Historians of technology have come to their calling by diverse paths, many from general history, some from journalism, some from engineering, and more and more from academic programs focused on technology and society. Few have had as unusual a pilgrimage as John Michael Staudenmaier, the author of Technology’s Storytellers , a prizewinning analysis of the emergence of the history of technology as a coherent intellectual discipline.

NEW YORK, N.Y. : Why did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse? The famous fiasco is a staple of introductory physics classes. Few students can forget seeing the grainy black-and-white film of the 1940 incident: the bridge ripples gently at first, then starts heaving and twisting with fearsome amplitude until finally, shockingly, it breaks apart.

Until the 1960s a student in an American engineering school was expected by his teachers to use his mind’s eye to examine things that engineers had designed—to look at them, listen to them, walk around them, and thus develop an intuitive “feel” for the way the material world works and sometimes doesn’t work. Students developed a sense of form and proportion by drawing and redrawing. They acquired a knowledge of materials in testing laboratories, foundries, and metalworking shops.

Half the world has seen the Newtown Holder Station, but you’ll never hear anyone call it that. The two huge canisters that rise above the flat landscape of Queens, maddeningly familiar monuments to the tens of thousands of motorists jammed in the traffic that strains from Manhattan toward the beaches and communities of Long Island, are “the Elmhurst gas tanks.”

Early on the morning of January 3,1944, a series of explosions ripped through the hull of a U.S. Navy destroyer that lay at anchor two miles south of New York City. The blast shook the entire metropolitan area, rattling plates and awakening people as far away as Westchester County, twenty-five miles to the north. As the flaming vessel sank, a swarm of boats from the Coast Guard Station at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, converged on it and began evacuating the 163 survivors. Fifty or more sailors had suffered burns and other injuries, many of them critical.

Tuesday, January 11, 1853, dawned clear and chilly, but despite the cold, Battery Park in lower Manhattan was thronged with curious spectators waiting to see the trial run of the Ericsson , a great ship powered not by wind or steam but by “caloric”—hot air. History was in the making; the Age of Caloric lay just ahead.

A Few Words About That Taxi

After reading the article “A Few Words About This Picture” (by Bobby Lowich, Fall 1992), I am left to wonder if old photographs can be trusted. Experience, however, has taught me that they do tell the truth, and that problems arise from interpretation. This is an interesting article, but I think the photo needs further study.

Half the world has seen the Newtown Holder Station, but you’ll never hear anyone call it that. The two huge canisters that rise above the flat landscape of Queens, maddeningly familiar monuments to the tens of thousands of motorists jammed in the traffic that strains from Manhattan toward the beaches and communities of Long Island, are “the Elmhurst gas tanks.”

Perhaps the most complicated piece of machinery built by hand in the world today is a Steinway Model D grand piano. The eight-foot-eleven-and-three-quarter-inch grand that is the favorite of concert pianists the world over has twelve thousand parts; it takes a year to make and roughly $60,000 to buy. It is built in a factory in Queens, New York, by a process that has hardly changed in a hundred years.

On March 16, 1906, a concert took place in the ballroom of the Hotel Hamilton in Holyoke, Massachusetts, that changed the nature of music in our century. The program, including selections by Schumann, Beethoven, and Bach, was standard concert A fare. But the music that filled the hall was made by an entirely new instrument: a music synthesizer.

I greatly appreciate “How Engineers Lose Touch” (by Eugene S. Ferguson) in the Winter 1993 issue of your magazine. I have never forgotten the frustration I experienced as an engineering student in the sixties when I discovered that many of my fellow students, who were doing much better than me academically, hadn’t the slightest idea which way to turn a nut, little intuition about how to put things together, and no feel for materials.

Few things on the planet look as satisfyingly like what they are as Clyde’s Cider Mill does on a cold blue morning a few days before Thanksgiving. It stands on a hillside in Old Mystic, Connecticut, surrounded by smoky November trees, feeding a steady column of steam into the still air as it ingests the contents of a truckful of McIntosh apples.

If there’s a cliché that hounds our lives unmercifully, it is that we live in the Information Age, a time when ever more information, wanted and unwanted, pours in on us from every side. So relentless and insistent has this flood become that it often seems impossible to escape. Marshall McLuhan’s once fanciful “global village” has emerged with astonishing swiftness in the form of a planet interconnected by elaborate media networks that transfer data and images almost instantly.

In retrospect it’s obvious that the first decade of this century was a time of great innovation in transportation—the beginning of our revolutionary shift to the automobile. But, like so many revolutions, that one was not evident at the outset. The big news in the early 1900s was the nearly complete conversion of urban transportation from horses to electric streetcars. With Henry Ford’s Model T not even on the market yet, the electrification of intercity transport looked like the logical next big change.

After every war in the industrial age there has been a scrap-metal boom, beginning at least with the Civil War. Soon after Appomattox, leftover iron from monitors, cannon, and the like flooded the market. In fact, the overcapacity of iron foundries at the end of the Civil War played a role in the birth of cast-iron architecture in New York City.

ON THE SHORE: Everybody loves a lighthouse. While most artifacts of technology—cars, factories, computers—inspire both positive and negative reactions, lighthouses are nothing but good. They do not pollute, they save many lives while costing none, the labor they require might vex the gregarious but is not particularly exploitative, and only a curmudgeon would complain that they ruin the landscape.

Supermarkets are a perilous business. They must stock thousands of products in scores of brands and sizes to sell at painfully small markups. Keeping close track of them all, and maintaining inventories neither too large nor too small, is critical. Yet for most of this century, as stores got bigger and the profusion on their shelves multiplied, the only way to find out what was on hand was by shutting the place down and counting every can, bag, and parcel. This expensive and cumbersome job was usually done no more than once a month.

Winter was an especial hardship for early American settlers. It was cold, of course, but perhaps an even bigger problem was the inescapable boredom. A lot of this had to do with the monotonous diet pioneers were forced to adopt. With no fresh crops, their fruit and vegetable consumption was limited to what they could manage to preserve at harvest time.

Papa Bar

The article “Bar Codes Sweep the World” (Spring 1993) was interesting and very flattering to Bob Silver and Joe Woodland. However, it was also misleading. An analogy would be an article that implied that Leonardo da Vinci and Samuel Langley had invented the airplane (when in fact they only built models that couldn’t fly) and didn’t even mention the Wright brothers.

Perhaps no twentieth-century engineer has left a more visible mark on a major city than has Othmar Ammann on New York. His five major bridges there bear much of the enormous traffic flow to and from the city while requiring remarkably little maintenance. They are beautiful and efficient structures, for Ammann achieved an uncommon harmony of visual elegance, simplicity, and power with practical design. But that harmony developed slowly.