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THE STEAM TUG ROLLED GENTLY ON THE NORTH Atlantic swells. It was a chilly April morning in 1886. Bill Dwyer sat on deck and donned the modern deep-sea-diving dress of his day: copper helmet connected by a rubber air hose to a handcranked pump; brass-and-rubber suit sealed to the helmet and garnished with lead weights hung over the back and chest; and heavy lead-weighted boots to let him walk, not swim, on the sea floor—more than 150 pounds of gear in all, not counting the many fathoms of hose and rope.

Ron Kaiser was in elementary school in 1948 when he played hooky to watch his first television program. His father had bought an eight-foot-high set with a twelve-inch screen for his small tavern in a western Pennsylvania coal-mining town, and Ron stayed home to watch the sixth game of the World Series from Boston. “There was so much snow in there it looked like a blizzard,” he said. “But you could make out the figures. You could see that there were really people inside that little machine.”

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 DECEMBER 1860, WITH SECESSION IMMINENT AND ARMED CONFLICT certain to follow, William Tecumseh Sherman, superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, warned a colleague: “You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. … You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people and will fight too. … The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make.

One of the first products of the frozen-food industry, and still one of the most popular, is the ordinary green pea. Its journey from field to consumer illustrates the basic processes involved in the production of frozen food.

“That’s ‘Hark the Herald,’” says Robert Berkman, glancing at blank slotted paper emerging from a perforating machine made around 1915. “Those are the final chords.” The machine has been punching forty layers of paper at once, making player-piano rolls the way it made them during World War I.

Two feet and seventy years away sits a personal computer. A cable from it branches into a sprawl of wires feeding to solenoids that drive about a hundred tiny electro-pneumatic valves. They run the perforator’s ancient pneumatic system.

“I MAKE USE OF PHYSICS. I GO TO THE MOON IN A CANNON ball, discharged from a cannon. He [H. G. Wells] goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. That’s all very well, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.”

PEOPLE OFTEN WRITE ABOUT HENRY FORD AS IF HE WAS A VERY ODD DUCK unlike the rest of us—an odd duck who had so much money he could get away with things. I think of him as a very ordinary duck, the difference being that after his early years he had so much money that he could act out impulses that we all may have but can’t possibly obey. I think his very similarities to us make it instructive to follow Henry Ford through some of his history.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as bicycles became more reliable and easier to ride, various Western countries experimented with using the new device as a military tool. Italy was the first, putting crack sharpshooters on wheels in 1870. By 1887 the French Army had soldier cyclists; it later developed a folding bicycle weighing only twenty-five pounds that could be carried in a backpack. Cyclist sections were formed among British volunteer forces in 1888; by 1894 they numbered 5,100, with a planned increase to 20,000.

Iron was the miracle material of the nineteenth century—abundant, cheap, and extremely useful. It was perfect for jobs requiring great strength in proportion to weight: cylinders for pumps and steam engines; boats and barges for canals; beams and columns for mill buildings; and, eventually, bridges. Several thousand iron bridges were built in America between 1840 (when iron began to replace wood and stone) and 1880 (when it was in turn being superseded by steel); some six dozen survive.

Seventy-one iron bridges from the golden age still stand. They are mostly combination bridges, made of both cast and wrought iron. Here are all seventy-one arranged geographically and listed with their designers and, where indicated, builders. ( NOTE : Several of the bridges listed are privately owned. Owner’s consent should be secured before venturing onto private property.)

BALTIMORE, MD. : When Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” in 1954, he inspired today’s pastoral school of baseball writing, in which every pop fly is an evocation of our country’s bucolic heritage. While it’s doubtful that the bleacher bums at Wrigley Field have any such thing in mind when they turn out to cheer the Cubs, Mr.

In 1933, as the Nazis took control of Germany and began to prepare for conquest, one of their first priorities was research into radio communication. Two years later German industry produced a new tool for the trade of listening: the Magnetophon magnetic tape recorder. The Magnetophon was the first truly practical recorder that used tape, and it emerged in the aftermath of World War II to set the modern course of magnetic recording. In America Bing Crosby staked his career in broadcasting to start a revolution for Magnetophon technology.

Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff—chairman of the hoard of RCA, founder of NBC, radio pioneer, adviser to Presidents, and the most powerful and visible man in the business of broadcasting—made three wishes.

When I tell them I invented the personal computer, people look at me like I just stepped off a flying saucer,” says Jack Frassanito, an industrial designer in Houston, Texas. He did invent it, though. His name is on a patent, issued July 25, 1972, for a machine that is the direct lineal ancestor of the PC as we know it.

Sixty years after the world’s first cast-iron bridge was built in England, Capt. Richard Delafield of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected America’s first cast-iron bridge, on the Cumberland Road. The 130-mile portion of the road from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, (West) Virginia, which opened in 1818, had been built by the federal government as a land route between the Ohio River and the Eastern states. However, as the result of niggardly allocations for maintenance, the road had quickly fallen into disrepair.

“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.

“YOU MAY TALK, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN , you may cough. They will not hear you. They do not even know you are here. And now, suppose you all follow me. Just come this way, if you will, and we will meet the first of our temporary visitors.” For forty years millions of revelers visiting Coney Island were drawn away from the clamor of roller coasters and shooting galleries to see these “temporary visitors”—tiny premature babies struggling to survive in prototypical incubators.

THE PHOTOGRAPH ABOVE SHOWS AN INSTALLATION of two IBM 7090 Electronic Data Processing Systems, manufactured by International Business Machines and installed at North American Aviation in Southern California sometime in the early 1960s. In colloquial terms the photo shows a large “mainframe” computer system. The word probably comes from the large metal frames, housed in the cabinets, on which the computer’s electronic circuits were mounted. Entire chassis could swing out, like refrigerator doors, for maintenance.

In December 1848 President James K. Polk told America in his State of the Union address that the persistent reports of gold in California were true. Within days Eastern cities were rocking and humming with a feverish mania unequaled before or since.