MY MOTHER ALWAYS SAID I MARCHED TO A DIFFERENT tune and majored in nonsense,” says Thomas Fogarty. He was fresh out of medical school in 1961 when he IWI announced that surgeons were subjecting patients to unnecessary pain and he could prevent it. Doctors typically cut a knee-to-pelvis incision to remove vascular blood clots in the leg; Fogarty said they should instead cut only a tiny incision and insert a long, slender catheter up the vessel and through to the clot to its far side.

UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH century, most Americans had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward paint. Wood was plentiful and cheap, especially on the frontier; in fact, most settlers had to chop down trees to clear their land. Eager to start farming, they used the wood to build their cabins and outbuildings as quickly and cheaply as possible. Painting the buildings might beautify them and extend their lifespans, but pioneers had more urgent concerns, like survival.

THE FALL 1990 ISSUE of Invention & Technology contained an article called “The First U.S. Patent.” It told the story of Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont, and how his innovative method of extracting potash from wood ashes (which were plentiful in a young nation whose settlers spent much time clearing trees from their land) earned the first patent ever granted by the United States government. The author was Henry Paynter, a retired MIT professor who lived, and still lives, in Pittsford.

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YOU, TIM Palucka, for “Making the Invisible Visible” (Winter 2002), with its stunning illustrations and its previously unpublished reminiscences from James Hillier and others.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

Oil From Under Water

TOM ZOELLNER’S ARTICLE ON THE DE velopment of offshore drilling (“Oil and Water,” Fall 2000) brought back some exciting memories. In 1950 I was one of a small team of geologists working for Magnolia Petroleum out of Morgan City, Louisiana, and it was my good fortune to be present the day we discovered oil on our drill site 25 miles offshore. We ran a routine Schlumberger electric log, and it showed a thick sand unit that looked hydrocarbon-saturated.

A LIQUID-CRYSTAL DISPLAY (LCD) is a sandwich containing two plates of glass with polarizing filters that are perpendicular to each other. Under normal circumstances, no light could pass through. In an LCD, however, the area between the glass plates is filled with liquid crystals, and the inner I side of each plate is grooved uanot in the direction of polarization. Under these conditions, the liquid-crystal molecules form spirals that rotate the polarization of the light, allowing it to be transmitted.

WHEN THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS WON THE WORLD SERIES LAST fall, team officials rushed to thank everyone who had contributed, from the players to the owner to government officials and fans. No one mentioned the name of Thomas Midgley, yet without him, there might well be no Diamondbacks, for his two great discoveries made today’s Southwest possible. Only the hardiest souls braved Arizona’s desert heat until Midgley’s development of Freon made air conditioning commonplace.

NO LESS THAN RAIL roads, bridges, or cities, dams embody the American ideal of progress. In New England, as early as the seventeenth century, they converted falling water into industrial power. In the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s hydroelectric dams lifted the region out of poverty. In the Southeast, dams made swampland habitable. And in the West they tamed one of the wildest and most mountainous regions on earth. The nation currently has more than 75,000 dams more than six feet tall, nearly one for every day since independence.

TO PEOPLE WHO WORK ON THK WATERFRONT, ONE OF THE most pleasing sights is an old railroad tug foaming down the harbor, casting a wall of water before her. The froth churns white along her bows; as the saying goes, “she has a bone in her teeth.” When she is a few yards from a dock or ship, the skipper, high in the pilothouse, gives a few turns on the wheel and throttles down. The boat slows, lurches, and then wallows in the trough she has created.

WAR IS A DIRTY BUSINESS, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT comes to clothing. Combatants can go for days without removing their uniforms, while dried blood, caked mud, and all the other stains of campaigning accumulate. This was the situation in which U.S. Marines found themselves after the battles of Saipan and the neighboring island of Tinian (from which the nuclear strikes on Japan would be launched), as well as elsewhere in the Pacific, in 1944. But these Marines were inventive.

GROWING UP IN SILICON Valley in the 1950s and ‘60s, Steve Wozniak loved building things from parts scavenged from old TVs and radios. He couldn’t afford new components, so he had to come up with his own inexpensive solutions to problems. His first Apple computer, completed in 1976, when he was 25, was a masterpiece of low-cost elegance. It was probably the first computer to use a simple keyboard, as opposed to a Teletype console, for input and a television set for output.

WHEN JIM WYNNE WAS A BOY, HE SAYS, “I WAS PAR ticularly interested in Flash Gordon on television.” Most kids who watched those old movie serials probably wanted to be Flash Gordon, who was portrayed by the dashing former Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe. Wynne, however, wanted to emulate a different character. “There was Flash Gordon, and his assistant, Dr. Zarkov, was a physicist. They had adventures in outer space. They had death rays. A light beam would come out of a machine and blow things up.”

The Mustard-gas Miracle

I JUST RECEIVED INVEN tion & Technology today and read with interest the article “From Poison Gas to Wonder Drug” (by Beryl Lieff Benderly, Summer 2002). The article states that mechlorethamine, derived from nitrogen mustard, “provides the M in MOPP, a cocktail of pharmaceuticals used against Hodgkin’s disease.” After surgery I received MOPP along with other drugs over a six-month period, followed by radiation, as treatment for Hodgkin’s disease.

WHEN NUCLEAR POWER WAS FIRST PROPOSED IN THE l940S , it seemed like a gift from heaven: a cheap, clean, and exhaustible source of electricity. In the decades since, scientific research and political developments have brought new advantages to the fore: Nuclear power generates no greenhouse gases, and its fuel does not come from countries of doubtful stability. Yet despite all these selling points, no new American nuclear plant has been ordered in nearly 25 years.

THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS can relocate anything except sunshine. That, in brief, is why modern Florida exists. It would be hard to find a spot anywhere in the lower 48 more inimical to human habitation than South Florida’s Everglades in its wild state: treacherous swamps, frequent floods, dense and dangerous vegetation, swarming insects, deadly diseases, hungry alligators, and the everpresent stifling blanket of heat.

With heavy hearts, car lovers noted the recent passing of Oldsmobile, America’s longestrunning automotive nameplate. Oldsmobiles first went on sale back in 1899, and at the dawn of autodom, when motorcars were still new and brash, the company’s Curved Dash Olds (CDO) taught Americans how to drive. Oldsmobile built more than 19,000 CDOs between 1901 and 1906, outselling any other make. Many owners became so enamored of these simple, rugged machines that they kept them in their barns and garages long after they had graduated to more modern cars.

IN THE SPRING OF 1932, WALT DISNEY previewed a work in progress titled Flowers and Trees , a new cartoon short for his studio’s “Silly Symphony” series. A perfectionist, he was not happy with what he saw. Although the black-and-white woodland fantasy was already half-finished, he decided to scrap it, start from scratch, and do it in color.

In late September 1942, as German U-boats inflicted heavy damage on Allied ships, Geoffrey Pyke—a science adviser to Britain’s chief of combined operations, Lord Mountbatten—proposed building aircraft carriers of ice, to patrol against submarines and carry planes to battle. These “berg ships,” as he called them, would be virtually unsinkable: How do you sink an ice cube? External insulation would guard against evaporation, and forced circulation of cold air would prevent melting.

UNTIL RECENTLY, RE searchers into pre-World War II television had only contemporary descriptions and blurry still photos of glowing screens to rely on. Now, however, a Scotsman named Donald F. McLean has managed to extract moving images from television signals that were recorded onto shellac phonograph disks as early as 1927—when most people were still getting used to radio.

CHARLES LINDBERGH’S SOLO NONSTOP FLIGHT ACROSS THE Atlantic in May 1927 caused widespread public excitement and sped up innovation in aviation around the world. By 1929 more than 400,000 passengers were traveling the world’s airlines, nine times as many as a decade before. Business interests saw a great potential for rapid air transportation of mail, cargo, and passengers, and transatlantic service would be invaluable. But there was one big problem.