ENJOYED “FROM BLACK and White to Technicolor,” by Tom Huntington, in the Summer 2.001 issue. It mentioned James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary 1861 demonstration of photographic color reproduction, in which he photographed an object three times through red, green, and blue filters and projected positive transparencies together through the same filters. This experiment should have failed, since sensitizing dyes were not yet invented and thus his film could have been sensitive only to the blue light that silver halide could record.

DURING THE 1950s, IN THE GLORY DAYS OF THE NEW YORK Yankees, Gil McDougald was the 1951 Rookie of the Year and a five-time All-Star infielder. One day in 1955, during batting practice, he reached beyond a protective fence to pick up a ball. Right at that moment, his teammate Bob Cerv sent a line drive in his direction, striking him just above the left ear. McDougald was not severely injured, missing only a few games before returning to the lineup. But the accident had fractured his skull and damaged his inner ear.

The exotic contraptions and magical processes that fill our dreams may seem an unlikely source for useful technology. But practical devices, from the first armored warship to a computer with laser circuits, have originated in dreams.

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.

INSPIRATION IS AN ELUSIVE THING . Sometimes it comes in a dream, as when Friedrich August Kekulé’s vision of a ring of dancing atoms, like a snake biting its tail, revealed the structure of benzene. Sometimes it is a simple mechanical analogy, as when the motion of a ship’s wheel led Samuel Colt to design his famous revolver. Much more often, innovators don’t know where their crucial insights come from.

Customers who bought Firestone’s “500” steel-belted radial tires began having problems with tread separation shortly after the tires were introduced in the early 1970s. But when they brought the tires in, the company couldn’t understand why its new flagship product was failing. Executives stonewalled. They blamed consumers for poor maintenance or bad driving habits, and the company resisted outside inquiries. Finally, in 1978, the U.S.

Long Before Technicolor

ENJOYED “FROM BLACK and White to Technicolor,” by Tom Huntington, in the Summer 2.001 issue. It mentioned James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary 1861 demonstration of photographic color reproduction, in which he photographed an object three times through red, green, and blue filters and projected positive transparencies together through the same filters.

Like it or not, we tend to think of the American West as relatively new and raw and of the East as more refined and finished. It can be startling and sometimes amusing to have these stereotypes upset. Let me compare two tourist railroads that seem to exhibit all the wrong qualities, considering their Down East and Far Western locations. They are the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire and the Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado.

One of the most versatile and familiar products of American chemical engineering, Teflon, was discovered by accident. There are many such tales to be found in the history of industrial chemistry, from vulcanized rubber to saccharin to Post-Its, all of which were stumbled upon by researchers looking for other things. So common, in fact, are unplanned discoveries of this sort that one might expect would-be inventors to simply mix random chemicals all day long until they come up with something valuable.

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE WE’RE THE BRANNOCK Device Company, they just look at me,” Tim Follett says. “When I say we make the metal thing that measures your foot in the shoe store, they grin and say, ‘Oh, yeah!’” Follett is vice president of the Liverpool, New York, firm that makes that thing. “We may be the only company in the world whose sole product is a foot-measuring device,” he observes.

Next to the atomic bomb, they were probably America’s most closely guarded secret of the entire war. Even the submachine-gun-toting Marines who patrolled the compound in northwest Washington, D.C., were forbidden to set foot in the building that housed the machines. Of the 4,000 Navy officers, enlisted men, WAVES, and specially cleared civilian workers who every day passed through the double fence of barbed wire surrounding the Naval Communications Annex, only a handful were even permitted to know of the machines’ existence.

IN 1937 THE MATHEMATI cian Alan Turing laid the foundation for modern computer science by introducing the concept of a Turing machine. Such a device could do four things: make a mark on a strip of paper, erase a mark, and move the paper forward or backward. In theory, a digital computer program of any complexity can be broken down into equivalents of these four steps.

The Mount Washington line was built between 1866 and 1869 up the slope of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet the highest mountain in the Northeast. The rise from the base to the top station is approximately 3,600 feet, and the average grade is 24.4 percent. At its steepest section it reaches a fearsome 37.5 percent; most main-line railroads rarely climb much over 2 percent and prefer to keep grades at half that. To overcome the steep slope, a multiple-toothed rack is placed in the center of the track.

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile. The author is certainly correct in describing the difficulties of dealing with these players on the road.

Platters On Wheels

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile.

1. William Morton , 1819-1868. Co-discoverer of anesthesia.
2. James Bogardus , 1800-1874. Inventor whose varied output ranged from engraving machines to the cast-iron building.
3. Samuel Colt , 1814-1862. Gun inventor and manufacturer.

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY , and of the millennium with it, is an invention as surely as is anything we cover in this magazine. Its main inventors include the ancients who devised decimal numbering systems, working from the number of fingers on their hands; the Roman official in 153 B.C. who fixed January 1 as the first day of the year; and Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth-century monk who came up with a calendar naming years by starting with A.D.

Picking The People Of Progress

I ENJOYED EDWARD SOREL’S DEPICTION of the century’s “People of Progress” in the Winter 2000 issue, and I do not disagree with the selection. There is a trio, however, that I feel should have been included: Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley, the inventors of the transistor, which made possible the computer age.

Roger L. Gaefcke
Playa del Rey, Calif.

The Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway is the highest rack railway in the world. It ascends to 14,110 feet above sea level, more than twice as high as the Mount Washington line, and at 8.9 miles is nearly three times the length of its Eastern sister. Pikes Peak is located just west of Colorado Springs, about 60 miles south of Denver. It is named for Zebulon M.

In September 1996 AT&T spun off its research arm, Lucent Technologies, as a separate entity. The new company, which began business as one of the nation’s 50 largest, inherited the famous Bell Laboratories as well as AT&T’s operations in fiber-optic, wired, and wireless communications equipment.