MAMMOTH SMOKE RINGS DOWN ENEMY BOMBERS! MONSTER MACHINE CREATES MAN-MADE TORNADOES! It was a fantastic idea, and it approached reality during World War II. The client? The U.S. government.

The East Broad Top will run three trains daily, at 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 and 3:00 P.M. , on Saturdays and Sundays only, starting June 3, 1995, and ending October 15. Prospective riders should call the EBT at 814-447-3011 for information. Orbisonia, about fifty miles west of Harrisburg, is on Route 522, fifteen miles north of Exit 13 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

AT THE END OF A LONG, WINDING DRIVEWAY in the farm country outside Waukesha, Wisconsin, just beyond the advancing sprawl of Milwaukee, I step past several chickens, a turkey, and one of the biggest cats I have ever seen and into a gift store that sells mainly woolen goods—slippers, gloves, socks, rugs, and comforters. As the woman who owns the store comes out to greet me, I hear from behind her a noise from the Industrial Revolution.

THE EAST BROAD TOP RAILROAD was organized in 1871, under a charter issued in 1856, to build a narrow-gauge track between the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line at Mount Union and a group of coal-mining communities some thirty miles to the south. The first section, from Mount Union to Rockhill Furnace, opened in August 1873, and the remainder of its main stem reached Robertsdale the following year. Several branches were added later.

IN AN ARTICLE TITLED “THE LOST LANGUAGE of Trains” in the Winter 1995 Invention & Technology , Peter Tuttle described how the traditions of steam railroading live on in Chama, New Mexico, where workers continue venerable practices and pass along ancient lore amid a physical setting that is a mixture of old and new.

Smokeless Powder

As an admirer of the Springfield 1873 to 1892 trapdoor rifle, I must rush to its defense from the attack on it that accompanied the smokeless-powder piece (“The Tragedy of the Trapdoor Springfield,” by Roger Pinckney). Before its official adoption by the Army in 1873, this fine old rugged rifle was fieldtested and won out over all the leading firearms of the day.

IN MAY 1943 CMDR. WILLIAM S. (“Deak”) Parsons returned from a secret mission to the South Pacific, where he had successfully introduced a new weapon in the war against Japan. He expected his next assignment to be the command of a ship. Instead he found himself on a train heading toward a most unlikely posting for a Navy officer: Los Alamos, New Mexico. His traveling companion was a nuclear physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Fermi’s life is covered in Atoms in the Family , by his wife, Laura Fermi, and in Enrico Fermi , Physicist, by his friend and collaborator Emilio Segrè. Nuclear piles and their role in the race for an atomic bomb are described in The New World, 1939/1946 , an official Manhattan Project history by Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA was famous for its machines. It also became famous for turning those machines into richly decorated works of art. Factory engines were painted bright red and green or made to resemble Roman and Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals, with classical columns, Doric-order entablatures, and pointed arches. Machine tools were covered with swirling arabesques or fanciful floral and animal images. Sewing machines were adorned with Egyptian sphinxes. Why?

PITTSBURGH, PA.: America’s rivers used to come in two varieties: pretty and working. The pretty ones attracted lovers, poets, and artists; the working ones stank, turned orange, caught on fire, and blighted the landscape. At first the two could be combined, as with a little old stone mill and its handsome, inefficient water wheel. But once manufacturers started learning about hydraulics and discovered economies of scale, beauty and industry went separate ways.

TO MOST AMERICANS TODAY THE NAME Charles F. Kettering conjures up little beyond a vague feeling that he had something to do with cancer research. Yet the interest that this remarkable man had in medicine was only a sideline. What enabled him late in life to help found the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City was an extraordinarily productive and lucrative career as an automotive inventor. His achievements made him one of the most admired Americans of his day. And in a way he is not really forgotten.

AMONG THOSE HUMBLE inventions that have moved into everyone’s lives and that no one can remember ever being without, probably none occupies such a warm spot in our affections as Scotch tape—or, as its developer called it, Scotch Brand cellophane tape. Millions of miles of it are pressed down every year by people in every walk of life all over the world for all manner of surprising uses—none of which were dreamed of by its originators, who thought of it only as a handy means of sealing packages.

ATTACK! THE ORDER REACHED THE TROOPS OF DESERT Storm at 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 24, 1991. Within minutes, as the command crackled over unit radios, the night was filled with the rumble of motors turning over in 1,956 M1A1 Abrams tanks. Pulses pounded as the big metal beasts rolled into southern Iraq, spearheading a massive armored thrust around the right flank of the Iraqi army, which had dug into defensive positions in and near Kuwait. Other M1A1s, many manned by U.S.

BY THE END OF THE NINE teenth century, Thomas Edison’s laboratory had created a machine that could record sounds and one that could record moving pictures. Combining the two was the obvious next step. At first it seemed a simple matter of making them start and stop at the same time—no more complicated than running any two machines at once. Yet more than thirty years would pass before talking pictures fully succeeded with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927.

TROY, N.Y.: The story is told of a finicky director filming a costume drama who insisted that his extras wear not just historically accurate uniforms, boots, and headgear but even underwear appropriate to the era. When asked who would know the difference if they wore ordinary BVDs instead, the auteur replied, “I would.”

HENRY FORD WAS INDEED A GREAT IN novator (“Henry Ford’s Big Flaw,” by John M. Staudenmaier, S.J.), but I question that those are “6000-horsepower gas-turbine engines in the powerhouse” shown on page 38 of the Fall 1994 issue. The prime movers driving the dynamos appear to be cross-compound Corliss steam engines. Gas turbines didn’t become available for industrial use until well after World War II.

Cowen’s inventions, in fact, often developed in ways he hadn’t intended. He meant to revolutionize photography in 1898 with his fuse for igniting magnesium-powder flashes, but instead the U.S. Navy bought 24,000 to use in detonating underwater mines. Then he designed little metal tubes to illuminate flowers in their pots, which another man used to start the Eveready flashlight company.

FEW TECHNOLOGIES HAVE TOPPED nuclear energy in its capacity to bring forth sweeping predictions of either doom or nirvana. Either we were going to blow ourselves up or, as Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission suggested in 1954, we would have electric power too cheap to be worth metering. In the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s, the possibilities of a fuel that packed 400,000 times the wallop of TNT seemed endless.

THE FATE OF MOST ABANDONED RAIL roads is a speedy dismemberment. The rolling stock is sold to other railroads, or if it’s as obsolete and undersized as that of the EBT, it usually goes to the scrapyard. The rails are then pulled up and sold to be relaid or scrapped. The buildings are sold for adaptive reuse, torn down, or simply abandoned. The rightof-way is offered to anyone who can use it.

FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS SUMMER, THE WORLD WAS changed forever when the first nuclear bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert and then bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The moral, psychological, and geopolitical ramifications of this most powerful and revolutionary of all technologies and its use have been matters of universal concern ever since. They will undoubtedly be the subject of particularly intense discussion this summer.