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AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE METRIC system in our Fall 2002 issue mentioned the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed to work properly because of a misunderstanding over whether metric or Anglo-American units were being used. Now archeological research has uncovered a much earlier failure caused by the lack of a standard measuring system, one that may have changed the course of history in a very important way.

SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, LABORATORIES ALL OVER THE United States have been growing, feeding, and studying extremely dangerous anthrax germs. Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, have grown batches of anthrax to sequence the entire genome of the germ that killed the photo editor Robert Stevens, the first person to die in the bioterrorism attacks. The Justice Department has subpoenaed a dozen laboratories to submit their Ames strains of anthrax to the U.S.

EVEN AS A CHILD I WAS FASCINATED BY ORIGINS AND conclusions. Such a line of thinking naturally led to a career in history, during which I became curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. One of the first historic facts I learned was that John Cleves Symmes developed the land in and around my hometown of Cincinnati, some one million acres, starting in 1788. Symmes was from New Jersey. Then, as I read and studied, New Jersey began to appear large in all matters of national consequence.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT INVENTION LIES a great crime. Or so it can appear from reading today’s technological historians, who sometimes make it seem that no important idea has ever enriched its actual originator. Morse, Bell, and Edison are just a few of the famous inventors who have been accused of stealing or duplicating others’ work or trampling on the rights of earlier discoverers. The pattern continues in this century with disputes over the invention of television, computers, and the laser.

AROUND OUR COM pany’s offices, people like to revisit a 1994 article from our sister publication, American Heritage . It shows a set of trading cards from the late nineteenth century that depict not baseball players or actresses but prominent newspaper editors.

LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH ON PAGES 34 AND 35 OF this issue. An airplane sits on an empty expanse with just two shacks and a man nearby. The airplane has never flown. No airplane has ever flown. The photograph shows the end of a period in human history, the final twilight before the dawn of aviation. It is November 1903, and the man is Wilbur Wright. In a few weeks his brother Orville will pilot the plane into the air, and the world will change.

THEY HAVE GONE DOWN IN POPULAR history as just another silly fad from the 1950s. The most lasting images they left behind are photographs of people crowded in theaters wearing cardboard spectacles. Yet there was a time when three-dimensional movies were seen as the savior of America’s film industry.

THE EARLIEST-KNOWN USE OF SCENTS TO accompany motion pictures came around 1908, when S. L. (“Roxy”) Rothafel, the famous theater owner who later founded Radio City Music Hall, spread rose perfume with a fan while showing film of the Tournament of Roses at a theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania. A few other exhibitors tried similar stunts through the years, usually with floral fragrances. Typically just a single scent was used, and it had to be sprayed by hand.

I AM LEANING BACK AGAINST MY CAR, which I have parked on the shoulder of the bustling divided highway that connects the city of Lancaster to the distant Pennsylvania Turnpike. Gusts from passing cars shake me as I look across a sagging fence at the sight that caused me to stop: a decrepit windmill, its blades turning slowly in a breeze that I can scarcely feel, standing tall beside a broken barn on a farm that nobody has farmed for a couple of decades.

THERE ARE A LOT OF false popular accounts of the history of the bra. The story of the New York socialite Caresse Crosby, also known as Mary Phelps Jacob, is closer than most to the truth. Around 1913 Jacob purchased a sheer, tight-fitting evening gown, but the rigid stays and embroidered eyelets of her corset ruined its smooth contours. Instead of wearing the corset, Jacob sewed together a makeshift brassiere out of a pair of silk handkerchiefs and some ribbon.

DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER (1610-90), THE painter of Alchemist in His Workshop (1650), a portion of which is reproduced at right, made about 350 canvases of alchemical subjects during his long and rather specialized career. He was part of a flourishing tradition of such paintings, whose creators included such masters as Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

JAMES BUCHANAN EADS IS KNOWN AS THE GREAT ENGI neer of the Mississippi. Born in Indiana in 1820, he was just 22 when he persuaded a St. Louis shipbuilding firm to build a new kind of “submarine” vessel to recover cargo from sunken Mississippi steamboats and with it launched a salvage business so successful that he contemplated retiring at 37. During the Civil War he built ironclad gunboats to defend the river. After that he crossed it with America’s first major bridge with steel arches, the Eads Bridge, at St. Louis.

SAUL GRIFFITH REMEMBERS THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN he was inspired. He was in Africa, participating in a Lions Club program to recycle used eyeglasses by giving them to impoverished rural Africans. “It’s not a very good way to correct vision problems, but it’s a lot better than nothing,” he says. He wanted especially to help a four-year-old boy with such poor vision he had never been able to read or play ball with his friends. So Griffith and his colleagues took the thick lenses from a pair of adult glasses and fitted them into child-size frames.

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE ARMISTICE THAT ENDED THE FIRST WORED WAR, ONE last major naval engagement took place, at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea. The Durazzo raid, on October 2, 1918, had little effect on the course of the conflict, for by that time the Central Powers’ position was eroding rapidly on sea and land. One historian has compared the raid to “using a hammer to swat a fly.” Nonetheless, it gave the U.S.

RAYMOND KURZWEIL IS ONE OF THE VERY FEW CONTEMPO rary inventors who come close to the Thomas Edison loneinventor stereotype. A child prodigy who made numerous television appearances demonstrating his creations, he won first prize in electronics and communications at the International Science Fair as a teenager and paid for his college education by selling computer programs he wrote. The most amazing of his inventions so far may be the Kurzweil Reading Machine, introduced in 1976.

BEFORE THE CANAL ERA, THE PLACE THAT WOULD BECOME known as Chicago barely merited a dot on the map. It was a trading post and fort on the way to St. Louis, the leading city of the West, and the Great Plains beyond. But just twelve miles west of Lake Michigan there existed an ancient geological feature that, with some new technology and an immense amount of labor, would make Chicago into the city of the century. It was a subcontinental drainage divide, a five- to six-foothigh ridge running north-south along what is today Harlem Avenue.

SAM WILLIAMS STOOD AT THE PODIUM AND EXPLAINED why he enjoyed his occupation. “One of the great things about invention is that your wife can’t tell whether you’re asleep or inventing,” he told the audience. “You can be sitting by the TV, having a couple of beers, and she never knows the difference.”

WHEN OTTO LILIENTHAL, THE GERMAN WOULD-BE inventor of the airplane, died in a glider crash in 1896, the 24-year-old Orville Wright was incubating typhoid fever and about to enter a six-week delirium that would bring him near death. While Orville lay sick, his older brother, Wilbur, thought about the fatal accident. The brothers had followed Lilienthal’s work at a distance through newspaper accounts. When Orville at last began a slow recovery, he and Wilbur discussed the problem of flight.

BEFORE GUGEIELMO MARCONI SENT A RADIO SIGNAL ACROSS the Atlantic in 1901, and even before Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves in 1888, there was Dr. Mahlon Loomis. In 1866 he successfully transmitted a signal through the air between two mountaintops in Virginia. Who was Mahlon Loomis? And how did he become the first person to demonstrate wireless telegraphy?

YOU MAY AT SOME TIME, WHEN CLEARING A JAM IN A PHOTO copier or a laser printer, have gotten some of the toner powder on your hands or, even worse, your shirt. It’s natural at this point to expect a major cleanup, but the anticipated dire result is avoided when you find that the black smudge simply brushes off. This property of toners is more than just a boon to clumsy office workers; in fact it lies at the very heart of the process by which copiers and printers produce documents.