JIM QUINN’S “Hall of Fame Report” titled “A State of Inventiveness” (Winter 2004). It is amazing how much technology came out of the Buckeye State. While all the technology of rubber and glass bottles was going on, the National Cash Register Company in Dayton was developing the mechanical wonder it is named for. Soon Delco, under Charles (“Boss”) Kettering, was developing the self-starter at its plant in Dayton.

ON JUNE 22, 1918, JUST A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE END of World War I, a provocative article appeared in the British Medical Journal . The author was Capt. Oswald H. Robertson, a physician in the U.S. Army who had been treating battlefield casualties on the front lines. In his paper Robertson described his successful performance of transfusions using blood collected in advance and stored, rather than immediate transfusions from donor to recipient.

MY FAVORITE STORY ABOUT ALBERT EINSTEIN INVOLVES something that happened while he was riding a bicycle. I think it reveals as much about the nature of creativity as it does about the mind of the great man. It was the summer of 1895, and it happened while the 16-year-old was pedaling down dirt roads in Tuscany during a glorious family vacation. He was in the midst of some very common adolescent anxieties. His teachers said he would never amount to anything, and he dropped out of high school.

IT IS A “CIPHER”—ORGAN BUILDER’S LINGO FOR A STUCK note—that has brought us up to a cramped chamber hidden behind a side wall 40 feet over the stage of Yale University’s Woolsey Hall.

More Buckeye Brilliance

I ENJOYED JIM QUINN’S “Hall of Fame Report” titled “A State of Inventiveness” (Winter 2004). It is amazing how much technology came out of the Buckeye State. While all the technology of rubber and glass bottles was going on, the National Cash Register Company in Dayton was developing the mechanical wonder it is named for. Soon Delco, under Charles (“Boss”) Kettering, was developing the self-starter at its plant in Dayton.

In 1851 Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, arranged for a Great Exhibition in London to show off the technical accomplishments of the British Empire. Millions of visitors thronged the fantastic Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park to house the event. In the American section crowds craned their necks to watch a loud, charismatic man expound on a revolutionary new product, a pistol that could fire not once, not twice, but fully six times in rapid succession without reloading.

BRADFORD PARKINSON SOMETIMES CARRIES AROUND A photograph of a specially equipped tractor. The machine is equipped with a robotic driver that navigates back and forth solely on signals from the Global Positioning System, the network of 24 satellites orbiting 11,000 miles above Earth that beams precisely timed signals to allow anyone with a GPS receiver to pinpoint exactly where he is.

INSECTS LOVE US. TERMITES ARE CONNOISSEURS OF THE wood we use in construction, each year munching through $3 billion worth. Fleas, ticks (which are not insects, strictly speaking), biting flies, and disease-vectoring mosquitoes are blood-loving little vampires in search of warm, carbon dioxide-exhaling bodies to dine on. Housefleases they transmit is big Every year more than a billion pounds of pesticide, with active ingredients worth $8.5 billion, changes hands in the United States.

THE BRONX-WHITESTONE Bridge has long been New York City’s least charismatic major span. One reason is that it connects two resolutely untrendy boroughs, the Bronx and Queens. But another reason is the way it has repeatedly been strapped in and buckled up for safety through the years. Underneath it all lies a beautiful bridge, but the effect has been like dressing Heidi Klum in a snorkel coat and galoshes. Now, however, the bridge is being stripped down to something resembling its original designer attire.

IF YOU WANTED TO BUILD A BASEBALL PITCHING MACHINE and had never seen one, how would you do it? By analogy, you would probably use some sort of mechanical arm. If that didn’t work, you might try a sharp impact with a piston, or perhaps some sort of slingshot. But when Charles Hinton, a mathematics instructor at Princeton University in the mid-1890s, saw his school’s pitchers getting sore arms from throwing too much batting practice, he came up with a more imaginative solution.

BRADFORD PARKINSON REMEMBERS HOW HARD IT WAS. He went to Capitol Hill again and again to ask members of Congress to support an ambitious science project proposed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The project is fairly well known today. It’s Gravity Probe B, launched last spring in an audacious attempt to get an exquisitely accurate measurement of the curvature of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. Any deviation from Einstein’s theory may point toward unexplored areas of physics. Is that mind-blowing, or what?

AT 5:00 A.M. ON JANUARY 16, 1966, CAPT. CHARLES Wendorf, a 29-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot, sped his B-52 bomber down the dark runway at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Over the next day or so, Wendorf and the six airmen sharing his plane planned to fly over the Atlantic, cross Europe, brush the Eastern Bloc, then turn around and come home. Presumably they would make it back to the States without releasing their cargo: four hydrogen bombs.

THE ARTICLE ON BAT guano in the Spring 2004 issue (“High Wire,” by Rockey Spicer) reminded me of an important aerospace use for the stuff. Back in pre- and post- Sputnik days I worked for the Raymond Engineering Laboratories, in Middletown, Connecticut. Because of our skill with explosive actuators, we received a contract to design and build explosively erected antennas for the Mercury, and later Gemini, spacecraft.

Dung In The Space Race

THE ARTICLE ON BAT guano in the Spring 2004 issue (“High Wire,” by Rockey Spicer) reminded me of an important aerospace use for the stuff. Back in pre- and post- Sputnik days I worked for the Raymond Engineering Laboratories, in Middletown, Connecticut. Because of our skill with explosive actuators, we received a contract to design and build explosively erected antennas for the Mercury, and later Gemini, spacecraft.