The idea was to find a dead tree. Not just any dead tree, but one that had died more than 100 million years ago and fallen into a stream and been caught and sealed there in the muck, rotting and eventually petrified when mountains collapsed and sand dunes blew over and covered the forgotten river, until the tree was nothing more than a sponge for radioactive gases coming up from inside the earth.

In Manchester, Connecticut, near Hartford, two high-tech bandits set up a dummy ATM in the Buckland Hills Mall and used it to gather card codes and PINs from people trying to use the machine. The two men planned their caper with care, setting up a phony institution called Guarantee Trust Company and leasing a small stand-alone Fujitsu unit from an independent supplier. Then, on April 24,1993, dressed as workmen, they and another conspirator wheeled their machine into a heavily trafficked area of the mall and plugged it in.

DURING THE 1820S THE BRITISH EXPLORER WIL liam Parry led several Arctic expeditions across Baffin Bay and through miles of frozen waste toward the north magnetic pole. The explorers used a new technology to help them survive in the frigid north: canned food. Tin-coated, wrought-iron cans would allow them to carry palatable provisions almost indefinitely without spoilage. The trouble began when they actually wanted to eat the food. A can of roast veal came with these forbidding instructions: “Cut round on the top with a chisel and hammer.”

Before the advent of automated teller machines (ATMs), most people’s experience with devices that dispensed money involved pulling a handle and hoping three cherries would line up. For this reason, perhaps, many people did not trust ATMs at first. In the early days it was common for users to count their cash each time. After all, how could you rely on a machine to dispense the correct number of $20 bills when your photocopier regularly skipped pages and kicked out blank sheets?

WHAT IF WATSON HAD BEEN OUT TO LUNCH when Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call, in 1876? Bell’s invention let people converse across long distances instantaneously, but not with someone who wasn’t home. That would be the weak link in the communications revolution.

Whether one is fighting a war or maintaining a III peace, knowing what the other side is up to can be more valuable than any amount of personnel or weaponry. Few techniques are more effective for this than observation from above. What we now call aerial reconnaissance dates from the beginning of the Civil War, when three professional balloonists—John Wise, John LaMountain, and Thaddeus Lowe—offered their services to the Union.

IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE AN ESTABLISHMENT A CENTURY and a half older than the Republic, or one built around a technology devised by an alchemist. The Avedis Zildjian Company is in a big modern building, where it makes the world’s best cymbals for jazz, rock, and concert musicians. But each cymbal begins with the mixing of a bronze alloy by a secret technique that has been handed down for fourteen generations, since 1623.

IN THE MID-1930S LOS ANGELES, THE FASTEST -growing city in the United States, was desperately in need of two things: water and power. The Boulder (now Hoover) Dam was being built to provide both. Electric power lines would stretch 266 miles from the dam site, on the Colorado River, to Los Angeles. They would carry 275,000 volts of power and provide Angelenos with cheap electricity, but there was a problem.

EARLIER THIS YEAR A GROUP OF JOURNALISTS ASSEMBLED BY NEW York University voted Silent Spring (1962), by the ecologist Rachel Carson, the second most influential piece of American journalism of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of scientific studies, Carson demonstrated to the public that DDT, the miracle chemical of World War II and the keystone of the World Health Organization’s global antimalaria program in the 1950s, was less a benefit to humanity than a danger to the global ecosystem.

The Better Slide Rule

THE SPRING 2000 ARTICLE ABOUT calculators (“How the Computer Got Into Your Pocket,” by Mike May) shook loose a memory for me. In 1974 my high school precalculus teacher recommended that we buy slide rules to aid our calculations. Almost all of us ordered and awaited delivery of the mysterious devices. The big day arrived and I expected we’d spend the hour learning the rudiments of our enigmatic new tools.

DANIEL COLLADON DIDN’T SET OUT TO CREATE A telecommunications revolution in 1841. The Swiss physicist simply wanted to show an audience in Geneva how a horizontal jet of water broke up into droplets as gravity pulled the liquid in a downward arc. The water was hard to see with the meager illumination available at the time, but Colladon had a bright idea. He piped a beam of sunlight into the darkened lecture hall with a hollow tube poking through closed window shutters. He then aimed the beam along the water jet.

AS RECENTLY AS 1970 THE ONLY WAY doctors could see inside a patient’s body without surgery was with X rays. This technology, which dated back to the horse-and-buggy era and had seen few improvements since, amounted to a form of two-dimensional photography, complete with negatives and film. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, three separate new methods combined to greatly expand a physician’s ability to find and diagnose potentially dangerous conditions.

AS SOON AS THEY LEARN TO RECOGNIZE numerals, most children notice an enigma that presents itself every time they visit a store: Why do so many prices end in 99? Some children shrug it off as one of the unaccountable mysteries associated with grownups, like cauliflower or social studies. Others ask an adult and are told that $5.99 is supposed to look cheaper than $6.00, even though the ruse is apparent to a small child. In fact, every shopper mentally rounds off such prices to an even dollar amount.

LAST SUMMER MY EMPLOYERS ASKED ME, AND quite a few other people at the company that owns this magazine, to attend a one-day management-training seminar given by a management consultant in a conference center high above Wall Street.

SAY YOU WANTED TO BRING UP TO DATE CHRISTIAN SCHUSSELE’S 1862 MASTERPIECE Men of Progress , a heroic four-by-six-foot scene of nineteen innovators of the age. Whom would you put in it? Who are the men of progress, or the men and women of progress, or whatever you would call them now, of the twentieth century?

At the risk of reigniting the “redgreen” wars brought on by the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads in 1968, I feel compelled to offer comment on “Postfix: Jet Train,” by Ed Pershey, in your Fall 1999 issue. I was at the time the Pennsylvania Railroad’s coordinator of the Northeast Corridor Demonstration Project, a government-railroadsupplier partnership that ultimately brought the Metroliner and Turbotrain to service in 1969.

THE NATURAL PROCESS OF REFLECTING ON THE PASSING century involves much pride in technological achievement. It is, after all, the century of wireless communications, jet travel, space exploration, and computer networks.

At first it looked almost too easy. Emilio Emini had all the sophisticated tools of modern science to deploy against the virus. Tall, articulate, and energetic, trained in microbiology at Cornell University and able to muster the resources of one of the world’s leading research companies, he was in the prime of his scientific career in 1986 and was eager to meet the challenge. His opponent, identified only three years before, was a virus that needed to be in an animal to live, and even then half its population would die within a day.

Itzhak Perlman has called Jascha Heifetz the “father of modern violin playing,” and Isaac Stern credits him with extending the range of the possible more than any violinist before or after. When in 1972, in Los Angeles, Heifetz gave his last public concert, the standing-room-only crowd included luminaries from throughout the violin world as well as a young Hollywood studio musician and Heifetz student named Ron Folsom.

A Dangerous Stunt?

At the risk of reigniting the “redgreen” wars brought on by the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads in 1968, I feel compelled to offer comment on “Postfix: Jet Train,” by Ed Pershey, in your Fall 1999 issue. I was at the time the Pennsylvania Railroad’s coordinator of the Northeast Corridor Demonstration Project, a government-railroadsupplier partnership that ultimately brought the Metroliner and Turbotrain to service in 1969.