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Take a boat down the Potomac, thirty miles south of Washington, D.C., round the bend at Sandy Point, and enter Mallows Bay. Press forward through the shallow waters of the little bay, surrounded by tall, forested ; bluffs; thick algae, smelling of age and rot, will swirl about the prow of your boat as it pushes slowly ahead. The silence may be interrupted only by a great heron I fleeing before you. You are entering an eerie, little-known region populated only by great and hoary relics of generations past.

JOSEPHINE GARIS COCHRANE seemed to have reached the low point of her life one Sunday in about 1880, when she went to church in the midst of an illness and heard the pastor deliver her eulogy. Jasper Douthit, the minister, was undoubtedly rushing things a bit, but then, he had been a reformer on so many fronts for so long that impatience was probably his idea of a positive contribution to any effort. Whatever the intent of his wistful farewell, entitled “Hoping, Waiting and Resting,” Mrs. Cochrane eventually rallied.

STEPHEN FOX’S ARTICLE “THE STRANGE Triumph of Abner Doble,” in the Summer 1998 issue, mentions only briefly the McCulloch Corporation’s steamautomobile endeavor with Abner Doble in the 1950s. I thought readers might like a more complete story.

As curators of industrial history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), we get offered lots of old stuff. “I’m cleaning out my mother’s house, and I found. … ” Or: “We’re closing down our factory and thought you might like. … ” Or even: “How do we get our invention into the Smithsonian hall of fame?”

People think it might be worth saving, they can’t bear to throw it away, they think it might get good publicity being at the Smithsonian. That’s fine. We have almost no budget to acquire artifacts, so we depend on donations.

HOWARD H. AIKEN HOLDS AN AMBIGUOUS POSI tion in the history of the computer. Although a number of historians have declared that his first machine—the IBM ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), known today mainly by the simpler name Mark I—inaugurated the computer age, many accounts of the birth of the computer either ignore his role altogether or consider him to have belonged to a pre-computer age.

AS LONG AS THERE HAS BEEN TECHNOLOGY, IT HAS BEEN APPLIED TO AGRI culture. Every major advance throughout history, from metallurgy to steam power to computers, has been used to make the natural processes of growth more productive and efficient. Just as hunting and gathering have given way to neat rows of crops and pens filled with cattle, another area of food production—vital but easily overlooked—has been systematized in much the same fashion: apiculture, or the raising of bees.

THIRTY FEET BELOW AN OPEN HATCH IN THE grain carrier Kinsman Independent , at anchor in Buffalo, New York, men are in constant motion on a sea of wheat. Four of them stand in a corner of the 50-by-100-foot-long bin, alternately pulling and releasing ropes hanging down from overhead. Others catch and position 4-foot-wide metal shovels strung to ropes running overhead; the ropes pull the shovels the length of the hold, carrying wheat along with them.

IN 1946 THE NORDBERG MANUFAC turing Company, of Milwaukee, contracted with Mr. Doble to design and manufacture at Nordberg a steam engine to replace the diesel engine in the rear of a bus. It would have the same fuel consumption as a diesel, and the operation would be fully automatic. The design had two vertical high-pressure cylinders and two horizontal lowpressure cylinders. The exhaust would pass through a high-speed 50,000-rpm single-stage reaction steam turbine, driving a fan through the double reduction gearbox.

Henry Mitchell has lived in the house next door to mine all of his 85 years. He keeps an eye on my renovations, and I often pause, hammer in hand, to listen to him describe the way his father built his own house those many years ago. When I return to my previous task—pulling a rusty square spike or dismantling a joint in the heavy timbers—I am more conscious of the building of my house a century and a half ago. I can imagine all the effort, the heading of spike from nail rod, the chiseling of mortise and tenon, the erecting of heavy timbers.

THE JET ENGINES ROAR. THE PILOT AND copilot push the hurtling test vehicle to its limit. Technicians measure the stress on metal parts, the rising temperatures, and the vibrations created by mounting velocity, all the while clocking the speed of the machine. Then the run is over; observers announce that it has set a speed record.

“DOING WHAT COMES ARTIFICIALLY” (by Miles R. McCarry, Summer 1999) brought back old memories and reinforced for me the fact that inventions often find uses far removed from their original purposes. In 1959 the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) sought to develop an easy-open can end to salvage a container development using a composite foil-and-card-board laminated body stock. Conventional can openers would not be useful for the container, which was for frozen orange juice.

I WAS ASTOUNDED BY THE PHOTO graph of the Buffalo pumping engines (“They’re Still There: Hidden Treasure,” by Frederick Allen, Summer 1999). I have never before seen a photo of any engine so large. I sure hope the Industrial Heritage Committee can get these things on display, and I also hope they are interviewing anyone who still knows anything about the operation of the engines. I haven’t run across many stationary engineers lately.

MOST PEOPLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA —or eighteenth-century anywhere, for that matter—never saw pictures of themselves, not even once in their lives. Photography lay decades ahead, and only the wealthy could have their portraits painted. Even they usually had no more than one in a lifetime. So when a portrait was made, it was never a simple likeness but rather a lone chance to convey how you wanted to be seen and remembered, and your pose and attire and attitude and surroundings were all very carefully chosen.

YOUR ARTICLE REFERS TO THE COM pany’s “floating power” engine-mounting arrangement. It had one flaw that I, and I’m sure many others, liked to spring on unsuspecting drivers. The gearshift ball on the Chrysler I owned for many years resembled the top half of a billiard ball on a floor-mounted lever. In low gear it almost touched the driver’s right kneecap. I’d invite a friend at the wheel to “check the full-throttle pickup on her”; after that, under power, the gearshift lever would be torqued way to the right.

AS A LIFELONG STEAM-MACHINERY BUFF and engineer, I was delighted to read about the Col. Francis G. Ward Pumping Station, on the Buffalo waterfront. In the early 1960s I visited Buffalo, and it was my luck to learn that early the evening I was there one of the steam engines was going to be put in service. Standing on the balcony next to the enormous machine in the dim light, I was almost hypnotized by those flashing rods and whirling flywheels.

IN THE LATE 1950S JACK KlLBY, AT TEXAS INSTRUMENTS in Dallas, and Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, at Fairchild Semiconductor near San Jose, California, independently came up with ways to cram many tiny transistors and resistors onto a small sliver of silicon. By adding microscopic wires to interconnect groups of adjacent components, they made the first integrated circuits, which are now known informally as chips.

IT MAY BE HARD FOR TODAY’S GENERATION TO BELIEVE , but America’s space program was once the very emblem of high technology. Nowadays the era is rarely invoked except in smirky phrases like “spaceage bachelor-pad music,” and with spacecraft having come to resemble sport-utility vehicles, 23-year-old graphic designers use clip-art images of rockets to convey retro campiness. Even the space suit has an antique air, as science fiction characters now mostly dress as if they belonged in a Shakespeare play.

I HAVEN’T EVEN FINISHED READING LARRY C. Hoffman’s excellent piece on the evolution of rock drilling (“The Rock Drill and Civilization,” Summer 1999), but I’m already thinking of his work as being in the same vein as the wonderful PBS series Out of the Fiery Furnace .

IN 1939 THE LONGEST BATTLE OF WORLD War II, the Battle of the Atlantic, got under way as German U-boats began prowling the seas between the United States and Europe. The battle would last until 1945, and during its early part German U-boats would send Allied ships, and therefore Allied supplies and troops, to the bottom in alarming numbers. The submarines were quick, easy to maneuver, and difficult to detect. The standard convoy proved an easy target, and the Allies realized they would need a new weapon if they were to survive.

“WE’RE ONE OF THE FEW COMPANIES STILL making fabric ribbons,” says Victor Barouh, 72, a wavy-haired man with a pencil-thin mustache. “We must have three or four hundred different spools, so when someone needs a ribbon for an old Addressograph or an Underwood typewriter, we’re the people who can supply it.” We are walking through his cavernous factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.