On the twenty-fifth of April, 1838, the crack steamboat Moselle tied up to a raft a mile and a half above the Cincinnati landing to take on a group of westward-bound immigrants. With the passengers aboard, the packet cast off and was edging away from the raft to continue the downstream voyage when her boilers exploded.

He was a great stout paradox of a man, brilliantly creative yet restless and insecure, lighting up skies with his inventions yet repeatedly facing bankruptcy, founding major corporations yet proving unable to run them, succeeding repeatedly with self-taught technical intuition in a world of technologists with advanced degrees. A high school dropout, he was awarded numerous honorary doctorates. A salesman of the first order, he left at his death a company that would wind up nearly half a billion dollars in debt.

Henry Chapman Mercer, a frustrated archeologist, had what you could call a vision of the history of technology one day early in 1897. At the moment it happened, he was searching for fireplace tongs in a junkyard in his native Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The Mercer Museum, on Pine Street in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is open Monday through Saturday throughout the year from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Admission is $4.00 for adults, $3.50 for children and students, and $1.50 for senior citizens. Fonthill, Mercer’s fascinating concrete home, and his Moravian Pottery and Tile Works are also open to the public at similar charges and during similar hours.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.: Inspired by the success of Ph.D. programs in the history of technology at institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware, the historian of technology Merritt Roe Smith has lobbied long and hard for a similar program on his home turf, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Of all high-tech industries in America, the most high tech of all may well be chemicals. Chemicals is the industry that spends the most nongovernment money on research and development—more than eleven billion dollars a year—and that spends more research money on basic (not applied) research than any other. Furthermore, it is one of only two major hightech industries that have consistently maintained a positive balance of payments in international trade. (The other is aerospace.) Why is the American chemical industry so enduringly preeminent?

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.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO, IN A BACKYARD WORKSHOP IN upstate New York, a teen-age tinkerer toyed with a motorcycle he had bought for fifty dollars. The improvements he made marked the beginning of an inventing career that would bring him international fame and fabulous wealth. Over the next three decades he would win patents for more than a dozen high-performance aircraft and some of the world’s deadliest weaponry, develop the first color television, and inaugurate coast-to-coast airline service.

From 1899 to 1901 the largest-selling car in America by far was the steam-powered Locomobile. Sixteen hundred of them were produced in 1900 alone, an impressive feat of mass production by the standards of the time. Other companies produced a small handful of steamers as well, plus 1,575 electric cars and just 936 powered by internal combustion.

When Fred Waring died in 1984, the obituary writers remembered him not only as the leader of the clean-cut Pennsylvanians choral group but also as the inventor of the blender that carried his name. They were wrong. Fred Waring did not invent the blender, but he did throw his energetic support behind it to help turn a half-formed idea into standard equipment in millions of bars and kitchens across the nation.

The captain of the Red Jacket , an American-built clipper ship sailing out of England, had both a sense of humor and a bit of flair. As the big three-master swept toward the equator, bound for Australia in 1854, he spotted the little bark Sea Bird , plodding from Boston to Cape Town, and decided to give his passengers a show.

There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder missile. The Navy didn’t ask for it; the Air Force didn’t want it. Yet a small, dedicated team of Navy scientists and engineers at a desert laboratory produced it against all odds. Bill McLean and his coworkers succeeded where larger teams with much more money and support failed, in developing a simple, inexpensive, immensely successful air weapon, and in so doing they showed how technical creativity can soar in the right environment.

In 1847 a citizen of Concord, Massachusetts, who had been in Harvard’s class of 1837, responded to a letter from his class secretary, asking about life ten years after college, by writing, with little regard for conventional punctuation: “I dont know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. … It is not one but legion. I will give you some of the monster’s heads. I am a Schoolmaster—a private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter.

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.

The Old Order Amish and Mennonite people of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have always believed in isolation from the evils of the world and have thus eschewed modern conveniences, relying instead on simple mechanical tools and face-to-face communication. When the telephone appeared, it created a crisis among them.

America’s Strength

As a footnote to Arthur Molella’s fascinating interview with Thomas Hughes (“America’s Golden Age,” Spring/Summer 1989), one might cite the reaction of a Russian visitor to the America of President James Buchanan: “Young, active, practical, happy in their enterprises, the American people … will have an influence on Europe but they will use neither arms nor sword nor fire, nor death and destruction. They will spread their influence by the strength of their inventions, their trade, and their industry.

At the turn of the century steam engines still pulled passengers into Manhattan, and every train that came and went from Grand Central Terminal had to make its way through the narrow, choking Park Avenue tunnel. Smoke and fumes were worst at rush hour, and they were particularly bad on the morning of January 22, 1902. A New Haven commuter train was stopped at a red signal in the tunnel when a New York Central express came plunging through the murk on the same track.

The discovery in the last few years of a new class of superconductors, which carry electrical currents without any loss of energy at relatively high temperatures, has brought about a storm of interest in the potential usefulness of these materials. It has led to a frantic race to find even better materials and to a level of media attention quite unprecedented in the recent history of science and technology.

If inventors, engineers, and industrial managers are the main characters in the history of American technology, they are far from the sole makers of that history. They must share the job of determining whether and how their innovations are adopted with consumers, corporations, and broad social, cultural, and economic factors—including politics and ideology. Since a great public-works project involves so much technology affecting so many people, serious political and ideological conflicts are likely to play a big role both in its birth and in its later direction.

Silicon is the stuff of the information revolution. It is the basic raw material of which are built the transistor and the integrated circuit and, indirectly, the computer and everything else made from microelectronic elements. Before any of those marvels of the age could be manufactured, there had to be elemental silicon; specifically, there had to be hyperpure silicon. Until the 1940s there was no way of obtaining hyperpure silicon in quantity; it was my good fortune to find the untrodden path that led to an answer.