WHILE YOU’RE READING THIS, IF IT’S DAY time, a man is slowly walking under forty feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico a mile or two off the Florida coast. He is leaning far forward into the current and examining the dim ocean floor in front of ,him, rhythmically turning his head from side to side. Periodically he sees a sponge, gathers it with a rake held in his right hand, and deposits it in a wire basket. Most likely he is a Greek-American doing the same thing his father and grandfather did: professional sponge diving.

WHEN THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHAL - lenger was destroyed in 1986 by the failure of an O-ring, it tragically brought home the familiar technological truth that the breakdown of a seemingly insignificant part can trigger an enormous catastrophe. A complex system like the space shuttle contains hundreds of components and subsystems that can go wrong, and the seals and connections between them greatly multiply the potential for failure.

IN 1963 NEW YORK CITY’S HISTORIC-PRESERVATION movement lost its greatest battle, and the Pennsylvania Railroad proceeded to demolish the architect Charles Follen McKim’s elegant Pennsylvania Station, in the heart of Manhattan. The new commercial structures that rose in its place offered none of the architectural distinction of the splendid Beaux Arts building they replaced, and ever since then railroad passengers have had to make do with a sterile, low-ceilinged subterranean facility.

Flash Man

I KNEW HAROLD EDGERTON (“THE MAN Who Stopped Time,” by Joyce E. Bedi, Summer 1997) very well, beginning in my days as a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s. While his fascination with high-speed photography led him to many unusual endeavors, such as a fruitful collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in undersea exploration, the most extraordinary was that of setting off all the atomic and hydrogen bombs the United States tested.

AS AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER I HAVE always enjoyed Invention & Technology and I share Walter Vincenti’s interest in history (“What Engineers Know: An Interview With Walter Vincenti,” by Robert C. Post, Winter 1997). But I differ with him on the relationship between technology and culture. While he sees our culture as the age of technology—as opposed to the Middle Ages, the age of religion—I see all cultures as driven by technology.

INNOVATIONS IN EQUIPMENT HAVE dramatically reshaped many sports, often in very unexpected ways. In the 1980s aerodynamic engineers redesigned the javelin so that with a precise, technically perfect throw, it would fly farther than the strongest athletes had ever thrown it before. In the hands of techniqueoriented athletes it set new records, but it proved dangerous, too, when it landed in a judges’ tent at the 1984 Olympics.

HEDY LAMARR AND George Antheil were among the more prominent celebrity inventors, but the entertainment world has had many other stars who were inventive off-stage as well as on. The magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, for example, was issued patent 1,370,316 in 1921 for a diver’s suit. In 1952 the comedian Danny Kaye received design patent 166,807 for a “Blowout Toy or the Like,” based on those rolled-up snakelike paper toys that children blow into at birthday parties.

AT FIRST GLANCE THE PICTURE OPPOSITE RESEMBLES A photo of a pile of junk. Look closer, however, and you will see a propeller, a wing, and a belly tank. Far from being junk, it is a Japanese “Zero” fighter plane from World War II that went on to be of inestimable value to the United States. Aviation buffs and historians know it as Koga’s Zero, for the name of its pilot, or as the Akutan or Aleutian Zero, for the crash site.

THE ZERO WAS JAPAN’S MAIN FIGHTER PLANE THROUGHOUT WORLD War II. By war’s end about 11,500 Zeros had been produced in five main variants. In March 1939, when the prototype Zero was rolled out, Japan was in some ways still so backward that the plane had to be hauled by oxcart from the Mitsubishi factory twenty-nine miles to the airfield where it flew. It represented a great leap in technology.

The Seaway Saga

What a great article by Daniel J. McConville (“Seaway to Nowhere,” Fall 1995). My husband and I marveled through the entire story, wondering why all that work hadn’t reached the consciousness of our family in the 1950s. Both of us thought the Seaway had been completed several decades earlier. We could scarcely believe that America had so shortchanged its cooperation with Canada. And the part on the problems encountered with the glacial till was dumbfounding.

IF THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAS AN IMAGE OF ITSELF, IT IS SURE ly a rural and agrarian one. Even our license plates proclaim us to be America’s Dairyland. In fact, Wisconsin also has a good share of manufacturing, but it’s rarely mentioned when discussing the “good life” of the state. We may be grateful to have industry in Wisconsin, but we don’t seem to talk about it much.

NEW YORK, N.Y.: Good industrial design comes in two varieties. The first one turns mundane items into works of art, revealing the potential for beauty in something as humdrum as a wastebasket or pencil sharpener. The second one goes to the opposite extreme, merging form and function so completely that the object’s appearance seems ordained by nature instead of thought up by a man at a drawing board. In the best cases one might just as well ask who designed the sunflower or who designed Niagara Falls.

THE MODERN SPEEDOMETER evolved from the odometer, which goes back to Roman times. To determine how far they had traveled, Roman legions rolled a wheel as they marched and multiplied its circumference by the number of revolutions. By the sixteenth century the odometer had been combined with a clock to yield a kind of speedometer. Through the stagecoach and railroad ages, calculating average speed over an interval was usually good enough. No one felt much need for an instant speed reading.

“AMERICA certainly can not pretend to wage war with us,” a London newspaper declared on June 10, 1812. “She has no navy to do it with.” Such was the disdain for American sea power on the eve of the War of 1812 that the British politician George Canning dismissed the infant U.S. Navy as “a few firbuilt frigates with hits of hunting at the top.”

POLITICIANS LOVE THE LIME -light, and so, it is said, do performers. But people familiar with the theater know that there is no limelight anymore, and there hasn’t been for ages. Most people don’t even know what limelight actually was.

I KNEW HAROLD EDGERTON (“THE MAN Who Stopped Time,” by Joyce E. Bedi, Summer 1997) very well, beginning in my days as a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s. While his fascination with high-speed photography led him to many unusual endeavors, such as a fruitful collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in undersea exploration, the most extraordinary was that of setting off all the atomic and hydrogen bombs the United States tested.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.: The year 1996 sees two major American industries, cars and computers, celebrating anniversaries. In both cases the date is somewhat arbitrary. As early as 1805 Oliver Evans drove a steampowered vehicle through Philadelphia; as for internal combustion, at least three such cars were successfully operated in 1893 and 1894. The so-called centennial of the American automobile industry turns out to commemorate a more arcane milestone: the first multiple production of a gasolinepowered car, the 1896 Duryea.

IN 1833 A NEWSPAPER IN Albany, New York, printed a rave review of a demonstration of nitrous oxide gas presented by an itinerant lecturer named Dr. Coult—Dr. Coult of London, New York, and Calcutta.

THE FIRST ANESTHESIOLOGISTS found that they could harness the very power of sleep. With nitrous oxide, ether, or chloroform, they discovered a passageway leading to an insensible sleep known as narcosis. Their successors managed to explore that shadowy route, charting each individual patient’s course through it, and over the past 150 years anesthesiology can be said to have been fully realized as an instrument of medicine, to have been mastered.

COKE, A FUEL USED mainly in iron and steel manufacture, is essentially pure carbon. If it came out of the ground that way, life would be a lot simpler—and cleaner. Unfortunately, coke starts out as bituminous coal, a mixture of carbon and various impurities. Separating the impurities is not particularly hard; you just heat the coal to drive them off. The problem lies in disposing of the unwanted portions. For decades each new solution simply replaced an old environmental peril with a new, unexpected one.