MICHAEL HARRIS TAKES OUT WHAT APPEARS TO be an opera hat made of ebony, pearl, and nickel, inserts a three-by-five-inch paper card under its hinged lid, and places it on my head. The vertical bars around the hat’s sides push out to exactly fit my skull. Then he snaps the lid shut. He takes the hat off my head, opens the lid, and removes the card and shows it to me. It now has holes punched in it that represent the exact dimensions of my head. My head is shaped, to my mild dismay, like a foot.

The Erector Makes The Man

HENRY PETROSKI’S “THE TOYS THAT Built America” (Spring 1998), struck a deep chord. I enclose a photo of myself taken at Christmas 1931. Note the Erector set to my right, my chief present that year. It was a favorite for many years, and although I did not become an engineer, I think it may well have been influential in my lasting interest in the sciences.

YOUR ARTICLE “THE GHOST FLEET of Mallows Bay” (by Donald G. Shomette, Winter 1999) brought back memories. When my family lived in the Washington, D.C., area many moons ago, one favorite family pastime was the Sunday afternoon auto ride. Sometimes we would drive down the bank of the Potomac. This was before National Airport was dredged up out of that river and before the Pentagon was erected on Roosevelt Field. Farther down, in one of the inlets of the river, we could see rows of wooden ships tied up and apparently abandoned.

THE PROGRESS OF MANKIND CAN BE MEASURED BY THE progress of mining and metallurgy. The successive historical epochs of stone, copper, bronze, iron, steel, and silicon are the steps our species has taken in the quest to control the world rather than simply survive it. Besides adding to humanity’s health and material well-being, each of these stages has created the need for an everincreasing web of laws, rules, and etiquette. The whole complex synergy that we call civilization ultimately depends on mining, and mining depends on rock drills.

One September day in 1989 about 2,700 Apple Lisa computers were unceremoniously buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah. In an industry where rapid obsolescence is not only the norm but a goal, the mass burial elicited few tears from anyone except insiders. Yet this prosaic event put an end to perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary failure in the history of computing.

THE N-1 MOON ROCKET, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL, LIFTED FROM ITS launch pad in Kazakhstan with the thrust of 30 engines. A cacophonous roar rolled across the steppes, a roar that carried hope. It was July 1969; at Cape Kennedy, half a world away, NASA was preparing to launch Apollo 11, which would carry the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to man’s first lunar landing. The N-1 was unmanned, but if its flight proved successful, the Soviets might be in a position to match the Americans’ achievement.

YOU WALK UP TO AN ORDINARY-LOOKING CLUSTER of old brick waterfront industrial buildings and into a plain gray lobby. You open an unmarked black door in the rear corner of the lobby and pass through it to find yourself in a hallway lined with aging white ceramic tile. The hallway is undistinguished except by an ornate embossed enamel sign from early in the century: DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR.

THE VERY FIRST BLAST CAME EARLY ONE APRIL night in 1840. Federal troops were in the midst of a skirmish with the Seminole Indians, who had been fighting for 23 years to keep their lands in Florida. A 36-year-old Army officer from New Bern, North Carolina, had fashioned a primer that would explode when touched and attached it to an ordinary artillery shell. A couple of days earlier he had hidden shell and primer under a bundle of clothing near a pond often used by the Seminoles.

IN LATE 1923 A SERIES OF CURIOUS FULL-PAGE ADVERTISEMENTS APPEARED IN The Saturday Evening Post . The first, in the issue of December 8, presented just four sentences surrounded by wide margins. It began, “By reason of his past and pending accomplishments, the figure of Walter P.

ANYONE WHO COMPARES OLD AND NEW BUILD ings in a city of any antiquity will usually end up thinking: They don’t build them like that anymore. Appearances can be deceptive, of course; plenty of boring architecture from the old days has since been knocked down. Still, very few pre-World War II buildings could pass for background illustrations in a video game.

THE LAND MINE IS ONE OF THE most capable weapons systems available today. It is cheap, easily massproduced, and deadly. It is also controversial: It maims and kills soldiers and civilians alike. For much of this century, mine and countermine technology have gone round for round in innovation and counterinnovation. Here are some of the salient events of that fight.

WHO BUILT THE FIRST COMPUTER ? As I. Bernard Cohen explains elsewhere in this issue, answering the question is difficult and ultimately arbitrary. Under a loose definition of what constitutes a computer, Charles Babbage’s 1820s Difference Engine can claim the title. For today’s teenagers, to whom a computer with no mouse might as well be a typewriter, Apple’s Lisa model (predecessor of the more successful Macintosh) makes a much better candidate.

Imagine one of today’s management gurus becoming so absorbed with golf that he gives up his lucrative consulting contracts to devote full time to the total quality management of the PGA Tour. Perhaps it is not a completely far-fetched idea, given the game’s irresistible appeal and the global reach and multibillion-dollar size of the modern golf industry. But think back to the beginning of the century, when it took teams of horse-pulled pans and scrapers—and a phalanx of manpower—to clear land of rocks and boulders and build a playable golf course.

THE SPECIAL EDITION OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH THAT MADE ITS debut on December 7, 1938, should have been a colossal failure. The Pulitzer-owned paper carried no advertising and earned no money at the newsstand; in fact only 15 copies were printed. It contained no memorable scoops, just stories like a front-page article reporting the arrest of one Albert Button “after Mrs.

ONE GREAT EVENT OF EVERY MODERN AMERI can’s youth was watching the family car’s odometer turn over. When the mileage approached a multiple of 1,000—or even 10,000, on a particularly lucky day—all conversation would cease as riders tracked the dial’s hypnotic crawl: 999.1, 999.2, 999.3. … When the longed-for moment finally arrived, the 9’s turned into O’s with the flawless synchronization of a Rockettes kick line, and everyone spent a few moments in silent contemplation.

FOR SOMETHING LIKE A CENTURY AMERICANS USU ally loved engineers, those individualistic heroes who rose above the mundane to put their stamp on recalcitrant nature. Politics could only get in the way of those master creators. To a degree, a negative version of that view may still be with us.

Stagnant water plus mosquitoes equals yellow fever. A century after this connection was established, the equation is common knowledge. But 200 years ago in the new United States, long before the concept of germs became widespread, the immigrant engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe struggled to bring fresh water to American cities largely because he and others believed it would combat epidemic disease.

For more than 50 years following Banting’s breakthrough discovery in 1922, the primary source for insulin remained the pancreases of slaughtered cows and pigs. In the mid-1970s, however, a worrisome rumor arose that because consumers were generally eating less meat while the number of diabetics continued to increase, a shortage of insulin was absolutely inevitable. In actuality the concern was unfounded, but the strength of the rumor proved invaluable to a new and very troubled field of science.

HENRY PETROSKI’S “THE TOYS THAT Built America” (Spring 1998), struck a deep chord. I enclose a photo of myself taken at Christmas 1931. Note the Erector set to my right, my chief present that year. It was a favorite for many years, and although I did not become an engineer, I think it may well have been influential in my lasting interest in the sciences.

Who was Howard Hughes? There are many answers. But through all his shifting activities he remained a riverboat gambler with a bottomless pot of money and a habit of doing as he liked. We remember him as a Hollywood playboy whose exploits made the papers almost daily—and as a recluse who hid from his closest associates. During a decades-long involvement with aviation he built a record-breaking racing plane that the Army Air Corps declined to purchase and an enormous flying boat that flew only once. Yet his life also held many solid achievements.