IN 1736, IN PHILADELPHIA , Benjamin Franklin founded the American colonies’ first volunteer fire company. Before then, in Philadelphia and most other cities, whoever happened to be nearby when a fire broke out would be drafted into a bucket brigade, sometimes under the direction of a local fire warden. These impromptu firefighters used whatever water was available to extinguish the flames.

The Overland Train Lives

I ENJOYED YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE Overland Train (“Big Wheels,” by Charles W. Ebeling) in the Winter 2001 issue, but I must make a correction to the statement that today it “exists only in memory.” The control car of the Overland Train has been reclaimed and is on display at the Yuma Proving Ground Heritage Center, in Yuma, Arizona. It was originally sold as government surplus, and all the cargo cars and wheels were cut up to be melted down for aluminum scrap.

“FLYING LOW TO MAKE OUT SIGNS ON RAILROAD stations or other buildings is dangerous, yet I sometimes has to be done,” wrote Amelia Earhart in 1932. Elsewhere she lamented: “And oh, for a country-wide campaign of sign painting! Coming down through a hole in the clouds, any flyer is thankful for definite information as to his location, even if it is only to check his navigation.”

IMAGINE GETTING STUCK BEHIND THIS ON A HIGH way. It is twice as wide as a semitrailer and 572 feet long. Its 54 giant rubber tires each stand 10 feet high, and their treads are 4 feet wide. Every wheel contains a DC electric traction motor in its hub; they’re powerful, but they still can’t propel the massive vehicle at more than 20 miles an hour. Fortunately, it was never intended for use on highways. It was designed for off-road transport operations over rough and hilly terrain, and only in very remote corners of the world.

BEFORE MARGARET Knight, most paper bags were simply tubes pinched together at one end and glued; they didn’t have flat folded bases, so they couldn’t stand up or open square. Knight invented a machine that gave them that shape.

THE TV REMOTE CONTROL WAS AN INVENTION BORN not of necessity or even convenience. It grew out of one man’s detestation of advertising. Eugene McDonald, the founder of the Zenith Corporation, declared in 1946 that advertiser-supported television could never succeed. Citing the high cost of producing programming, he insisted that television, unlike radio, could not possibly earn a profit on ad revenue alone. The solution: subscription television.

THEY CALLED GEORGE ARENS berg “The Boy” when the 19-year-old printing compositor arrived in New York in 1869. Within a year, though, his shopmates had renamed him “The Velocipede.” Arensberg had E. A. Donaldson, a composing-room foreman at The New York Times , to thank for his newfound fame.

ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE WE EXPLAIN HOW WlLLIAM Coolidge figured out how to make ductile tungsten after watching his dentist prepare a filling. Some years earlier, a similar epiphany had led to the establishment of America’s data-processing industry. One day in the early 188Os, the inventor Herman Hollerith noticed that his railroad ticket was perforated with a peculiar pattern of holes.

IN THE FIRST FEW DECADES OF DIGITAL COMPUTING, THE OUT put of printed information to the user was essentially an afterthought. Typewriter-style impact technology, in which a piece of metal in the shape of a letter was struck against a ribbon, remained virtually universal.

Tires began as a durable material circling a fragile wheel, such as a steel tire on a spoked wooden wagon wheel. I So when inventors first came up with better tires, they didn’t quickly think of the pneumatic rubber kind we know today Long after air-filled versions became common, they were seen more as an outer layer than as an independent structure.

IN THE LAST HALF-CENTURY, HISTORY HAS TAUGHT SOME POWERFUL LESSONS about the need to look before leaping into untested and potentially hazardous technologies. All too often we have addressed such issues only after the fact. With internal-combustion automobiles and coal-fired power plants, for example, we learned quite belatedly to address the pollution they had long been creating. And we made extensive use of pesticides such as DDT until the naturalist Rachel Carson warned of their harmful effects.

BEFORE DAWN ON JANUARY 5, 1943, FOLLOWING A bombing raid in the Solomon Islands, an Allied naval task force rendezvoused off Guadalcanal. It was thirteen months after Pearl Harbor, and the United States was struggling in every theater against past neglect of its military forces as well as against powerful and battle-wise enemies. The Americans had gained the upper hand on the strategic island of Guadalcanal and Allied forces were pushing northward into New Guinea, but victory in the Pacific was far from assured.

ANDY BUSH DROVE A MERCEDES, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL in the United States in the early 1960s. More unusual still, the tires on his car never seemed to wear out, even though they always looked flabby and underinflated. He loved the durability of his peculiar French-built “radial” tires.

IT IS HARD NOW, SURROUNDED BY EASY WAYS TO PRINT and copy documents, to imagine the difficulties faced by anyone who wanted to do so 200 years ago. Originals had to be written out in longhand; there was no other way. Those who wanted copies could either have the documents printed, repeat the longhand exercise on another piece of paper, or enlist someone else to do the work.

WHEN A LONG ISLAND typewriter-repair shop closed its doors a few years ago, its owner had to decide what to do with all the Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, and Coronas, most of them manual, that had accumulated over several decades. The resale market was nonexistent, for there are few things more obsolete than a manual typewriter (though, to be fair, this column is being typed on a 286 computer, which seems even quainter somehow—like the gray area in between a new car and a classic, when you’re driving a rusty heap of junk).

ON OCTOBER 11, 2000, THE SPACE SHUTTLE DISCOVERY took off from Kennedy Spaceflight Center at Cape Canaveral. Two days later, it docked with the International Space Station, setting the stage for eight clays of construction work. At the moment of docking, the shuttle/station complex, including the three modules that made up the station at that time—Zvezda, Zarya, and Unity—weighed more than 160 tons and spanned a length of more than 150 feet.

IF YOU LOOK IN ANY ANTIQUES STORE IN AMERICA, ODDS are that you will find an old camera. Maybe it’s a boxy Brownie or a metal contraption with leather bellows. It probably doesn’t work any more, but it’s a lovely old item. Pick it up, look through the viewfmder, and imagine the people who held it long ago. You’ll probably walk away feeling there’s something magical about that little box.

Dr. Jacob Zabara , a neurophysiologist at Temple University, was attending a childbirth class with his wife in 1971 when he had an idea that led to an implantable electronic device for preventing epileptic seizures. He realized that if the controlled breathing his wife was learning really decreased pain during birth, the common understanding of the vagus nerve must be wrong.

HENRY F. PHILLIPS, of Portland, Oregon, patented a new kind of screw and screwdriver in 1936. Within a decade his screws were holding things together all over the world. Why? Wasn’t one kind enough? For the average person tackling a minor do-it-yourself project, the advantages of the Phillips can seem elusive. Perhaps it was a scheme by the tool industry to make people buy twice as many screwdrivers.

But for the cabins and smokestacks on their sterns, you might almost think the vessels shown on these pages were advanced underwater craft. Like submarines, they have hulls streamlined to minimize the resistance of the water they plow through. That hull design was conceived in the 1870s and 1880s by the Scottish-born Great Lakes captain Alexander McDougall, who had begun his career at 16 as a deck hand and porter and worked his way up to the command of ships by the time he was 25.