I WAS SURPRISED THAT IN HER OTHER wise comprehensive history of rations (“Dinner Goes to War,” Summer 1998), Barbara Moran made no mention of the Long Range Patrol (LRP) ration, introduced during the Vietnam War and known to almost every field soldier of the time as “the Lurp.” Packaged in a dark-green foil-lined pouch, it provided a lightweight dehydrated main meal in a plastic bag. Adding hot or cold water resulted in a surprisingly tasty entrée, and it came with a chocolate bar.
THE DOBLE MODEL E RAN LIKE NO other car of the 1920s. It even sounded different. When the driver flipped the starting switch, a distinct whump came from under the hood, followed by a steady, throaty, subdued rumble that suggested great power barely contained. After a short time, two minutes or less, the roar subsided. Then, as it drove away, this huge, powerful automobile made virtually no sound at all beyond the muted, liquid hum of tires on pavement.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I took great pleasure in playing with tin cans from my mother’s kitchen shelves, sometimes gathering a variety of them in the middle of the floor to build ever-taller walls and towers. My earliest constructions may have been inspired by those display stacks in the corner grocery store, where seemingly countless numbers of identical cans of soup or vegetables were arranged like bricks, in staggered rows because the tin cans didn’t nestle bottom into top the way today’s aluminum ones do.
I READ “HOW THE RAILROADS DEFEATED Winter” (by Patrick Allitt, Winter 1998) with much interest but was surprised that the author did not mention the City of San Francisco , which was snowbound at Donner Pass from January 13 to 16, 1952. I was on that train as a young Navy officer headed for San Francisco during the Korean conflict. There were 196 passengers and a crew of 30 aboard while a huge blizzard piled snow higher and higher for about two days of subfreezing temperatures after we stalled.
THE DU PONT GUNPOWDER MILLS WERE ALREADY GRINDING away at six in the morning on April 14, 1847. To fill the rush of orders brought on by the Mexican War, in fact, the works along Delaware’s Brandywine Creek had been busy around the clock. Then, “in an instant, without the slightest warning,” wrote a family member, “there came a shock that seemed so terrific in its nature that I could only compare it to the meeting of heaven and earth.
“NOT A LOT OF THESE PEOPLE EVEN KNOW it’s a steamship,” says Thom Hawley, director of public relations for the 410-foot-long SS Badger , as we walk through her main passenger deck. Around us families are eating dinner from a shipboard cafeteria while somewhere far below them two coal-fired four-cylinder steam engines each twenty feet high and twenty-four feet long propel them and their automobiles through the night.
WINTER WAS AN ANNUAL ORDEAL to Americans in the colonial era and early Republic, especially in the North. Food from the fall harvest had to be husbanded carefully and a large supply of firewood laid in to carry families through the cold months. Heavy snow cut communities off for weeks at a time and forced settlers to rely on their own resources. Isolated farms and villages could do little to help those who fell sick from pneumonia, grippe, scurvy, and other winter illnesses. Work, diet, dress, lighting, and social life all were restricted.
ALTHOUGH IT’S NEVER GOTTEN NEARLY AS much glory, the humble Quonset hut was the architectural equivalent of the jeep in World War II. Like the jeep, it was simple, rugged, versatile, and easy to manufacture; and like the jeep, it was a ubiquitous part of the scenery for American servicemen both during the war and after they got home.
IT’S A WARM, SOFT MAY afternoon in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and on a plank laid across two sawhorses outside his workshop in Chocorua, Geoff Burke, master boatbuilder and connoisseur of edge tools, is lining up his collection of axes for me the way a proud parent might line up his kids for a family portrait. On the far left is the smallest, though not necessarily the youngest, of the crew: a trail ax, really a 1¼-pound hatchet head on a twenty-four-mch handle.
HIS WORK IS PART OF YOUR HOME, FOR he reinvented the light bulb in the form we use to this day. But that was just a start. His light-bulb work led him to vacuum tubes, and he improved the crude ones of his time, allowing colleagues to build the tubes that launched commercial radio broadcasting. Similar tubes produced X rays and brought important advances in medicine. Then, with his research taking wing, Langmuir developed the first techniques for measuring the sizes and shapes of atoms and molecules. He founded a new science, plasma physics.
AFTER CHARLES LINDBERGH FLEW across the Atlantic Ocean alone in 1927, he became such a celebrity that when he developed an interest in the possibility of organ replacement three years later, he was invited to the Rockefeller Institute to work with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate eminent in the field of cell culture. Forty years later Colonel Lindbergh told Dr.
AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED WORLD WAR II, PROFESSOR Grace Hopper joined the Navy. She was too light to get in, missing the minimum weight for her height by 16 pounds, but she received a dispensation. She could have received another dispensation to relieve her from basic training, because the Navy was interested only in using her mind, not in making her into a sailor.
IN THE ANNALS OF GOOD TIMING, THE ELECTRICAL Exhibition of 1898 must surely rank near the top of the list. Predictions of war had been brewing even before February of that year, when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Then, in late April, Commo. George Dewey steamed into the Philippines and routed the Spanish fleet at Manila for the first victory of the Spanish-American War.
FRANCIS ROGALLO WANTED TO FLY, AND LIFE’S FATEFUL twists prevented him from flying in the ordinary way, so he discovered a new manner of flight, one so revolutionary and simple that today more than a million people have tried it. And they have done so without runways, airframes, or big, powerful engines, flying instead by actually attaching wings to their bodies, as Daedalus did in mythology and as Leonardo, da Vinci only dreamed of doing.
KEYPORT, WASH.: In preparing this issue’s article on World War II torpedoes, we received invaluable help from the Naval Undersea Museum, which documents and preserves the history of submarines, torpedoes, mines, and related technologies. Among its holdings the museum has copies of wartime correspondence between Albert Einstein and the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) on ways to improve torpedo design and performance.
WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, men walked on the moon. It was the biggest anticlimax of my life. To someone raised on “Star Trek” and “Lost in Space,” it was a huge disappointment to learn that we had just gotten around to something that seemed so basic. I was reminded of this recently when a computer beat Carry Kasparov at chess. Grownups professed shock, but I’ll bet a lot of eightyear-old Webheads were surprised that such an elementary task had taken so long.
A DUMMY IS A STEAM LOCOMOTIVE BOXED UP TO LOOK LIKE A PASSENGER car. This sort of deception seems unnatural for such a direct and upfront machine; most locomotives bristle with bolts, rivets, pipes, and rods. Was it the Victorian preoccupation with decorum that prompted the movement to cover up all those nasty working parts with a pretty wooden enclosure? Were naked locomotives considered indecent? If not indecent, they were viewed as being too raw and brutish for service on city streets.
AT 10:37 ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 9, 1943, LT. COMDR. John A. Scott of the USS Tunny saw a sight that other submarine commanders only dream of. After tracking a radar contact and carefully maneuvering into position, the Tunny was prowling the surface just in front of a major Japanese Navy convoy off the Caroline Islands.
NEXT, LOAD SOME 66-INCH HANDEES AND get them spotted and bored and rolled,” Ken VanTol says to his shop foreman, who replies with a couple of businesslike questions about the job. “Then we need 300 teeth.” VanTol turns to his other workers. “You guys are going to count teeth. And when you’re done, you’ll take your break.”
The Apollo lunar-landing program was the greatest triumph of America’s post-World War II can-do technological spirit. In a series of increasingly ambitious missions, NASA’s engineers and astronauts made the monumental achievement of landing men on the moon seem almost routine. Even when disaster struck Apollo 13 , Mission Control managed to bring its astronauts home safely. The only fatalities in the entire program occurred in its very first mission.
