News/Blogs

BROOKLYN, N.Y.: Riding the New York City subways has been known to inspire many different feelings, but a sense of history is not usually one of them. To be sure, there is a lot of antique equipment in operation; however, a straphanger on a crowded C train in July is not likely to consider the old-fashioned rotary fans to be charmingly quaint. Still, a system that began construction in 1903 and now moves a billion people a year over 710 miles of track must have a lot of history behind it.

Having been involved in the dieselization of U.S. railroads, I found Maury Klein’s article “The Diesel Revolution” (Winter 1991) very interesting. His reference to engine men gradually coming to appreciate the vastly improved working conditions of diesel is almost an understatement. On one major road that completely dieselized, a sudden traffic surge required reactivation of a few steam locomotives. No one wanted a steam job, so only those on the bottom of the seniority list operated those locomotives.

When this mammoth wind machine was unveiled in Cleveland in 1888, it surely inspired awe or admiration from passersby along the city’s fashionable Euclid Avenue. At the time there was nothing like it in the world. It did not pump water or grind grain; it generated electricity, in the backyard of the inventor and scientist Charles Brush.

Max Woods throws his weight against the lever, the grip seizes the rope beneath the street, and the first cable car of the day rumbles past Union Square, tilts its face to the lightening sky, and starts up Nob Hill. As the car rises up out of dusk and mist, sunlight flashes white off the tracks ahead; the perpendicular landscape falls away on the right to show a blue slice of bay; and San Francisco looks every bit as ravishing as San Franciscans say it is.

Thousands of onlookers thronged the Battery in lower Manhattan on the morning of April 23, 1838, as the news spread. The black hull of the transatlantic steamer Sirius had been spotted in New York Harbor, sails furled but her stubby smokestack pumping out thick black clouds and her twenty-four-foot paddle wheels churning the water.

Battles are won not just with soldiers and weapons but also with information. An army that responds quickly to changing conditions can defeat an opponent that has it outgunned and outmanned. Gathering information is important, but getting that information to those who can use it is equally so. In every modern army good communications are essential; otherwise, all the fancy hardware is useless. Communications is a recognized military specialty today, and that recognition began with a young U.S. Army surgeon named Albert J. Myer just before the start of the Civil War.

I am pleased to announce that beginning with this issue, American Heritage of Invention & Technology increases its frequency to four times a year. The next four issues will be Fall 1991 and Winter, Spring, and Summer 1992.

We’ve been publishing the magazine for six years now, supported by the continuing generous commitment of General Motors and the sustained interest of our readers. On every level it has been satisfying for us—and something of an adventure as well.

On our 125-acre northwestern Ohio farm, back in the first fifth of the twentieth century, agriculture was a subject we read about. Farming was what we worked at.

Glenn Curtiss was always going someplace. Lean and solemn, with long, powerful legs, a lust for speed, and an intense drive to win, he rode his bicycle all over western New York. Wherever there was a bicycle race, he and his club, the Hammondsport Boys, took most of the prizes. He could easily move faster than most cars of the day, but in 1901 nobody in Hammondsport had a car anyway. Then, one clear summer day, Glenn Curtiss introduced that quiet village at the tip of Keuka Lake to the noisy, speed-crazy twentieth century.

For generations it was a familiar memory from just about everyone’s childhood: a slow-moving freight train crawling across the prairie, huffing up a steep grade, or gliding down a valley like a huge metallic snake. Young rail enthusiasts would count how many cars there were between the steam-belching engine and the stubby caboose or search the colorful railroad insignias for ones they hadn’t seen before.

NEW YORK, N.Y. : The Greenwich Village air was sweet with the smell of burning tar, which mingled with souvlaki and honey-roasted peanuts in an olfactory mosaic. Staccato bursts of jackhammer noise, accompanied by equally rapid-fire cursing from road workers, served as percussion for the usual symphony of ambulance sirens and car horns. Weak sunlight filtered gamely through the smog; most blocks had at least one sidewalk passable; in short, it was the perfect day for a stroll down to Cooper Union to talk about the infrastructure.

There are just three places in America that lie below sea level. Two are in the California desert. The other is considerably more hospitable: it’s the city of New Orleans, which has been called “a bowl of water surrounded by water.” The Mississippi lies on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other, and more rain falls here than on any other major city in America.

If you make your way to the top of a rugged, forested hill in the northwestern corner of New Jersey that the local people call Edison’s mountain, you can still find the remains of what was for a few years a century ago a mammoth industrial complex. Empty cellars, quarry pits, and stone walls under the trees mark the site of what may have been Thomas Alva Edison’s most ambitious but least-known project—and his most spectacular failure.

The revolutionary “American system” of manufacturing interchangeable parts began in armories like Robbins & Lawrence’s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as now, advances in technology were often stimulated by military need. Army muskets at the time were assembled from pieces that resembled one another but were not machined precisely enough to fit together without extensive hand filing.

The American Precision Museum, on South Main A Street in Windsor, Vermont, is open daily May 20 to November 1, weekdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and weekends and holidays from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. To get there, from I-91 take Exit 8 north to Winsdor or Exit 9 south to Windsor.

I enjoyed T. A. Heppenheimer’s computer-history article “How Von Neumann Showed the Way” (Fall 1990), but I believe he erred by omitting discussion of the 1973 Sperry Rand-Honeywell patent case over priority for the invention of the digital computer. Judge Earl Larson found that John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., “did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor was only twenty-two when he got promoted to gang boss in a machine shop at the Midvale Steel Company, in Philadelphia, in 1878. A slender, intense upper-class young man, he found himself at once the target of undisguised threats from his new underlings. He recalled later, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management , one man’s threatening words:

CLEVELAND, OHIO: The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) was born here in 1957, when Melvin Kranzberg convened a group of scholars dissatisfied with the low importance historians of the day assigned to technological matters. Through the years SHOT has grown in numbers and in respect, and upon returning to Cleveland for its annual meeting last October, it found itself facing the challenges of middle age. (The same cannot be said for Kranzberg himself, who retains the energy of an excited teen-ager.)

A tiny white airplane soared upward under rocket power, its vapor trail bright against the blue-black sky. It was September 1956, and Capt. Iven Kincheloe was taking the experimental X-2 to a record altitude of 126,000 feet—some seven miles higher than the previous record.

In addition to the standard styles of cars, the railroads devised some curious and interesting special-purpose cars, mostly built in very small numbers. For example:

Wooden tank cars used by big food processors such as H. J. Heinz to move their products around the country in bulk quantities.