John Muir spent most of his life, as he put it, in “the study of the inventions of God.” He was a world-renowned naturalist and conservationist, a respected botanist and glaciologist, and a writer who with words brought the wild areas he loved to millions. But before he took up his pursuit of untouched places, he first devoted himself to what might seem an opposite world: he was a tireless inventor and mechanic, a few of whose creations might have made him rich had he bothered to patent them.

On the east bank of the Susquehanna River, about seventeen miles downstream from Columbia, Pennsylvania, stands the burly white block of Pennsylvania Power & Light’s Holtwood Hydroelectric Station. It’s an extremely handsome plant, very much at ease with the superb scenery around it, and a suitable monument to the confident era that built it. Holtwood went into operation in 1910 to serve a new century that was getting increasingly thirsty for electricity. It was a modern plant in every particular; so modern, in fact, that at first it ran into trouble.

William Stanley contributed in a major way to a major invention: the transformer, the key element in the alternating-current system that delivers almost all of the world’s electricity. He also helped build two major corporations, both the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company and its archrival General Electric. But hardly anyone remembers him.

The greatest American bridge builder of the nineteenth century was John Roebling, and he is celebrated above all for designing the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge. His bridge-building career began in Pittsburgh, the city of rivers, where he constructed his first two suspension bridges and made some of his most critical innovations, including the technique of spinning wire suspension cables and using inclined stays for stiffening. It was for Pittsburgh that he designed one of his most audacious constructions—the Tripartite Bridge.

Despite their dour expressions, the motorists in this 1909 photograph were completing a feat unheard of until that moment. The driver and his dapper passengers were the first to travel by automobile between New York and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River. Their journey, in a Lozier automobile, did not take place in a tunnel designed for motor-vehicle traffic; not for another eighteen years would the Holland Tunnel make such trips routine. How then did these gentlemen do it?

It’s not just a single mood. It constantly keeps changing—segues from one emotion to another.” Milton Berger is talking about a roller coaster; and if his terms might seem better suited to a symphony, that’s all right. The coaster he’s describing is a masterpiece.

WASHINGTON, D.C. : On December 17, 1903, a man named Lorin Wright visited the Dayton office of the Associated Press to report that his two younger brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had wired home with the news that they had flown four times that day, their longest flight lasting just under a minute. The AP newsman was not impressed. “Fifty-seven seconds, hey?” he told Lorin Wright. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes then it might have been a news item.”

Liberty Ships Live On

What a fine Winter 1988 issue! As a maritime historian I wanted to offer you a little additional information relating to James R. Chiles’s “The Ships That Broke Hitler’s Blockade.”

In 1905 Francis and Freelan Stanley, the twins who built the famous steamer automobiles, constructed an aerodynamically advanced steam-powered racing car, the Rocket, shaped like an inverted boat hull. It had a flat full-length underpan and enclosed front and rear suspensions; the driver sat low on the floor, ahead of the engine. In January 1906, with Fred Marriott at the wheel, the Rocket reached a record 121.57 mph, at Ormond-Daytona Beach, Florida.

Undoubtedly it was birds that first inspired man with the notion of flight. If there had been no birds, perhaps insects could have done the same, but insects can hardly match the inspirational value of soaring eagles, diving hawks, or maneuvering swifts or swallows. Wanting to fly meant wanting to fly like birds. Yet birds are terrible models for human flight, and a too slavish attention to their example—often unconscious —has often impeded the development of aircraft.

THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY WAS OFFICIAL ly born in the United States in 1958, when the Society for the History of Technology was established. But long before the subject donned that academic cloak, three lone pioneers virtually invented it, writing histories that took on the human and moral dimensions of technology in the broadest way. The Harvard economic historian Abbott Payson Usher published A History of Mechanical Inventions in 1929.

In surviving laboratory books from 1889 and 1890, Stanley and his assistants sketched out, often in color, his ideas for AC motors and other projects.

The machine has swept over our civilization in three successive waves. The first wave, which was set in motion around the tenth century, … was an effort tof achieve order and power by purely external means, and its success was partly due to the fact that it evaded many of the real issues of life and turned away from the momentous moral and social difficulties that it had neither confronted nor solved. The second wave heaved upward in the eighteenth century after a long steady roll through the Middle Ages.

The process of innovation has frequently been held to be an unusual and mysterious phenomenon of our mental life. It has been long regarded as the result of special processes of inspiration that are experienced only by persons of the special grade called men of genius. This mystical account of these phenomena is, however, gradually yielding ground before the growing body of psychological analysis.…

Before The Skyscraper

Readers of Tom Peters’s most interesting article (…The Rise of the Skyscraper from the Ashes of Chicago,” Fall 1987) might be interested to know of the contribution in this area of a littleknown American educator named Cyrus Hamlin, who founded Robert College in Istanbul and was later president of Middlebury College. Hamlin, who went to Turkey in 1839 as a missionary, was a man who combined remarkable scientific and engineering skills with a great intellect, in the true Renaissance mold.

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota.

What a fine Winter 1988 issue! As a maritime historian I wanted to offer you a little additional information relating to James R. Chiles’s “The Ships That Broke Hitler’s Blockade.”

History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments. It is never stilled. … The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. … The historian deals with a perishable material, men… . His role is to put in order in its historical setting what we experience piecemeal from day to day, so that in place of sporadic experience, the continuity of events becomes visible. … History, regarded as insight into the moving process of life, draws closer to biological phenomena.

When I was a graduate student in aeronautical engineering, in the late 1930s, my professors told me categorically that a properly designed airplane should be inherently stable aerodynamically. That is, the airplane, if disturbed from equilibrium by a transitory occurrence such as a gust, should return to that condition without any corrective action by the pilot—even if he has let go of the control stick. The need for such built-in stability was simply taken for granted.

The original Remington typewriter, prototype of all modern typewriters, made its public debut in 1874. Hardly anyone noticed. “The advent of the first writing machine was not announced in cable dispatches and newspaper headlines,” The New York Times recalled later.