In the early 1830s the Rocky Mountain fur trade was in trouble. Trappers had decimated the once-teeming beaver streams of the West. Veteran mountain men felt the end was at hand. But Capt. Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, a newcomer to the trade, disagreed. Born in Paris, Bonneville had come to America as a child and graduated from West Point in 1815 at the age of nineteen. In 1832 he outfitted 110 trappers and headed into the wilderness. His men returned to their rendezvous almost empty-handed, but he wouldn’t give up.

On North Second Street in Philadelphia an old firehouse has been turned into a splendid museum of the city’s fire-fighting past. The tall doors are now windows, and behind them the boiler of a ninetyyear-old American LaFrance fire engine gleams in the afternoon sunlight. Nothing better expresses the heroic age of American industry than a big steam pumper: the great, confident machine, all brass and nickel and paint and capable of throwing nine hundred gallons of water a minute, an output the next century has been able to improve by a mere hundred.

When he was well into his thirties, King Camp Gillette received some advice from a friend. Gillette was a bottle-cap salesman and his friend was the company’s president, William Painter, who had invented the cork-lined bottle cap.

When the first cotton sheeting came off their looms in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and the other investors in the Boston Manufacturing Company knew they had launched America’s Industrial Revolution. American factories had produced cotton yarn since 1790, when the British engineer Samuel Slater opened Almy and Brown’s spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but weaving had remained exclusively a domestic handicraft. The British, for their part, had solved the basic problems of the power loom by 1788, but they still made thread in one factory and cloth in another.

The Boott Mill will open to the public in late May or early June 1992. The best source of information about the Boott Mill, the other national park facilities, and even the various non-park attractions in Lowell is the National Park Visitor Center, 246 Market Street, which is open from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s (508-459-1000).

MADISON, WIS. : The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) journeyed to America’s Dairyland last fall to hold its annual convention. This year’s event was a particularly special occasion, not just because of the scenic location but because of the additional presence of the History of Science Society (HSS).

Since the earliest days of democracy, as the world has sought the ideal form of government, it has also sought the ideal method of voting. The ancient Greeks decided public questions by clashing spears on shields. Colonial America at first favored the show of hands, or splitting into groups. Later the viva voce method, in which a voter would openly declare his preference (and then be thanked in florid fashion by the candidate), gained favor.

When Kirkpatrick MacMillan of Courthill, Scotland, built the world’s first mechanical bicycle in 1839, he had a practical objective in mind: to visit his sister in Glasgow, forty miles away. Ever since, the history of the bicycle has been tied mostly to Europe, where cycling enjoys a rich tradition. However, America took a strong interest in the fledgling two-wheeler from the beginning and made major contributions to its development.

The world received its abrupt introduction to atomic energy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic age, ushered in by the bombs dropped on those cities, was the product of a massive effort known as the Manhattan Project. Yet several years before the Manhattan Project got under way, an apparatus was secretly being built in a U.S. government laboratory to attempt to make use of the energy of nuclear reactions—not from fission but, even more difficult, from fusion.

Pro Tesla

Your Winter 1992 issue is so interesting that it was difficult to know which article to read first—until I found Curt Wohleber’s “The Work of the World.” I cannot express enough appreciation to Mr. Wohleber and your magazine for bringing to the public an appreciation of Nikola Tesla, certainly one of the most underrated geniuses who ever lived.

When Titan II Missile Complex 571-7 was in operation, it was barely noticeable. A couple of antennas and some metal poles poked through the Arizona desert floor above a large concrete slab, a wooden deck, and a few other odds and ends, all of it surrounded by a chain-link fence. But beneath this seeming disarray an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) waited in its silo, and a hidden crew ran an underground control center.

I remember the first time I called the Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois. After a ring or two the phone was answered: “Clock Tower Resort. How may I direct your call?”

Resort? Had I dialed the wrong number? “Is this the Time Museum?” I asked hesitantly.

“One moment, sir,” the operator said, and my call was put through.

It was mid-June of 1952, and President Harry Truman was at the Electric Boat Company shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Off to his side lay a huge, bright yellow steel plate that was to become part of the keel of a new submarine. Truman gave a speech, and then a crane lifted the plate and laid it before him. He walked down a few steps and chalked his initials on its surface, whereupon a welder stepped forward and burned them into the steel.

Your Summer 1992 issue, with its piece on Charlotte Smith (“The Champion of Women Inventors”), held special significance for me. Autumn Stanley’s fine article, recalling Ms. Smith’s struggle to gain recognition for women’s roles as inventors, noted that Smith implored the Patent Office to set aside a hall for the exhibit of women’s inventions during its centennial celebration in 1891. Charlotte Smith’s dream of such an exhibit was not to become a reality for another hundred years.

Inventing Women

Your Summer 1992 issue, with its piece on Charlotte Smith (“The Champion of Women Inventors”), held special significance for me. Autumn Stanley’s fine article, recalling Ms. Smith’s struggle to gain recognition for women’s roles as inventors, noted that Smith implored the Patent Office to set aside a hall for the exhibit of women’s inventions during its centennial celebration in 1891. Charlotte Smith’s dream of such an exhibit was not to become a reality for another hundred years.

By the mid-1920s American racing technology was so advanced that our automobiles were establishing speed records that would stand for decades, with engines that set the pattern for those in today’s fastest sports cars. Yet automobile racing on public roads had been illegal in almost every state since the early 1910s. American auto racing grew up not on roads but on big, oval loop tracks made of wood. The tracks have all been gone for more than sixty years and are hardly remembered today.

This photograph of a taxicab would never have been taken if the Sixteenth Amendment hadn’t been ratified in 1913. The Sixteenth Amendment authorized the federal income tax; the income tax made necessary the invention of a printing taxi meter; this picture showed off the new invention.

In 1809, after years of experimenting, a Parisian confectioner named Nicolas Appert demonstrated a scheme for putting cooked fruit, vegetables, and meat in cork-sealed bottles and then immersing the bottles in boiling water, which, as we now know, destroyed the bacteria that could ruin the contents. For developing his method of food preservation, Appert was granted 12,000 francs by the French government, and in 1810 he published a book, L’Art de Conserver , that was soon translated into several languages.

It’s been raining all day. and New Orleans is sinking. Brown water is backing up the storm drains, filling the intersections, creeping toward people’s front steps. Children run home from school with their pants rolled up to their knees. Parts of Freret Street are underwater. Cleary Avenue is impassable. At the Camellia Grill on the corner of Carrollton and St. Charles, a regular complains to one of the cooks. “We never flooded this bad when I was young. It’s all the damn concrete: there’s no place for the water to go.”

Your Winter 1992 issue is so interesting that it was difficult to know which article to read first—until I found Curt Wohleber’s “The Work of the World.” I cannot express enough appreciation to Mr. Wohleber and your magazine for bringing to the public an appreciation of Nikola Tesla, certainly one of the most underrated geniuses who ever lived.