ROBERT FULTON MAY NOT HAVE literally invented the steamboat, but he surely introduced it into everyday commercial service. His premier boat of 1807 ran steady and full, and its public acceptance opened a new era. For the first time, mechanical power was used to carry passengers and cargo over long distances. The Hudson River became a highway for long and sleek side-wheelers racing along at 20 and 25 miles an hour. Travel time to Albany fell to just seven hours. Fortunes were made by business leaders like Daniel Drew and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

I’VE BEEN AN AVID reader of the magazine for more than 10 years, but no article has captured my attention like Mark Bernstein’s “Thomas Midgley and the Law of Unintended Consequences” in the Spring 2002 issue. I would not likely have obtained a degree in mechanical engineering and become a professional engineer if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be one of 17 undergraduates Mr. Midgley financed.

“COME TO KINDLY TERMS WITH YOUR ASS for it bears you.” Those words introduced How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot , first published in 1969. Its title might imply that it was the precursor to the current spate of “For Dummies” books, but it was something altogether different. The Idiot Book, as it was called, was more than just a repair manual. It was a manual for a way of life.

UNTIL ABOUT 70 YEARS ago human beings had to go through life without a quick, easy way to fasten two or more pieces of paper firmly. People sewed papers together, skewered them with pins, used glue, or punched holes and secured them with ribbon. They tried clamps, brads, and other cumbersome fasteners. The first stapling devices were not a startling improvement.

ASTRONAUTICS IS UNIQUE AMONG THE sciences in that it is the only study to have begun its existence as pure fantasy. For centuries it lived only in the works of fiction writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and of scientists, swayed by them, who believed in as patently unlikely a proposition as flying into space.

IN THE EARLY 1940S A DIAGNOSIS OF CANCER WAS USUALLY a death sentence, with a small chance of a reprieve and the certainty of great suffering beforehand. Some doctors would not even tell cancer patients that they had the disease.

EVER SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, WHEN CENTRAL AMER ica first appeared on European maps, visionaries have put forth schemes to build canals there. The first came in 1529 when a Spanish explorer named Alvaro de Saavedra suggested that a waterway might be dug by hand; by far the strangest was proposed more than 400 years later, when the United States considered blowing a trench through the isthmus using atomic bombs.

WE LIVE IN A BAT tery-operated world, yet only a minuscule portion of the power we use actually comes from batteries. That’s a good thing, because it would take about eight AA cells to boil a cup of water. But inefficient as they are, batteries have the key advantage of supplying power wherever and whenever we need it.

THEY’RE EVERYWHERE, so common that we scarcely notice them. They’re ignored, uncelebrated, the butt of jokes about peripatetic dogs, yet they play a vital role in public safety. In their 200-year history, fire hydrants have saved countless lives and billions of dollars.

Seeing With Electrons

THANK YOU, TIM Palucka, for “Making the Invisible Visible” (Winter 2002), with its stunning illustrations and its previously unpublished reminiscences from James Hillier and others. I have two observations.

A LOW BUZZ EMANATES FROM A DINGY stall on a street in New York City’s infamous Bowery district. Inside, under a bare bulb, one man is hunched over the naked back of another, engraving something into his skin and pausing occasionally to wipe away the blood. The walls are decorated with brightly colored cartoonlike drawings: battleships, impaled valentine hearts, scantily clad women, skulls. The year is 1900. Here is the ancient art of tattooing, practiced in some form in almost all regions of the world for millennia.

IN 1948 JAMES HILLIER, THE RCA PHYSICIST LARGELY responsible for developing the first commercial electron microscope in America, summarized the progress that had keen made and the challenges that lay ahead in mapping the microscopic world using electrons. In a speech to the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he asked his listeners to perform a thought experiment. Suppose, he said, a scientist wanted to examine an entire plant or animal under an electron microscope.

WASHINGTON, D.C., WAS A GREAT PLACE to be a photographer in the 19605. Stories like the civil rights marches and antiwar protests lured the top photographers to town. The Time/Life bureau was the center of the action, and I had the good fortune to be a young stringer there.

I HAD JUST BEEN TO THE POLLS TO VOTE IN A LOCAL election on a brilliantly clear and placid end-of-summer morning this year when I saw a crowd of people gathered at the corner looking up with such shock I thought someone must be threatening to jump from a nearby building. That would be, it occurred to me, as alarming a sight as I had seen in my life. But it was much worse. The crowd was looking at two of the biggest, tallest, solidest buildings on earth ripped open and pouring out flame and smoke.

In our Spring 2001 issue, this column made reference to an archaic technology: the coal furnaces that were prevalent in New York City’s schools. The reference had been inspired by our 1996 “They’re Still There” column. When that column was written, 322 of the city’s schools were heated with coal. Five years after that figure had been collected, it did not seem necessary to check whether the coal-burning furnaces were still in operation.

THE STRUCTURE IN THIS PICTURE MAY NOT LOOK LIKE the pinnacle of architectural beauty to you, but in 1920 the French architect Le Corbusier declared it and its brethren “the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age.” By that year he and his fellow modernists would have had a field day in the American Midwest, where the innovative new buildings, concrete grain elevators—clusters of tall grain-storage cylinders ringed by complicated conveyor mechanisms that moved enormous to

“It will never get off the ground.” “it’s ridiculous.” “With that large a fuselage and the present tail, it will be unstable.” So the detractors said, and unlike the detractors in most aviation stories, they were right. It was the world’s largest airplane and in many ways the most unlikely, and to one degree or another it fulfilled all these comments and predictions.

In 1970 two small start-up companies—Optel, near Princeton, New Jersey, and James Fergason’s Ilixco, in Kent, Ohio—decided to gamble on making liquidcrystal displays a reality. Two years later both were ready for something completely new: the digital wristwatch. False starts and missteps had bedeviled them, but they had paved the way not just for watch displays but for LCDs of all sorts.

IN THE 1960S LIQUID CRYSTALS HIT THE MEDIA AS THE STUFF OF sci-fi futuristic fantasy, a magical type of chemical that would oon be able to see through the human body and bring to life Dick Tracy’s TV wristwatch or a television set you could roll up like a magazine and stuff into your back pocket. Then in the 1970s came the Mood Ring, color-changing jewelry that could supposedly reveal your true emotions and help guide your love life.

YOU WILL HAVE NOTICED A NEW LINE ON THE cover of the magazine: IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE NATIONAL INVENTORS HALL OF FAME . This marks the beginning of a partnership with an institution uniquely allied with what we do. It’s an alliance that we believe promises great benefit to both sides.