IT IS A CURIOUS PARADOX OF AMERICAN LIFE THAT IN many municipalities bar patrons are not allowed to smoke, yet they can spend all night polluting the atmosphere with out-of-tune caterwauling to a karaoke machine and remain sadly beyond the reach of the law. Even the staunchest advocates of free trade might abandon their principles when faced with the threat from this particular Japanese import.

You had to be rich to own a car radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Installed, a decent set might cost you $175. Since you could by a new 1930 Chevrolet sedan for $695, a radio represented a pretty hefty piece of change.

The name suggested mild titillation; the plate on the device promised “tingling relaxation and ease.” Twenty-five cents, and it would shake the mattress under you for 15 minutes, probably 14 minutes more than anybody could ever really want. The genius behind this 1958 invention was a former salesman named John Houghtaling.

ON JULY 10, 1962, IN WASHINGTON, D.C., VICE President Lyndon B. Johnson picked up the telephone to chat with Frederick Kappel, the chairman of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Kappel was calling from Andover, Maine. For about two minutes the men traded platitudes about the potential benefits of satellite communications and the need for government and industry to work together. Then they thanked each other and hung up.

It was as plain as daylight to any rationally thinking oilman in the early part of the century that vast oceans of oil must lie under the world’s seabeds. After all, the same geological pressure cooker that had turned ancient organic matter into petroleum under the Texas cap rock had to have worked just as well under the ocean, hadn’t it? The oil was there all right, but it was tantalizingly out of reach. A smart geologist could almost see it. It was like looking at snowcapped peaks from the floor of a desert—all that lovely water so close, and no way to get at it.

SNEAKERS WERE NOT POSSIBLE UNTIL CHARLES Goodyear made rubber useful. Rubber, derived from latex, the milky sap of the South American hevea tree, had interesting properties. It was both waterproof and elastic, and rubber-soled shoes could absorb the countless shocks that feet suffer in running and jumping—something that couldn’t be said of leather boots, which remained the footwear of choice for both work and play through the late nineteenth century. But rubber also melted in warm weather and became cracked and brittle in the cold.

MOST MAJOR WARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY have contained deadly previews of the next conflict on the timeline. Aviation technology and aerial warfare provide excellent examples of this pattern. In World War I the airplane was hardly decisive, yet the opposing powers discovered its usefulness in reconnaissance, bombardment, and air-to-air combat, a lesson applied during the 1930s in the Spanish Civil War, which today is seen by many as a rehearsal studio for the German and Soviet fighter and bomber tactics of World War II.

HOW DO YOU GET A PERSON TO FEED MONEY INTO A DEVICE that serves no function but to give only some of it back? Slot-machine designers have always had an intuitive grasp of the arts of both P. T. Barnum and B. F. Skinner, mixing two parts sucker appeal with one part operant conditioning. Their devices have been caressed and kicked, prayed to, execrated, and suspected of malign intelligence. They have soaked up billions in profits and attracted a century of legal suppression.

A CENTURY AGO, WHEN THE AGE OF THE AUTOMOBILE WAS JUST BEGIN ning, few people worried about what would happen when cars began to wear out. After all, there were plenty of junkyards, where horse carts and carriages and all the other conveyances of premotorized America ended their days. If anyone did think about it, they probably figured that old automobiles would be taken apart and sold for scrap, just like their predecessors.

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.

Today’s high-tech innovators know that simply creating a clever bit of technology is no guarantee that it will be adopted. In many cases an invention does not become accepted until it is used in a “killer application”—something irresistible enough to overcome people’s natural reluctance to change. Thirty-five years ago Texas Instruments (TI), with headquarters in Dallas, faced the same problem.

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.

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Roger L. Gaefcke
Playa del Rey, Calif.

“T HESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS . …” S O WROTE T HOMAS P AINE IN T HE C RISIS IN D ECEMBER 1776 .

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

ALMOST 60 PERCENT OF ALL CALVES BORN ON AMERICAN dairy farms are offspring of parents that have never met. Artificial insemination (AI), once something that would “never work,” is close to being standard practice, selectively or across herds, wherever cows are milked. AI is the biggest reason why today’s dairy farms are producing at a rate that was unthinkable 50 years ago. Acceptance by owners of beef cows, while not yet as impressive, is slowly on the upswing as well.

Americans began building automobiles commercially in 1896, and in 1898 the Winton Motor Carriage Company produced the first American truck, a gasoline-powered delivery wagon. Winton was soon followed by a number of other companies, including that of the Mack brothers of Brooklyn. Over the next decade, as the number of cars on the nation’s roads mushroomed, more gasoline, steam, and electric trucks came along, but by 1910 there were still fewer than 11,000 of them alongside the more than 450,000 cars on the road. Why?

The Walls Around Us

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

Cheating has been a nuisance for slot operators from the earliest days. Players fed the machines slugs; manufacturers fought back, incorporating slug detectors in the form of windows that let the operator see the last coin played. “Escalators,” introduced in 1925, paraded the last four or more coins in full view. Thieves drilled holes into the sides of machines and used wires to manipulate the reels; designers added steel plating to the inside of the cabinet.

THERE IS AN OLD COWBOY SAYING, “Never squat with your spurs on.” It appears that the lady in the picture on page 56 half-heard the saying; she has removed her right spur but not the left one for the photo. Aside from that amusing observation (for the easily amused such as myself), another great issue. Thank you.

In 1920 scientists all around the world were searching for a treatment for diabetes, a heart-rending disease that had been growing steadily in incidence. Dr. Frederick G. Banting was not one of them. He was a lonely surgeon stranded in London, Ontario, where he spent his days waiting in vain for patients and his nights scheming to get out of London, Ontario, as soon as possible. At one point he applied to be a doctor in the Arctic. At another he tried to join the British Army in India.