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PHILADELPHIA, PA. : “Who is Lewis Mumford?” That’s the question Professor Thomas P. Hughes asked the scholars gathered at the University of Pennsylvania last November for the International Symposium on Lewis Mumford. A simple question, but simple answers are unlikely when academics meet to size up the work of a man whose career spanned more than half a century and focused on a multitude of subjects.

Thomas A. Watson is remembered mostly as the man who answered the first telephone call. He is known to a few as the actual coinventor of the phone—he worked out the basic idea with Alexander Graham Bell and added major improvements including the bell and the switch hook. But he retired from telephones at twenty-seven and then embarked on a life—or series of lives—so rich and varied that his exploits with Bell might be considered mere preamble.

EVERYTHING IS MADE FROM SOMETHING. THIS SIMPLE FACT AND ITS VAST IMPLICATIONS ARE THE SUBJECT OF “A Material World,” an exhibition opening this spring at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. For the first time the museum will display a range of objects from the American past with the focus not on the purpose, design, or manufacture of the objects but rather on the materials that constitute them and what they tell us.

Perhaps the most famous image of Thomas Edison is a photograph taken in 1888, showing the inventor after three days of nearly constant toil on his improved wax-cylinder phonograph. The disheveled Edison is slumped before his handiwork, eyes intense, brooding.

Kirkwood Meadows, California, August 15, 1981: Buckminster Fuller, his gentle eyes grotesquely magnified behind his thick glasses, watches intently as I insert the final balsa-wood struts in a twenty-five-inch-diameter geodesic sphere that models his latest structural innovation. His large head, prickly with white hair, angles forward from the compact eighty-six-year-old frame—alert, anticipating. As Fuller’s new engineering assistant I am on my first “business trip.” Guided loosely during his brief office visits, I have gradually learned to decipher the code.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 6, 1949, journalists and scientists from around the nation crowded into the lecture hall at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), in Washington, D.C., to see the world’s first atomic clock. It looked like a metal cabinet seven feet tall, with a maze of tubes, knobs, and gauges across the front. On top sat a conventional, round face, with hour, minute, and second hands indicating the time. There was no ticking, only a low electronic hum.

The gray mists of predawn shrouded the waters and banks of the Natchez riverfront on the morning of April 3, 1833, as the steamboat Java cautiously moved past the ghostly forms of rafts, keelboats, and two other steamboats. On board the small, unadorned working boat, Capt. Henry M.

In the handsome, high-windowed directors’ room on the second floor of the Watts, Campbell Company in Newark, New Jersey, Chad Watts has set up a little museum. There, on neat display, are working drawings pasted to boards and varnished so they wouldn’t get spoiled in the shop, dim old photographs of steam engines, tools, billheads and ledgers, and all the other memorabilia that a busy machine shop could be expected to generate over the decades.

In the northwestern corner of Connecticut, there is a pretty town called Colebrook. The landscape is serene and pastoral. The main villages, Colebrook Center and North Colebrook, have both become National Historic Districts.

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.

THE UNITED STATES IS A SEAFARING NATION, AND HAS BEEN SINCE prerevolutionary war shipwrights first trimmed pine trees into masts. During the nineteenth century America pioneered steam power, the fast clipper, and the ironclad, and after World War 1 the U.S. fleet was one of the biggest in the world. But in the years between 1922 and 1937, the nation’s shipyards built only two oceangoing, dry-cargo freighters.

James Rumsey, a remarkable American inventor of the eighteenth century, is today almost forgotten. Most technological histories accord him little more than a footnote, as one of the less successful claimants to the invention of the steamboat. To some extent this is due to the loss of all his United States patents in the great Patent Office fire of 1836. But his four British patents, describing more than twenty inventions, have survived, and they and other sources make it apparent that Rumsey was one of America’s most creative inventors.

After the war, radar research moved easily into nonmilitary pursuits. In 1946 a variation of the Army’s old SCR-271 set bounced pulses off the Moon, opening an extremely productive era of radar astronomy. Radar made it possible for the first time to scrutinize the terrain of cloud-covered Venus, and it was radar mapping that told flight planners where they could safely land spacecraft on the Moon and Mars. Of late, radar astronomy has merged with laser ranging for even greater precision.

Some say that traditional religion died in the nineteenth century and was supplanted in the twentieth by worship of the machine. A curious reverence for machinery did spring up in the first decade of this century, principally in Europe; in the United States the new “religion” did not make a strong showing until about 1927, despite the fact that expanding technology and the shift to an urban economy had transformed America into the most highly industrialized nation in the world.

Things are never what they seem. Skimmed milk masquerades as cream. And laborsaving household appliances often do not save labor. This is the surprising conclusion reached by a small army of historians, sociologists, and home economists who have undertaken, in recent years, to study the one form of work that has turned out to be most resistant to inquiry and analysis—namely, housework.

I wonder if James Blackaby may not have moved a little too fast from the shaving horse to the workbench in “How the Workbench Changed the Nature of Work” (Fall 1986). Yes, the joiner practices at a workbench, and some of the tools he uses have had adjustable stops and depth gauges for close to a century now. But has Mr. Blackaby ever tried to join a couple of one-by-sixes with only a joiner plane, perhaps using hardwood with an unfinished edge and a handsaw as a start? This certainly requires skill and judgment and a lot of patience.

The lack of any advanced metallurgy among the Aztecs and Mayas has long been a mystery to students of pre-Columbian civilizations. Why, historians ask, were the great Mexican empires stuck in the Stone Age?

The Spanish crushed the Aztec empire with amazing ease, and the Americans’ technological inferiority was undoubtedly partly responsible. The conquistadors had gunpowder and horses; the Aztecs had neither. However, the blades of Aztec swords, made of obsidian, were sharper than steel. They could behead a horse.

The long feud came to an end on the morning of December 17, 1948. Eight hundred and fifty people attended the ceremony in the North Hall of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. They sat in chairs facing a temporary speaker’s platform—and the great tattered flag that Francis Scott Key had seen still flying over Fort McHenry in the dawn’s early light of September 14, 1814. The Star-Spangled Banner was but one of the American icons in this building.

Shown below are excerpts from Orville Wright’s comparison of the original Langley plane and the version flown in 1914. The full list of changes was published in the Smithsonian’s 1942 report on the matter.

Marty Cohen rings the doorbell of my apartment at seven in the morning every Wednesday, the day his route takes him to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He is a husky fellow, built like an iceman, and he has to be: like the iceman’s, his job involves carrying heavy things into people’s homes. And like the iceman’s, his job is nearly extinct.