Reading “Amazing Light” (by Joan Lisa Bromberg) in the Spring 1992 issue, I was reminded of a seminar I attended in about 1964 for MIT graduates. Charles Townes spoke and described the development of the maser. However, instead of using the usual technical definition—Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation—he advised us of a more practical definition: Method for Arriving at Support for Expensive Research.

Thanks for an elegant article in a thoroughly attractive magazine.

John R. M. Alger
Rumney, N.H.

The first ads for Whizzer motor kits appeared in 1939, and what American boy could possibly resist? For only $54.95 you could convert your bicycle into a full-fledged motorbike. Think of the fun, the admiring glances, the wind in your hair as you purred down Main Street!

“I Albert Doumar,” the proclamation I begins, “come from a royal family in the world of ice cream. We Doumars proudly claim title of creators of the ice cream cone …”

Benjamin Holt was a Yankee immigrant to California whose inventions freed farmers from tedious hand labor and put food on tables around the world. He was a pioneer marketer and exporter of heavy machinery whose tractors boosted America’s reputation for innovation and quality in the early years of this century. His rumbling “caterpillars,” born in agriculture, helped win World War I by hauling artillery and inspiring the invention of the tank. His machines and what they inspired changed the face of the earth, for better and worse.

The patient lies on the operating table. The surgeon is implanting a filter to trap potentially fatal pulmonary embolisms (blood clots). Will this be a risky major surgical procedure involving general anesthesia, major incisions, and high costs? Not if the surgeon is using a filter made of nitinol. The surgeon can take the mushroom-shaped filter, cool it below body temperature, pull it into a straight bundle of wire, and then insert and position the bundle through a cooled catheter in one of the patient’s larger veins.

The tiny biplane was already higher than the peak of Mount Everest, yet its pilot, Maj. Rudolph Schroeder, was heading higher still. Looking out from his open cockpit, he could see ice forming on the wings, for the temperature was sixty degrees below zero. He topped 33,000 feet, still with power to spare; then he suddenly blacked out as his oxygen supply failed. The plane fell off in a power dive, roaring downward with an unconscious man at the throttle. At 4,000 feet the denser air revived him; he regained control and made a safe landing.

OAKLAND, CALIF. : For decades the slide rule was a universal emblem of the engineering profession. A slide rule sticking out of the shirt pocket, along with the inevitable black glasses and bad haircut, was the easiest way for a cartoonist or filmmaker to show that someone was an engineer. Groups of students carried oversized versions at their graduations, and a drawing of a slide rule was invariably used in newspapers to illustrate an engineering-related story.

What’s A Maser?

Reading “Amazing Light” (by Joan Lisa Bromberg) in the Spring 1992 issue, I was reminded of a seminar I attended in about 1964 for MIT graduates. Charles Townes spoke and described the development of the maser. However, instead of using the usual technical definition—Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation—he advised us of a more practical definition: Method for Arriving at Support for Expensive Research.

Thanks for an elegant article in a thoroughly attractive magazine.

John R. M. Alger
Rumney, N.H.

VIEWED FROM A COCKPIT UP ABOVE, THE LAYER OF FOG over the Arcata airport in Northern California was a churning mass of gray and black in a field of rolling white. As the plane descended, the black portion rose like a mushroom cloud, suckare and more white fog into its vortex. es Grimes and Byron Clark, fresh from World War II service (Clark as a bomber pilot i Europe, Grimes flying transports in Alaska), pointed the nose of their C-47 toward the nearest edge of the turbulence and began their descent.

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.

In 1893 George Washington Gale Ferris was the champion of U.S. technology, the engineer who had proved that America could top the Eiffel Tower. That summer, excited tourists waited in line for the ride of a lifetime on Ferris’s big mechanical wheel, which could carry 2,160 passengers at a time to a height equaling that of a twenty-six-story building, in an era when most people had never seen a skyscraper.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Looking through garbage can be rewarding. Inspecting an opponent’s rubbish has been invaluable for political campaigns. In affluent areas you can furnish a house with what people leave out on the street. And there’s always the chance that you’ll stumble on a cache of important historical documents.

It was the last shift before the 1951 Christmas holiday, and the coal miners at the Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort, Illinois, were in a festive mood as they boarded the cage (the mine elevator) to go to work underground. My dad, a foreman, rode the cage down too. His job this evening was to assign tasks to a group affectionately nicknamed the peanut gang, men with no specific job descriptions who worked wherever they were needed.

The radio program was the first of its kind: an explorer visiting an unknown realm and broadcasting his experience live to the American people. It was September 1932, and the naturalist William Beebe was descending through the waters off Bermuda to a depth of 2,200 feet. A telephone line linked his tiny craft, cramped as a space capsule, to the ship above. From there his voice—along with that of his topside assistant, Gloria Hollister—would reach the nation via the National Broadcasting Company.

Every crusade has its Jerusalem, every crusader his or her moment when the trumpet call becomes irresistible. For Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist, it was being forbidden to speak at an Albany, New York, temperance rally in 1852. For the birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger it was the death in her arms of an impoverished mother from a botched abortion in 1912. For Charlotte Smith it was the tragic story of a starving St. Louis inventor she met in the 1870s.

Once upon a time Carl Borgh worked for McDonnell Douglas as an aerospace engineer. “I worked on a telemetry system to bring back data from space vehicles.” Borgh is a tall, powerful, capable-looking man in his early sixties; it’s no surprise to find out he was good at what he did. “Trouble was, the longer I was there, the more management stuff I had to do. I was getting further and further away from what I liked.”

Public transit before the age of the trolley was a decidedly lowtech operation. Horsecars moved through city streets at speeds scarcely faster than a walk. Their tracks, embedded in the pavement, were primitive assemblies of wood and strap rail that hearkened back to the earliest days of railway engineering. The cars were tiny four-wheel affairs with hard seats, minimal lighting, and no heat. Braking power depended on the strength of the driver’s arm.

For the most part we think of portable radios as a post-World War II phenomenon. From the cheap plastic models of the 1950s to today’s elaborate Walkmans, they have been among the most visible examples of the electronics revolution. But portable radios did not start with the invention of the transistor; their history stretches back more than two decades earlier. The 1920s gave birth to the boom box, but the boom box boom quickly went bust.

The long-awaited inauguration of a most improbable conveyance took place on September 13, 1892, when the Mount Holly & Smithville Bicycle Railroad was opened to a skeptical public. It was unique among the railroads of the world. It was nonpolluting, quiet, and very healthful for the patron. It had no cars or engines, and was one of the world’s shortest and most scenic lines, crossing and recrossing the meandering Rancocas Creek ten times in one mile.

Before the Second World War quantum physics had few technological payoffs. The small group of imaginative scientists who had created the field were driven, like many artists or writers, by aesthetic considerations and the pursuit of truth. During and after the war, however, one after another of the phenomena of quantum physics became the basis for technological innovation—transistors, semiconductors, and nuclear energy, to name but a few.