The cab of a steam locomotive or the balloon-frame construction of a wooden house might seem like mundane objects at first. But by examining the “innumerable, often anonymous acts of arranging, patterning and designing” that went into the creation of such things, John Kouwenhoven has elucidated important and formerly neglected aspects of American culture. His classic study Made in America was published in 1948.

During World War II the United States exported more tons of petroleum products than of all other war matériel combined. The mainstay of the enormous oil-andgasoline transportation network that fed the war was the oceangoing tanker, supplemented on land by pipelines, railroad tank cars, and trucks. But for combat vehicles on the move, another link was crucial—smaller containers that could be carried and poured by hand and moved around a battle zone by trucks.

Builders have striven for height ever since the Tower of Babel, but until the end of the nineteenth century the tall structure was a monument, a symbol of temporal or spiritual power, not the functional building we know today. That changed when from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 Chicago rebuilt itself as the most modern city in the world. Tall buildings were going up in other places then, too, but no other city made such a determined and sustained effort to build and define their use and form.

DO YOU STILL THINK OF TECHNOLOGY AS MANKIND’S OBEDIENT SER vant? If so, you may be jolted by Walter A. McDougall’s observations about the space race. McDougall, a professor of history at the University of California, maintains that post- Sputnik , government-underwritten space technology has bred a genuine technocracy that is eroding the very Free World values it is supposed to defend.

American locomotives were worked very hard during the nineteenth century because like the jetliners of today, they were expensive capital goods, and their owners were intent on realizing maximum use from a major investment. Between 1840 and 1870 main-line locomotives normally cost eight to ten thousand dollars each. This was very big money for the period. Engines ran twenty to thirty thousand miles a year, consuming about twelve hundred cords of wood in the process.

ON JANUARY 8, 1815, AMERICAN troops under Andrew Jackson won a great victory against an attacking British force at the Battle of New Orleans. Sharpshooters and cannon behind well-defended positions brought down the staid redcoats by the hundreds, until the famed British discipline broke. The only problem with this success was that representatives of the two belligerents had signed a peace treaty in Belgium two weeks earlier, and only formalities remained before ratification.

IN 1907 ALBERT ABRAHAM MICHELSON BECAME THE FIRST U.S. CITIZEN to win a Nobel Prize for science. He was honored as the laureate in physics “for his precision optical instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations conducted therewith.” It was an honor well deserved. His ether-drift experiment of 1887, done in collaboration with the chemist Edward W.

As Tom Crouch pointed out, the inventors of the airplane got much of their knowledge of stability, control, and lightweight structures from the bicycle industry. He did not, however, mention the bicycle industry’s debt to aviation. The tension wheel, with its wire spokes and thin, flexible rim, was invented by the British aviation pioneer Sir George Cayley in the early 1820s, for use on gliders. This lightweight wheel design was, along with high-strength steel, what made the bicycle actually practical.

The big Allis-Chalmers triple-expansion engine is dead, but not to Walter Wilson and Daniel Hoffman. These men are, respectively, division foreman and manager of pumping and maintenance for New Jersey’s Hackensack Water Company; but back in the 1940s they were just starting there as two young engineers fresh out of the Navy, and the engine was very much alive.

At 5:04:40 on Saturday morning, May 26, 1934, the first diesel-powered, stainless-steel, streamlined train pulled out of Union Station, Denver, on a dawn-to-dusk race for Chicago. Called the Zephyr, it had been delivered to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad in Philadelphia just six weeks earlier and had traveled west in a series of short trips. To reach Chicago before sunset, it had to cover 1,015 miles nonstop in less than fourteen hours.

The Wrights’ Stuff

Tom Crouch’s excellent piece on the bicycle’s relationship to flying and airplanes (“How the Bicycle Took Wing,” Summer 1986) is another valuable contribution to a long-neglected segment of our history. When I was a boy in the 1920s, the conventional wisdom viewed the Wrights as unsophisticated repairmen who somehow got lucky in the quest for powered flight, a notion far from the reality of their having anticipated nearly every avenue of inquiry that has since come to characterize the design and development of aircraft.

The collapse of the Quebec Bridge on August 29, 1907 (“A Disaster in the Making,” Spring 1986 issue) entailed considerably more than the ruination of Theodore Cooper’s career, steelworker Hall’s two fingers, and the lives of seventy-five men. Of those seventy-five men, no fewer than thirty-five were Mohawk Indians from the Caughnawaga Reserve in Quebec. Their deaths had a devastating effect on this small Indian community, altering drastically its demographic profile, its economic base, and its social fabric.

After the tragic loss of the nuclear submarine Thresher , in 1963, the U.S. Navy undertook the development of Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles (DSRVs). On the basis of knowledge gained from earlier submarine-escape research and from the Navy’s bathyscaphe Trieste , which descended to a record depth of 35,800 feet in 1960, plans were made for six vessels, each capable of carrying a crew of three and twenty-four evacuees.

As America entered the First World War, in 1917, an Armenian named Garabed Giragossian petitioned Congress to investigate his miraculous and eponymous Garabed, an invention that would provide unlimited energy, “a natural force that we can utilize and have energy as we like, without toil or expense.” First he secured the endorsements of the director of music in the Boston Public Schools, the president of the board of trustees of the Boston Public Library, and the president of a shipbuilding concern; when he began his lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill, reports about his machi

LACKAWAXEN, PA.: The sight of a canalboat crossing a river was hardly remarkable in 1849 when, on April 26, a local crowd and engineers from all over the country gathered on the banks of the Delaware River in upper Pennsylvania. The boat in view was an ordinary barge. What was curious was how it got from shore to shore—floating inside a wooden flume suspended thirty feet above the water from two iron cables, which dipped across the river over stone piers.

In reading about the exaggerated promotional ploys used by early inventorbarons (“How Did the Heroic Inventors Do It?” by Thomas P. Hughes, Fall 1985), I wonder if today’s jadedness is not in some way a reaction to subsequent barrages of techno-hype.

In his article on the Burndy Library (Fall 1985), I. Bernard Cohen mentions that in the eighteenth century church bells were commonly rung in a vain attempt to ward off lightning strokes, and that they often bore the words fulgura frango . In fact, the full citation reads: Vivos voco,/ Mortuos plango,/ Fulgura frango (The living I call,/ The dead I mourn,/ Lightning I break).

Your magazine is most interesting and provocative for someone who has spent his career as a chemical engineer in the research and development of aerospace technology. And special thanks to Robert Kargon for his article “Inventing Caltech” (Spring 1986). His historical perspective brings into view much of what has influenced me since I joined Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1956.

On June 4, 1896, the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican offered what most of his readers must have regarded as a rather startling prediction. The airplane, he remarked, would likely be the work of bicycle makers. “The flying machine will not be the same shape, or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles,” he admitted, “but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to the evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.” The editor’s judgment was confirmed seven and a half years later.