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.

Although no one could ever patent it, one of the most important inventions of the late nineteenth century was the modern corporation, and of those who might lay claim to it, Isaac Leopold Rice was perhaps the most brilliant. At his best, a corporate entrepreneur like Rice was as much an innovator as was the inventor of a practical machine or process, for he institutionalized the useful. Rice was extraordinarily shrewd about patents, building more than fifteen corporations to sell technologies devised by other men.

Since World War II new technological revolutions have been heralded many times. First there was the industrial revolution to be fostered by nuclear power; more recently the computer or information revolution began—if we take the word of the prophets. Space flight and underwater exploration of the “new ocean” are other favorite catalysts of a new era.

For the past sixty years people have struggled to categorize Buckminster Fuller. A college dropout, recipient of twentyeight U.S. patents and forty-seven honorary degrees, author of more than two dozen books, and lecturer at more than five hundred colleges and universities, Fuller was always highly visible. But he defied classification.

IF ONLY WE COULD STEP BACK IN TIME, A historian’s dream might be fulfilled. As a student of transportation I would be particularly thrilled to stand by as the John Bull is off-loaded at the docks in 1831, or to be in the crowd as the New York and Erie officially opens the Great Broad Gauge to Dunkirk in 1851, or to witness the Golden Spike ceremony in 1869. But I think it would be just as rewarding to drop in on a more everyday scene of railroading a century or more ago.

As someone who well remembers the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and who walked it on the first day and now is involved in the celebration of its fiftieth birthday, I must tell you that without a doubt your article “A Bridge That Speaks for Itself,” by Margaret Coel (Summer 1987), is the finest I have ever seen on the subject.

Robert F. Christian
Christian Engineering
San Francisco, Calif.

At the Pennsylvania Railroad Ore Docks on the Cleveland waterfront, three Huletts of the M. A. Hanna Company are dipping into the hold of the Capt. Henry Jackman . The Jackman is perhaps eight hundred feet long, but the big vessel is if not exactly dwarfed, at least seriously diminished by the astonishing machines that are unloading it.

Sitting on the deck of the packet boat taking him to England in the fall of 1830, Robert Livingston Stevens whittled at a block of wood he had obtained from the ship’s carpenter. He knew he would have to carve just the right kind of cross section for the rail he had in mind, for much depended on it.

The roundhouse is a most peculiar industrial building. Its obvious purpose was to store locomotives; it also offered a shelter where light repairs and normal servicing could be conveniently performed. In a day when engines were the pride and symbol of a great industry, the roundhouse was a place to clean and groom the iron horse—a machine resplendent in polished brass, steel, Russia iron, varnished wood, and elegant paint.

Fifty years old this year, the Polaroid Corporation has eschewed what its corporate communicators call “exercises in nostalgia.” Instead, the organization that gave the world the instant photograph is sponsoring a round of forward-looking events—a decision profoundly characteristic of a company that resists definition, historical or otherwise.

Spanning The Golden Gate

As someone who well remembers the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and who walked it on the first day and now is involved in the celebration of its fiftieth birthday, I must tell you that without a doubt your article “A Bridge That Speaks for Itself,” by Margaret Coel (Summer 1987), is the finest I have ever seen on the subject.

Robert F. Christian
Christian Engineering
San Francisco, Calif.

THE END OF THE LINE: It had always been shockingly easy to kill a passenger pigeon. The roosting birds, one witness said, “seemed to court death. Wherever there was a naked branch on a tree, [they] chose to sit upon it in such a manner that an amateur could not fail to bring down at least half a dozen at one shot.” Every year the pigeons traveled to nestings in the hardwood tracts of the Midwest in flocks nearly a billion strong; clubs thrown into the dense mass as it passed overhead would bring down hundreds.

On June 24, 1930, two employees of the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., were trying to find out whether airplane pilots could follow the narrow beams of radio short-waves that a transmitter was sending out from a laboratory building. One of the men, Lawrence Hyland, had set up a receiver a short distance from the laboratory, near the Army airport at Boiling Field. His job was to watch a meter and record the strength of the navigation beams at various locations on the ground.

We always used to ask, how could the foremost technological nation in the world not have an agency dealing with its technological past,” says Eric DeLony, principal architect for the Historic American Engineering Record, a federal project based in Washington, D.C. He began asking this question in the late 1960s, when, as a graduate student in architecture, he became involved with the Historic American Buildings Survey, the WPA-born archive of historic architecture.

Across the way from the portentous WPA Romanism of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., a cheerful stand of Federal buildings has managed to survive, and in one of them is a machine that changed the way the world looks.

Fate has put this mechanism in the hands of Fred Litwin, and it couldn’t have found a better curator. Litwin is a used-furniture dealer—his family has been working in the store at 637 Indiana Avenue, N.W., since before World War I—but he speaks with the authority of a historian and the passion of a dedicated preservationist.

Thomas Jefferson had a good eye for real estate on a grand scale. But when the notion of a canal linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River near Albany, New York, was put before him in 1809 by two New York State legislators, he dismissed it out of hand. “Why, sir,” he said, ”… you talk of making a canal three hundred and fifty miles long through a wilderness! It is a little short of madness to think of it at this day!”

The question “Where did it all start?” is always an irresistible, if slippery, one in matters of technology, and the more important and visible an invention, the greater the fascination in finding its origin or earliest use. In the case of the ever visible automobile, the argument can be made that it was an obscure Kentuckian, Dr. Joseph Buchanan, who, in the mid-1820s, built and drove the first in the United States. The case becomes more debatable the closer one looks, but it also becomes more interesting.

In “Notes from the Field” (Spring 1986), you write, “New York City’s Holland Tunnel, completed in 1927, was the first of many built using compressed air.” I believe there were accounts of sandhogs being blown up to the surface of the East River during the construction of the IRT and BMT tunnels well before the twenties.

Emma Cobb replies: Correct. The Holland Tunnel was the first automobile tunnel so built.

In “Working with Working Models” (Fall 1985), Benjamin Lawless showed a patent model for a Dahlgren-like gun designed by John Ericsson and described the rings around the barrel as providing cooling. But overheating from rapid fire was a small problem in 1864 compared with the tendency of large iron cannon to burst. A host of inventors on either side of the Atlantic labored furiously to develop composite cannon with greater strength and endurance, and Dahlgren, for one, patented circular plates stacked and shrunken into place for added reinforcement.

After traveling in the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens did little to advance the cause of transportation—much less tourism—by canal-boat when he committed his impressions to paper. He recounted canaling experiences that were better read about than lived through.