ON THE WEB: Believe it or not, there’s an awful lot more on the World Wide Web about the history of technology than there is about, say, restaurants in Los Angeles. You might expect the brand-new information technology to excel at providing info of the moment, but judging from a recent journey through its expanses, solid history may get the best treatment of all. The Web is chock-full of history-of-technology museum displays, “virtual exhibits,” illustrated articles, teaching materials, library resources, periodicals, and more.

WE ALL TEND TO JUDGE NEW TECH nologies by what we suppose to be their political ramifications; just look at how people respond to the Internet, the Human Genome Project, or nuclear power. But how does a new technology acquire the political meanings that so define it? And are they really immutable, or can a single technology have at different times different and even contradictory politics? At least one technology has had its politics turn 180 degrees and mean clearly opposite things: the geodesic dome.

ONE ENTERS THE OLD PART OF Auburn, Indiana, abruptly, as though passing through a clearly marked curtain of time. After a vale of strip malls and franchise food, the large street trees close in suddenly, shading a rich selection of Victorian, Craftsman, twenties Tudor, and generic Colonial houses, anchored at the center by the limestone and art-glass fortress of the DeKaIb County Courthouse.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AMERICAN Revolution, a man named David Bushnell built the world’s first practical submarine, which became known as the Turtle . He developed it in secrecy in Saybrook, Connecticut, and it came tantalizingly close to sinking the flagship of the British fleet.

Twenty-six of the best articles from Invention & Technology ’s first decade have been collected in the formats in which they originally appeared, with all the illustrations, in a new hardcover book called Inventing America ( CODE: AXH15 ). Copies can be obtained by calling 1-800-876-6556 .

AMONG THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PROFESSIONAL relationships of the first half of the twentieth century was the legendary association between the Standard Railroad of the World and the world’s best-known industrial-design firm, Raymond Loewy Associates. For two decades the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad and the dazzling Loewy organization collaborated on a set of images and objects that came to symbolize the Machine Age. Each organization proudly called public attention to its ties with the other.

AT THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , St. Louis, Missouri, was a city on the move, America’s burgeoning frontier metropolis. By 1860 the city had 160,000 residents, and if the bustling riverfront wharves gave any indication, growth and prosperity were not about to end. Standing at the confluence of the vast Mississippi and Missouri river networks, St.

WHEN BEVERAGE MANU facturers started putting their products in bottles, perhaps the biggest obstacle was finding an airtight seal. Cork, the ancient solution, was cheap, easy to handle, and flavorless; unfortunately, cork plugs tended to come loose, especially with beer and carbonated beverages. Some fifteen hundred bottle stoppers were patented by the 1890s, none very effective: They leaked, rusted, imparted unpleasant flavors and odors, and were so expensive that they had to be reused.

The Blue Riband Lives

I HAVE JUST READ “THE THRALL OF the Blue Riband,” by Robert C. Post (Winter 1996). Your readers might be interested to know that the Blue Riband, which the United States won on her maiden voyage in 1952, is now in foreign hands. The Sea Cat , a tri-hulled car ferry built for the England-to-France channel trade, eclipsed the United States ’s record in 1990 by a mere two hours and forty-six minutes.

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum is located at 1600 South Wayne St., P.O. Box 271, Auburn, IN 46706 (Tel: 219-925-1444). The town of Auburn lies at the intersection of I-69 and Indiana Route 8, about twenty miles north of Fort Wayne and thirty-five miles south of I-80/I-90 and the Michigan border. The museum is open from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.

AFTER THIS MAGA zine published my article on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (“A Manned Moon Shot—in 1865”), in Spring 1994, a curious letter appeared in the next issue. A fellow Ohio engineer, Paul Williams, had written to tell about an early-1960s scheme to launch rockets from a huge gun that bore uncanny parallels to the one in the Verne book. After his letter appeared, Paul called me to arrange a lunch.

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT the Society for Industrial Archeology, which leads tours of industrial sites each year and publishes a newsletter and a journal and has local chapters around the country, write to Society for Industrial Archeology Headquarters, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technical University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI 49931. Membership is open to anyone interested and costs thirty-five dollars a year.

THE 1949-50 SEASON WAS A VERY GOOD ONE for television owners. Ed Sullivan presented “The Toast of the Town” Sunday nights on CBS, and “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” appeared on Wednesdays. Milton Berle headlined “Texaco Star Theater” Tuesday nights on NBC. “Cavalcade of Stars” aired on the DuMont network on Saturdays. And “Roller Derby” rumbled two nights a week on ABC.

IT’S SOMETIMES HARD TO TELL when someone has just saved your life. But Elbert Botts has pulled me back from the brink a number of times, and he’s probably uncooked your goose once or twice too. Although there are no statues to honor Botts, he has hundreds of millions of tiny monuments to his memory along the world’s highways. No one can say how many lives they have saved during the last thirty years, but the total is more, I’d venture, than air bags and seat belts combined.

Bell Labs’ Greatness

I AM NOW A VISITING PROFESSOR OF music emeritus at Stanford University. I looked back many years with keen nostalgia when I read the fine piece “What Made Bell Labs Great,” by T. A. Heppenheimer, in your Summer 1996 issue. I encountered again the Labs’ “broad (but not unlimited) domain … ripe for innovation.” I admired again one of my heroes, M. J. Kelly, and recalled various other characters named or discussed, including myself.

A SHIMMERING MIRAGE, PINPOINT small, hovered on the horizon—one big ship floating on two razorthin hulls like ice-skate blades. It grew slowly, so it must be approaching us. We were a crowd of forty people on a sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser waiting by a dock at seven o’clock in the warm breezes of a January morning in Panama.

WHEN AN AMERICAN AIRLINES BOEING 757 SLAMMED into a mountain in Colombia just before Christmas last year, the world was shocked that such a modern plane, with all the latest safety equipment, could come to such an end. Everyone wanted to know how it had occurred. Though the plane had vanished in the jungle without human witnesses, the aircraft’s mechanical witnesses—its cockpit voice and flight-data recorders—were able to tell us in a few days, with intimate detail, the plight of Flight 965.

EVER SINCE ANTIQUITY HUMANS HAVE DREAMED OF flying with artificial wings. The rocket belt realizes that timeless fantasy with twentieth-century technology.

I HAVE JUST READ “THE THRALL OF the Blue Riband,” by Robert C. Post (Winter 1996). Your readers might be interested to know that the Blue Riband, which the United States won on her maiden voyage in 1952, is now in foreign hands. The Sea Cat , a tri-hulled car ferry built for the England-to-France channel trade, eclipsed the United States ’s record in 1990 by a mere two hours and forty-six minutes.

THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN Priscilla Vansteelant and Ronald Woody II is one for the record books. Five years ago Vansteelant was driving her 1989 Chrysler LeBaron sedan near Culpeper, Virginia, when she drifted left of Rural Route 640’s center line. Coincidentally Woody was driving a 1989 LeBaron convertible in the opposite direction. The two LeBarons met corner to corner on a blind hilltop at a closing speed of seventy miles per hour. Vansteelant was wearing a seat belt but Woody was not.