Often the most useful inventions are the simplest. Uncomplicated, functional solutions to common needs are the essence of good design. The safety pin and the paper clip, for instance, are as ubiquitous as they are elegant. A less visible but equally important example of classic simplicity is the ordinary O-ring.

What of Atanasoff?

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.”

Rope and ropemaking might seem like unpromising subjects for a historical study. While rope certainly figures in the story of ships and sail, it remains a minor character in that drama. Anv nonsoecialist asked to name a use for rope might rummage through remembered images of TV cowboys lassoing a calf or recall clotheslines and rope swings. Rope is ordinary and common stuff; even most sailors take its variety and easy availability for granted.

As usual, I greatly enjoyed the latest issue of your magazine, and I am delighted that it will now be published four times a year. I particularly enjoyed the articles on Glenn Curtiss and Niels Christensen.

In April of 1796, when George Washington sat for his portrait before Gilbert Stuart, the President was trying without much success to adjust to a new set of false teeth. He had recently lost his only remaining natural tooth, a lower left premolar, which he had insisted on keeping long after all his others had been lost or extracted. Washington’s attachment to this last tooth was not sentimental.

Throughout much of his life, Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist, was actively involved with inventors and inventing. Not only did he serve as a patent examiner in the Swiss Federal Patent Office—at a time when inventions in electric light, communications, and power were proliferating—but afterward he repeatedly served as an expert witness in patent cases and even patented and tried to market inventions of his own.

New York City’s General Post Office unfurls its grand white facade along two full blocks between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets on Eighth Avenue. It’s open around the clock all year long (as midnight draws nigh on April 15, representatives of the Maalox and Excedrin concerns pass out free samples to harried taxpayers in the tall marble hall), so at any hour a passer-by may drop in and poke into the alcoves where displays of mail pouches and old photographs and engravings tell the history of the New York postal service.

The Story Of O-rings

As usual, I greatly enjoyed the latest issue of your magazine, and I am delighted that it will now be published four times a year. I particularly enjoyed the articles on Glenn Curtiss and Niels Christensen.

More and more commercial phone numbers are being advertised with a name or word as part of the number. We are urged to dial 335-DIET or 970-LOAN. This is a small historical regression, requiring the use of letters that the phone company made obsolete decades ago.

Where did the old alphanumeric dial plate come from? Most of the world never used letters. And where did it go? The story begins in the telephone’s infancy.

It has become axiomatic that technology is a catalyst for social change. When one technology completely replaces another, it often displaces not only the old technology but a whole elaborate social structure that supported it. When gunpowder replaced the bow and arrow, or when the transistor supplanted the vacuum tube, the consequences extended far beyond the battlefield or the factory. Likewise, when diesel locomotives replaced steam engines in the middle of this century, a lot more was transformed than transportation itself.

The American Precision Museum, in the town of Windsor, Vermont, will never compete in size or grandeur with the great repositories of the world’s treasures, but behind its mellow brick facade dwells a fascinating collection of immense historic significance. The museum houses America’s most important assemblage of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century machine tools—implements that gave birth to modern manufacturing and helped make the United States the surpassing industrial force in the world.

If most nineteenth-century American inventors are forgotten today—which is undeniable—black inventors are especially obscure. Almost none of them were known even in their own times, and few books about technological history ever mention a black inventor. Jan Earnst Matzeliger is one of those who have been left behind. A solitary black immigrant, he invented a machine for use in manufacturing shoes that helped transform an industry, build a great corporation, produce several millionaires (himself not among them), and create work for thousands of Americans.

Just ahead, through rain and haze on the morning of July 7, 1952, Bishop Rock appeared on the United States ’s radar. The tiny granite island, England’s westernmost tip, marked the end of the transatlantic run for passenger liners clocking their time from Ambrose Light outside New York.

I am very impressed with Invention & Technology . Congratulations on an outstanding piece of technical journalism.

Should new forms of life, the creations of biotechnology, be protected by patents? Many of their inventors argue that they should. The patents would reward those inventors with a chance to profit from their inventions and encourage them to invent more. In exchange for the exclusive right to make, use, or sell their creations, the inventors would be required to disclose their discoveries, furthering the advance of science. Others argue against patenting lifeforms, most often on moral grounds; how can you patent a new kind of life?

James E. Strothman’s article “The Ancient History of System/360” (Winter 1990) incorrectly identifies the computer about which IBM’s chairman, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., wrote his famous memo citing its design and development by “34 people including the janitor.” The computer Watson was referring to was the CDC 6600, produced by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation in 1965. And it was not designed to compete directly with the 360 but rather was focused on scientific computing needs.

California’s Santa Clara Valley is an alluvial plain at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Until the 1960s the valley was home to prune, apricot, and cherry orchards and a worldclass canning and packing industry. Today the world knows it as Silicon Valley.

To see the dream, you could visit General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. As visitors glided through a scale-model world, a recorded voice murmured compelling promises in their ears. By 1960, it said, fourteen-lane expressways would carry traffic “at designated speeds of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles an hour.” The cars would enter and leave at high speed via sleek interchanges.

At first glance you might think this picture is an image dreamed up for some 1950s science-fiction movie: Attack of the Giant Thermos Bottles . But it’s real enough. One can only imagine what those who saw this top-secret behemoth thought as it rumbled on the rail lines along the Mississippi in the spring of 1945, making its way from the foundries of the Babcock & Wilcox Company, in Barberton, Ohio, to the north end of White Sands Proving Grounds, at Alamogorclo, New Mexico.