CHICAGO, ILL. : When Enrico Fermi built his atomic pile on a squash court under the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field (see page 10), it was the most important event to occur at a racketsport facility since the Tennis Court Oath in the French Revolution.

“I‘M HUNGRY. LET’S GO TO LUNCH!”

IN THE EARLY 1930S A TALL, THIN CANADIAN-BORN Chicagoan named Harry J. McCollum invented a car heater that burned raw gasoline. Two things made it amazing. First, it didn’t blow up. Second, it made the interior of his old Chrysler toasty warm in just ninety seconds.

WILMINGTON, DEL. : Any dedicated viewer of television’s “The A-Team” knows that the high point of each episode is the engineering scene. First the team stumbles on a rusty old airplane, tank, or rocket launcher that just happens to be right where they need it; then Mr. T patches it up with paper clips, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, and his Swiss Army knife; and finally the team members use it to subdue the bad guys and save the orphanage from ruin.

IN SINCLAIR LEWIS’S NOVEL MAIN STREET there is a scene where Dr. Will Kennicott and his wife, Carol, are on a hunting expedition near their Minnesota home. Dr. Kennicott, who prides himself on being up-to-date, lectures his less than fascinated bride on the merits of his new rifle, which uses the latest thing in propellants—smokeless powder.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1864 FEDERAL troops were stalled before Petersburg and Atlanta, and the public was souring on what seemed to be an endless war. Democrats were suggesting peace overtures to the Confederacy, and President Lincoln was nervous about his re-election. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton instructed Alexander B. Dyer, the Army’s chief of ordnance, to break the stalemate with increased firepower.

THOMAS FLEMING’S ARTICLE “TANKS” (Winter 1995) was fascinating in recounting the U.S. Army’s more than sixty-year struggle to develop a truly world-class fighting vehicle, but a gap in the story is evident. The marvelousIy detailed cutaway illustration of the M1A1 Abrams tank, with more than thirty callouts for its components, fails to pick out the raison d’être for the two-million-dollar vehicle: its main weapon and ammunition.

“WELCOME TO RIDE NIAGARA’S ULTIMATE ADVENTURE , made possible by the amazing DraxE-1000, high-technology, submersible vehicle—the only vehicle in the world that dares to take you over mighty Niagara Falls in perfect comfort and relative safety.” The speaker continues this soothing spiel as you travel along an “abandoned hydro tunnel” that deposits you in the Niagara River, immediately above the falls. Soon the craft is tossing and turning in the upper rapids; then it plunges down, down, down into the abyss below. Are you in danger? No.

IT WAS PERHAPS THE MOST AUDACIOUS ESPIONAGE CAPER OF THE COLD War. Starting in 1954, British and American intelligence agencies dug a quarter-mile-long tunnel from a suburb of West Berlin under the border and into the Soviet-controlled East. At the tunnel’s end they tapped into telephone and telegraph cables over which the Soviet military command in Germany communicated with Moscow and points east. They listened in for almost a year.

ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST person to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel, but she wasn’t the first stunter on the river. That honor goes to Sam Patch of Passaic Falls, New Jersey. On October 7 and 17, 1829, Patch made leaps of 85 and 130 feet into the Niagara River at the base of Horseshoe Falls from a platform of tree limbs lashed together. He died later that year—on Friday, November 13—doing a high dive into the Genesee River at Rochester, New York.

TO A CASUAL TRAVELER, THE NUMEROUS SMALL towns of the Great Plains, regularly spaced between tracts of cropland or rangeland, can seem mundane and unremarkable, each sleepy hamlet having its constellation of church steeples, grain elevators, and perpendicular streets. The names of the towns—Volga, New UIm, Ghent, Pulaski—hint at the residents’ varied backgrounds; yet despite this ethnic diversity, any trip across the Middle West, from the Mississippi River to the Rockies or from Saskatchewan to Texas, reveals much the same residential pattern.

APPROACHED FROM THE EAST, CHAMA, New Mexico, has changed very little from a century ago. The highway over Cumbres Pass parallels the Cumbres and Toltec narrow-gauge railroad’s swirling descent through the high mountain parks of the Rio Chama, with the river valley widening and flattening for only the last few miles.

INSIDE AN UTTERLY NONDESCRIPT HANGAR-SIZE SHED across from the small rural airport in Cambridge, Maryland, Ken Knox runs a flourishing industrial business from another century. “We have equipment from 1900 and before working here,” he allows matter-of-factly. “This piece right here is from 1905. All this stuff”—he sweeps his hand across a roomful of dark iron forms, grimy with whole lifetimes of constant use—“you can’t buy now. I hate to think what it would cost to start a barrel business today.”

IN AN AGE WHEN SATELLITE COMMUNI cations can take us anywhere in the world within moments, we sometimes forget how short a time it has been since the interior of our own continent seemed as remote and mysterious as darkest Africa. To the generation that swelled with pride over the driving of the Golden Spike, spanning the continent meant something more than faster, easier travel. It offered access to a harsh but spectacular landscape that had long fascinated Americans.

The Atomic Bomb

Your articles on the atomic bomb brought back memories. How Oak Ridge, Tennessee, missed being mentioned I don’t understand. I was in the Army Corps of Engineers there when General Groves would come into Nashville by train and we would furnish vehicles for his use. We transferred twenty of the largest dump trucks I have ever seen to the Oak Ridge project.

IN 1877 A SAN FRANCISCO reporter, evidently weary of the endless hoopla over the city’s new Palace Hotel, described the hotel’s remote signaling device. Twenty-five thousand numbered bellboys, he wrote, one for each guest room, waited in a basement for lodgers to ring. “Down goes the clerk’s foot on a corresponding pedal and up shoots the bellboy.… He is put in a box, shut up in a pneumatic tube and whisked right into the room designated by the bell-dial.

TEN YEARS AND THIRTY-FIVE ISSUES AGO we introduced American Heritage of Invention & Technology , hoping that people might enjoy a magazine devoted only to the history of technology. To our surprise and delight they responded far more warmly than we ever expected, and we soon knew we had struck a real nerve. Our readers were thrilled to see a magazine about engineering history and cared deeply about what it said.

APPROXIMATELY A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, ON Chiapa de Corzo, a windswept plain on the west coast of Mexico, a Mayan sits on a rock with his head thrown back. In front of him stands the tribal shaman, who is about to begin the ritual of drilling holes in the man’s front teeth before inlaying them with jeweled ornaments.

To ORDER any of the above books, call 1-800-876-6556 and give your credit-card number and the code number listed at the beginning of the review. Books may be packaged and shipped separately; please allow six to eight weeks for delivery. Shipping and handling charges will be added. Orders will be accepted through December 15,1995.

Your articles on the atomic bomb brought back memories. How Oak Ridge, Tennessee, missed being mentioned I don’t understand. I was in the Army Corps of Engineers there when General Groves would come into Nashville by train and we would furnish vehicles for his use. We transferred twenty of the largest dump trucks I have ever seen to the Oak Ridge project.