Frederic D. Schwarz’s article about slide rules (“Notes From the Field,” Fall 1993), caught my eye. My comment is that newer is not necessarily better. I teach physics, math, and computer courses, and I keep telling my students that one should first consider the task at hand and the desired results before automatically grabbing for a pocket calculator or a computer. For certain types of calculations, slide rules can still run rings around any electronic instrument.
NEW YORK, N.Y. : Everybody knows why the Titanic , sank: It hit an iceberg. Amid all the analysis that has taken place since the accident occurred on the night of April 14, 1912, that much at least is undisputed. What exactly happened after it hit, though, is open to considerable speculation. For years students of the disaster have pored over eyewitness accounts and radio logs, trying to establish what went wrong and why.
“For the historian there are no banal things,” said the Swiss architectural critic Siegfried Giedion. A historian of technology is supposed to know this, but it helps to be reminded from time to time. My most important reminder came during a course that I taught on invention, in which a student proposed to write her term paper on the history of the zipper. I was skeptical. What kind of story could there be in the history of a simple, ubiquitous device that was such a trivial part of everyday life?
Benjamin Franklin is remembered for many reasons today—as inventor, statesman, commentator, and patriot—but he is perhaps best known as an electrical experimenter and theorist. He named the two states of electricity, positive and negative; he showed that lightning was electric with his famous kiteflying experiment; and he explained the action of the Leyden jar, the earliest capacitor.
It was August 1914, and World War I had just started. Germany had a new and worrisome weapon in its Zeppelins—huge rigid airships that could stay aloft for dozens of hours, traveling long distances or hovering nearly motionless. Britain had nothing similar in prospect. The Admiralty feared that those airships could serve as eyes for the German fleet, and Britain needed to improvise a counter-weapon.
After Clarence Birdseye perfected his process to freeze fresh foods, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea of freezing cooked dishes as well. By the early 1930s General Foods had a few prepared items, such as Irish stew, on the market. Far-sighted executives envisioned complete frozen dinners, packaged in one carton, with family-size servings of several items in separate containers.
ON MARCH 29, 1889, WILLIAM KEMM ler killed his lover Matilda (“Tillie”) Ziegler with an ax at their home in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, it would turn out, was an infelicitous place to have done such a thing. The city was the home of the nation’s first commercially successful alternating-current electrical-transmission system and of a progressive-thinking humane society that had recently introduced the use of electricity to dispose of stray cats and dogs.
TUSTIN, CALIF.: It was inevitable. After an item about slide-rule collectors appeared in this space in Fall 1993, it was only a matter of time before the logical next step would be taken. Sure enough, word has arrived of the International Association of Calculator Collectors (IACC), formed early last year by Guy Ball and Bruce Flamm, a pair of “dedicated (and slightly obsessed)” antiquarians in Southern California who between them own more than fifteen hundred portable calculators.
Is it possible to own a miracle? Horace Goldin, a vaudeville-era stage magician, tried to do just that. He developed a technique for sawing an assistant in half—an illusion as closely associated with magicians as pulling a rabbit out of a hat—and then embarked on an extensive and costly legal campaign to protect his invention from competitors and anyone else who tried to exploit it.
No one can know what the ramifications of an invention will be, not with any certainty. In England a minister tried to halt the first experiments with locomotives by insisting that the human skeleton would collapse at speeds over thirty miles per hour. He pointed to the condition of people who fell off cliffs.
There is generally an enormous gulf between aeronautical engineering and flight as a subject for poetry and art. The artist deals with soaring metaphors and human emotions; the designer, even while Grafting wings and fuselages with the exquisite care of a sculptor, works instead from calculations and technical principles. Poets may admire an airplane’s grace but know little of its structural design; engineers, in creating that design, build it strictly along functional lines, paying no heed to the merely ornamental.
The kazoo, like the Chiclets box and the comb covered with wax paper, is a mirliton, a musical instrument in which air vibrates a membrane. It was invented, as far as is known, by Alabama Vest, a slave in Macon, Georgia, who thought it up around 1840. It is said to be the only purely American musical instrument.
Frederic D. Schwarz’s article about slide rules (“Notes From the Field,” Fall 1993), caught my eye. My comment is that newer is not necessarily better. I teach physics, math, and computer courses, and I keep telling my students that one should first consider the task at hand and the desired results before automatically grabbing for a pocket calculator or a computer. For certain types of calculations, slide rules can still run rings around any electronic instrument.
The first challenge in the development of the practical sewing machine was the design of an apparatus that could make a mechanical stitch. The second was the refinement of that apparatus into a reliable machine able to make stitches by the thousand, continuously and without a hitch.
Cities, like other living things, need water to grow: water for drinking and bathing, water for industry, water for sanitation and fires. Towns often grow first and get thirsty later, but whenever the thirst becomes evident, it has to be quenched for the town to flourish.
“THE HISTORY OF THE ZIPPER?” (BY Robert Friedel, Summer 1994) brought to mind my first experience with a zipper, just before the summer of 1940. I opened a law office in 1938, and in the spring of 1940 I bought a new suit, with a zipper, for $59.50. Connecticut’s blue laws forbade the sale of liquor after 9:00 P.M. on Sunday, and to attract diners, the Seven Gables in Milford, the premier nightclub in the area, had a Sunday dinner from six to nine for one dollar.
The mind of Henry Ford, was, I think, not so much inventive as associative; his genius found full expression in the efficient rearrangement of things. He admired Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, among others, because what they imagined and then brought to pass was genuinely new; Ford’s own achievements had more to do with what was readily available and could be improved. He did not conceive of the automobile; rather, he mass-produced it. And innovation followed in the wake of repetition.
Late in 1833 Thomas Davenport, a thirty-one-year-old blacksmith from Brandon, Vermont, visited the Penfield Iron Works in nearby Crown Point, New York. There he saw a three-pound electromagnet lift a 150-pound anvil. Davenport was deeply impressed. At great expense he bought the electromagnet instead of the iron he had come for.
As usual, I found your latest issue most interesting. The article “Seam Stresses,” by J. M. Fenster (Winter 1994), rightly tells of the resistance to sewing machines in France and of the multiple contributions that gave the sewing machine its final form, acceptable in both home and industry. I would like to suggest, however, that even more emphasis be placed on the effects of what Peter F. Drucker calls the productivity revolution, which of course was a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
IN MARCH 1626 SIR FRANCIS Bacon tried to invent frozen food. The great British philosopher and essayist bought a hen, dressed it, and stuffed it with snow. The only thing he accomplished, though, was his own death. The sixty-five-year-old Bacon caught a chill during the experiment, came down with bronchitis, and died a few weeks later.
