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.
WHEN THE NUCLEAR-POWERED SUB marine Thresher was launched into New Hampshire’s Piscataqua River on July 9, 1960, she represented the latest in naval technology. The Thresher was the ultimate attack submarine, designed to hunt and destroy enemy vessels. She had a high-speed hull, the most powerful sonar in existence, special silencing features, and advanced weapons.
HAVING RECENTLY READ WHY THINGS Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , and having assigned the book in my undergraduate course “Society and Technology,” I was delighted to see an interview with its author, Edward Tenner, in the Spring 1997 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology . Because the book leaves the reader with some key ambiguities, I looked to the interview for clarification.
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.
“RIDE THE LOG FLUME!” CRIES THE AMUSEMENT- park advertisement. Climbing into long, narrow boats molded and colored to resemble hollowed-out logs, Americans by the thousand ride these liquid roller coasters every summer, letting the splashing water soak them as they fly downward.
ZOARVILLE, OHIO: The news that America’s last surviving Fink through-truss bridge is in danger has failed, thus far, to electrify the preservationist community.
EVERY AIR TRAVELER HAS SEEN LIGHT WANDS—THOSE glowing Plexiglas rods at the ends of flashlights that guide taxiing airliners—but few realize that they were an important weapon in the Cold War. Fifty years ago an Air Force enlisted man, his name lost to history, developed the wands to communicate through the thick German fog with the planes of the Berlin airlift—that monumental effort to save West Berliners from slipping behind the Iron Curtain.
“WATCH THIS,” SAYS RlCK HANSON. HE STANDS up, holds his laptop in front of him at shoulder level, and lets go. It drops and bangs on the floor of his office, a tidy room in his California home crammed with computers, scanners, printers, fax machines, model-car kits, hot-rod posters, videos, and a small, orderly electronics workbench. The computer bounces and clatters to a rest. Hanson picks it up and switches it on. It is ready to go instantly, without warming up.
IT WAS FITTING THAT Abraham Lincoln, the Illinois rail-splitter, was the President who signed the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered adult white male citizens 160 acres of land west of the Mississippi. Under its terms homesteaders would become owners of their land if they lived on it for five years and made annual improvements, one of the simplest of which was fencing. Following the Civil War thousands of impoverished veterans from both sides rushed to the territories to stake their claims.
WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU WILL HEAR IT—IN MALLS , airports, supermarkets, even over the telephone. Muzak, with 100 million listeners daily and revenues approaching $200 million a year, is the largest radio station in the world.
HARLEY J. EARL WAS NOT THE FIRST CAR STYLIST; HE WAS JUST THE MOST IM portant. Today, 40 years after his retirement from General Motors and thirty years after his death, he remains the pre-eminent figure in the history of automotive design: a legend, a super ego among towering egos, the man who gave structure and order to an industrial art form that didn’t even have a name before he started.
THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER STOOD AT THE CENTER, literally and figuratively, of the United States’s westward expansion during the nineteenth century. By far the most prominent name in taming the powerful river was James Buchanan Eads. From the 1830s through the 1850s this supremely capable engineer salvaged hundreds of wrecks with a series of ever-larger diving bells, gaining in the process an intimate knowledge of the river’s bottom.
I WAS AMAZED TO SEE THE MlRAFLORES Bridge in the Panama Canal cover picture of the Fall 1996 issue. It is plainly visible at the entrance of the lock, on either side, a drawbridge in its open position. The Bridge of the Americas replaced it; I would have thought it had been dismantled. When I lived in Panama, between 1951 and 1959, the Miraflores Bridge and the nearby Thatcher Ferry were the routes across the canal.
DURING THE 1960S AN OVERBURDENED Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sought to ease the work of its air-traffic controllers by introducing computers. Like any government agency, it awarded its contracts to the lowest bidder. The system that resulted was obsolescent almost from the start, and when the FAA’s managers tried to improve it, they couldn’t. They could only change bits and pieces at a time, which left the traveling public relying for safety on a makeshift patchwork.
MATAGORDA BAY, TEX. : In 1995 a team of archeologists found the wreck of the French ship Belle off Texas’s Gulf Coast, where she had lain since running aground in 1686. The ship had been part of an ill-fated expedition led by the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was exploring the area in the mistaken belief that it was near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
IN THE WINTER 1997 ISSUE OF THIS MAGAZINE, DAVID E. AND Marshall Jon Fisher chronicled the take-no-prisoners battle over whose technology would define color television, CBS’s mechanical system or RCA’s electronic one. Peter Goldmark of CBS finally conceded defeat to David Sarnoff and a triumphant RCA in 1953, but the story doesn’t end there. I was one of a small group of dedicated Westinghouse engineers who inadvertently opened the old wounds more than a decade later. We had to pick a system for NASA’s Apollo Television Camera Program.
HAVING RECENTLY READ WHY THINGS Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , and having assigned the book in my undergraduate course “Society and Technology,” I was delighted to see an interview with its author, Edward Tenner, in the Spring 1997 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology . Because the book leaves the reader with some key ambiguities, I looked to the interview for clarification.
ANTIQUARIANS SAY, “THE MORE THERE WERE , the fewer there are.” By 1927 fifteen million Model T Fords had been built, and to shelter these tin lizzies, thousands of tin garages were bolted, screwed, and banged together in back yards from Cape Cod to Puget Sound. Not many T’s are still around, and even fewer tin garages. Some of them, built carelessly or cheaply, just rusted to pieces and collapsed. Most of them outlived their usefulness. As the auto industry matured, cars grew wider and longer until by 1940 most tin garages couldn’t hold them.
DECEMBER 22, 1845, A GERMAN IMMIGRANT NAMED JOSEPH FABER exhibited a mechanical device to the public at Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall. Outwardly it was similar to many curiosities of the era: A figure dressed like a Turk sat on a table, its face staring out at the crowd. The workings of this dummy, however, were far from the usual fare.
I WAS LUCKY. THE MOMENT I DROVE UP TO LAKE Okeechobee to cross over to Torry Island the bridge shut in front of me, blocking my way. A heavyset man in a wide-brimmed floppy straw hat ambled onto it and pulled down a gate at each end. Then he walked to the middle of the bridge, picked up a 10-foot-long pole, stuck it into a hole in the roadway, and turned it. Pretty soon the whole 140-foot-long steel span was rotating under him like a railway turntable, until it had swung ninety degrees.
