On April 7, 1964, the International Business Machines Corporation changed the business world with one of the most momentous gambles ever made by a corporation. It introduced the System/360 family of computers.

Astronomers sift. They sift through galaxies, through stars, through planets, through asteroids, looking for both the expected and the unexpected. They search for the evidence that will bolster one theory or topple another, and they also hunt for the big discovery, the prize jewel that has slipped through other sieves: an exploding star, a phantom galaxy, or—best of all—a new planet.

The worst natural disaster in American history struck Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, when a hurricane covered the whole seaside city with surging water, leveled a third of its area, and took an estimated 6,000 lives. The city had been ravaged by hurricanes before and would certainly be devastated again, but never had Galveston been so helpless and desperate.

Discover a planet and you get to name it. But when Lowell Observatory announced its new planet, it had no name ready. Hundreds of people wrote offering all sorts of possibilities, from Atlas to Zymal .

It was “curious to see,” reported a Yorkshire newspaper in 1851, “two implements of agriculture lying side by side in rivalry, respectively marked, ‘McCormick, inventor, Chicago, Illinois,’ and ‘Hussey, inventor, Baltimore, Maryland’—America competing with America, on English soil.”

Premier Plastic

After reading “A Most Invented Invention,” about the discovery of polypropylene (by David B. Sicilia, Spring/Summer 1990), I will always recall the brilliance of Karl Ziegler as I sit down to enjoy a Dannon yogurt from its plastic container. The article states that polypropylene is America’s fourth-largestselling plastic. What are the top three?

William Harvie
La Jolla, Calif.

“There is probably no other inert substance, the properties of which excite in the human mind, when first called to examine it, an equal amount of curiosity, surprise, and admiration. Who can examine, and reflect upon this property of gum-elastic, without adoring the wisdom of the Creator?”

Joe Horak is not as widely known as, say, Bryant Gumbel, but he leads just as visible a professional life. He is an instrumentation electrician, and one of his duties is to make sure the Colgate-Palmolive Company’s clock keeps proper time. “If it doesn’t,” he says, “the switchboard at the company offices on Park Avenue is swamped with calls.”

LOWELL, MASS. : In the 1820s and 1830s the mills of Lowell were at the vanguard of America’s industrial revolution. Once the nation’s leading manufacturer of cotton cloth, Lowell declined after World War I; the mills closed one by one as the textile industry moved south. By the 1970s Lowell was a blighted, stagnant community, an industrial ghost town with a proud past but an uncertain future.

In 1958 John H. White, Jr., a fresh graduate of Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, landed a summer job at the Smithsonian Institution. Jack, as all his friends call him, had a passionate interest in old things. As a boy he had thought the most wonderful of all occupations would be the proprietorship of a junkyard. Old things were, of course, the stock-in-trade of “The Nation’s Attic,” but Jack did not expect to stay in Washington for more than a few months. His long-range plans were vague.

Among the founding fathers of American technology—Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, John Fitch, Robert Fulton, and their peers —the most surprising disparity between shining merit and its recognition by posterity must be the case of Oliver Evans. The steamboats that conquered the Mississippi owed their engines to Evans. The first powered land vehicle patented in America was built by him. His genuinely automatic flour mill provided America with its first, seminal model of industrial automation—in 1786.

In two hundred years of existence, the U.S. Patent Office has issued nearly five million patents, which together document the greatest industrial development in human experience. (See “New, Useful, and Nonobvious,” by Steven Lubar, Invention & Technology , Spring/Summer 1990.) How did it all start? To whom and for what was the first U.S. patent issued?

Remember Pong? In 1972 it became the first successful videoarcade game. That same year Magnavox released Odyssey, the first home game, giving people new ways to stimulate their minds with a television set. Thus the video game is generally thought of as a creation of the 1970s. In reality, though, it was invented in 1958, in a laboratory in thenrural Upton, New York, by a man named William Higinbotham.

There were ten people in the party, and they were about to descend into the Grand Canyon. The guide wore a cowboy hat and leather chaps; a coil of rope hung from his saddle. Most of the others were dressed for a day outdoors, wearing hats, loose-fitting shirts, and the like. At the rear of the group was John Von Neumann—hatless and in the formal suit and tie of a banker. Moreover, while everyone else sat on a mule facing right, his faced left.

Nuts And Bolts On A Pedestal

Edward Tenner (“Pantheons of Nuts and Bolts,” Winter 1989) gleefully informs us that the great museums of technology all over the Free World have been conquered by his ilk, the social historians, who are busy throwing out the inventions to make room for exhibits of the pseudoissues they think the public should consider more important. Exhibits on social issues are far less interesting to the actual attendees of technology museums than the real machinery.

HOMESTEAD, PA.: Big Steel is dead, and streetlights no longer burn at midday in Pittsburgh, but residents of the area are realizing that the smoke-laden past must not be allowed to vanish completely.

Laura Kenard is something of a surprise. A recent graduate of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, she has spent a year overseeing quality control at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Woven Carpet Mills, and the yellow-haired woman in her early twenties looks incongruous at the controls of the immemorial elevator that lifts us to the shop floor.

More cities were destroyed during World War II than in any other conflict in history. Yet the cities didn’t die. The modern technological city, held together by electricity, telephones, water lines, and highway and rail networks, was still a recent phenomenon. No one knew how strong or vulnerable a machine it was. The consensus was that it was too reliant on an easily shattered infrastructure to survive a well-planned military attack. The consensus turned out to be wrong.

Who are the real makers of modern America? Not the politicians or the business magnates, according to Thomas Parke Hughes, Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, but the inventorentrepreneurs, industrial scientists, and engineers who contributed to the golden age of American technology between 1870 and 1970. They created the vast systems shaping modern life—systems such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan Project, and the automobile industry.

Who is this man wearing overalls and a jaunty fedora, and what is he up to?