“ALL WE KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS EQUIPMENT IS that it came over new from Germany in the 1920s,” says Lorette Russenberger, standing in the light, airy loft space of her Milwaukee factory. “You see, the company went through a lot of owners before the last one basically drove it into the ground.” She shakes her head. “He was very stubborn. I offered him five times as much for the company as I ended up paying at the 1RS auction.”

WE ALL KNOW THAT CHICAGO was once the “City of the big shoulders,” as immortalized by Carl Sandburg. It was also the city whose citizens the architect Daniel Burnham supposedly challenged to “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Though times have changed, Chicago and its satellite burgs across the Indiana border still conjure up apocalyptic images of raw industrial power.

DURING AVIATION’S HARLY DAYS PILOTS NAVIGATED BY following the railroad tracks. When the weather closed in, they would come down to low altitudes and continue onward. This practice led to such techniques as keeping to the right, to avoid collisions with low-flying oncoming planes. Hazards of the business included running into a locomotive and hitting a hill pierced by a tunnel.

Big Gun

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.

In reading “Made In America,” Nicholas Delbanco’s article about Henry Ford Museum (Winter 1994), I was surprised to find what appeared to be a technical error on page 11. A device shown there was described as “a fan from the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel.” It seems obvious to me that you erred in assuming that the power output of the device was at the fan end. The machine appears to be a wind-driven grinding wheel. Note the abrasive stone and tool rests.

Harold Warp Pioneer Village (Minden, NE 68959; Tel: 1-800-445-4447 (in Nebraska, 308-832-1181); Fax: 308-832-2750) is open every day of the year from 8:00 A.M. to sundown. It’s located twelve miles south of Interstate 80 at exit 279, on Nebraska Highway 10. Admission is $5.00 for adults, $2.50 for children aged six through fifteen, and free for younger children. A single admission is good for as many days as you wish to stay, and group rates are available.

“THIS USED TO BE THE CANDY CAPITAL OF THE world,” says Walter J. Marshall, looking out from his top-floor office at the New England Confectionery Company, two blocks and a whole world away from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We started it all in 1847; Schrafft came in in 1861, and then Fanny Farmer and all the others. Now there’s just us and Tootsie Roll Industries. It all migrated to the Midwest.

A NUMBER OF IN teresting new books have arrived in our offices lately, and this column is devoted to recommending the best of them. To make them easier to get hold of, we have made it possible to order them through us: See the box at the end of the facing page.

• The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology

”Sendzimir was a genius, a real character. The only problem was he had so many ideas. Ninetyfive percent of them weren’t any good. But the remaining five percent were so good that you forgot all the rest.” That’s how Tad Sendzimir is remembered by one steel-plant chief—and perhaps all of them, around the world, who own Sendzimir rolling mills.

Wright Or Wrong?

In reading “Made In America,” Nicholas Delbanco’s article about Henry Ford Museum (Winter 1994), I was surprised to find what appeared to be a technical error on page 11. A device shown there was described as “a fan from the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel.” It seems obvious to me that you erred in assuming that the power output of the device was at the fan end. The machine appears to be a wind-driven grinding wheel. Note the abrasive stone and tool rests.

MODERN TEA DRINKERS owe a debt of gratitude to Faye Osborne, for he is the father of the tea bag. He spent decades developing a paper with no taste that would be porous without falling apart. Osborne began his work in the 1920s, but tea bags were around long before then. As early as 1904 a salesman named Thomas Sullivan packed samples of loose tea in handsewn silk bags. He meant them simply as a sales gimmick, but some customers started using them for brewing. The advantage was obvious: no more leaves to fuss with.

YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPIER TO visit your dentist than after you’ve seen the new Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, where the artifacts of what once passed for dental technology will be unflinchingly displayed.

FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE WERE at the marina on the edge of San Francisco Bay, staring up in rigid fascination as Lincoln Beachey, his plane horrifyingly shorn of it wings, fell like Icarus from the winter sky. Beachey would have enjoyed their sudden silence. He often said they only came to see him die.

THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY WAS an important part of my life for at least forty years, from the early 1930s to 1975. As a native and long-time resident of Ogdensburg, New York—Seaway country—I watched it develop from a hotly disputed geopolitical concept to a massive construction enterprise to a vital international trade route. And then I watched it decline from a world-renowned engineering masterpiece to a half-forgotten artifact of the 1950s, a victim of global economic and logistics changes and its own design shortcomings.

BOSTON, MASS. : Who invented the bicycle? As with almost any invention, attributing it to a single person is problematic, requiring Talmudic distinctions on matters like when it took its current form, what degree of refinement is required, and how anecdotal the supporting evidence can be. In some cases the trail is hopelessly obscured, and one might as well ask who wrote “Three Blind Mice,” who made up the latest disaster joke, or who first thought of putting crushed M&M’s in ice cream.

Jack Ingram, curator of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, denies that his institution is a mysterious place. Yet visitors have to find it on an access road behind a gas station, surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence of chainlink and barbed wire, housed in the former restaurant of a nondescript gray ranchstyle converted motel at Fort George G. Meade, just outside Baltimore.

Outside Buffalo, New York, lives a man named Ed Winter who collects old machines. He has dozens of steam engines and tractors and railroad cars, but the centerpiece of the assemblage is a twenty-fourfoot flywheel salvaged from a factory that was being demolished. It’s painted bright red and stands upright on a platform near the road, where it makes an arresting sight for passing motorists. As a lawn ornament it certainly beats plastic flamingos and cast-iron jockeys.

“This is something I’ve never told anyone,” says David Kahn, between sips of cola at the Century Club in New York City. On a rainy, humid early evening in May, punctuated by the sound of the occasional car horn from the street below, he has been holding forth on one of his favorite subjects: Edward Hugh Hebern, a seminal figure in twentieth-century cryptography.

“This is a replacement human hip part,” says Michael Coladonato, showing me a curved metal bar about eight inches long shaped so gracefully it looks like sculpture. “We made it of a cobalt-chrome-nickel alloy called MP35N. And these things over here hold the space shuttle together. You spend a lot of money for these. We’re the world leader in precision fasteners.”

AS THE ERIE CANAL NEARED COMPLETION IN THE 1820s, IT BROUGHT HAPPY anticipation to businessmen in New York City. The canal would carry raw materials from the country’s interior across New York State from Lake Erie to Albany; from Albany goods would travel down the Hudson River to the city’s port facilities on their way to manufacturers at home and abroad. Finished goods would travel to the rapidly growing Western states by the reverse path. The canal would be a windfall for both city and state.