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On an August afternoon in 1943, a long column of American B-17s arrived over the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt. The bombardiers watched the city crawl by under the lenses of their top-secret Norden bombsights, made delicate adjustments, and, from four miles up, dropped eighty bombs into a mile-square target. The remarkable accuracy of their bombsights was due partly to the dozens of tiny and precise ball bearings in each one. Hundreds more ball bearings went into the bombers’ big radial engines.

Some inventors are better left unsung, for example Fred H. Brown. He was the creator of the “vibrochord,” an impressive agglomeration of electrical wires, coils, and magnets that linked a musical instrument—a piano or perhaps a guitar or trombone—to a listener’s body. It flooded his system with “waves of harmony” and thereby cured “insomnia, hysteria, nervous prostration, rheumatism and numerous other ailments.” Or consider Ernesto Finelli, of New York City.

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.

In “The Perpetual Search for Perpetual Motion” (Summer 1986) Ken Alder provides an amusing look at inventors who thought their machines could defy the laws of nature. I was troubled, however, by the curt treatment of Joseph Newman’s recent invention. Alder seems to have applied the same a priori reasoning in dismissing Newman’s invention as has the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

In the spring of 1887, the emperor himself came out to the Steinfeld firing range a few kilometers from Vienna to watch the Austrian Army trials for rapid-firing weapons. Franz Joseph seemed particularly impressed by the performance of the Nordenfeldt model, a gleaming five-barreled rifle demonstrated by a team of two—one man feeding the cartridges, the second carefully cranking out 180 shots per minute.

When I went to college, my father gave me his slide rule—the one he had used in college. Marked on its leather case, which I had often envied as a child, were his name, the Greek letters of his fraternity, and the names of the schools he had attended. Knowing that countless problems had painstakingly been calculated through skillful manipulation of its slide gave the tool an aura not unlike that of the swords passed from generation to generation in medieval times.

In his article Tom Crouch presents a fine synopsis of the evolution of the ordinary through the safety bicycle. However, the bicycle shown in an accompanying photograph (on page 12) has been wrongly identified. It is certainly an antique, but it is not an ordinary. The bicycle is a Star, an unusual early safety bicycle, with the large wheel in the rear and pedals that are actually spring-loaded levers driving a ratchet-wheel mechanism. It was probably built between 1883 and 1886, by the H. B. Smith Machine Company, of New Jersey.

THE DISAPPEARING RECORD: A few years after the last American troops left Vietnam in 1973, the Pentagon turned over a big batch of microfilm, more than one hundred rolls, to the National Archives. The film carried every enemy document captured by U.S. forces during the war—a spectacular trove of information for some future historian, and most of it not existing in any other form.

Squat and powerful, its boiler sheathed in stout wood planking and its nearly six-foot-long iron leading truck thrusting forward wickedly, the ten-ton John Bull is the oldest self-propelled vehicle in the world that can still run. Gazing at the 155-year-old steam locomotive, you begin to sense just how it was that it and other innovative machines became engines of change that knit nineteenth-century America together, industrialized the nation, and helped form the American character.

On September 19,1985, the most disastrous earthquake in North American history struck Mexico City. More than twenty thousand people were killed after a layer of wet clay amplified a distant temblor and set downtown buildings rocking. Hundreds of the buildings collapsed, crushing or trapping their inhabitants. But it could have been far worse. Thousands more buildings stood, including the landmark Latinoamericana tower.

The first issue of this magazine was published just seventeen months ago, in April 1985. In a letter from the editors in that issue we wrote, “American Heritage of Invention & Technology will not compete with the many periodicals that bring us news of the cutting edge. On the contrary, we intend to look behind the edge to the nature of the blade itself: its heft, strength, and resiliency—all those qualities that support the cutting edge and cannot be separated from it.

My great-uncle, George S. Morison, one of America’s foremost bridge builders, died July 1, 1903, exactly (as he undoubtedly would have said) six years, five months, fourteen days, and six hours before I was born. What follows begins with some incidental intelligence that has nothing to do with his work; these, listed in no order of relative importance, are just some of the things I know about him:

In October 1925 thousands of New Yorkers viewed an exhibition at the John Wanamaker department store entitled “The Titan City, a Pictorial Prophesy of New York, 1926-2026.” They saw murals of a spectacular skyscraper metropolis, with colossal setback towers spaced at regular intervals and connected by multilevel transit systems, arcaded sidewalks, and pedestrian bridges at the upper floors.

The herring are back again, battling their way up the Wankinko River past the Tremont Nail Company in Wareham, Massachusetts. “We caught a bunch this morning,” says Donald Shaw, the company’s general manager. He opens a stoneware crock to show the fish lying under a thick layer of salt. “We pickle ’em overnight, and then the boys have them for lunch the next day.” He points to a brand-new barbecue grill, very bright among all the old, dark metal in the company’s machine shop. “That’s why that’s there. The last one wore out.

Just before Christmas in 1913 three engineers from the American Marconi company crowded into a cluttered basement room in Philosophy Hall at Columbia University to see a young man demonstrate his new invention, a regenerative, or feedback, circuit, which he confidently declared had made possible the most effective wireless receiver in the world.

In the late 1880s Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-94), a German physicist, proved an earlier theory of the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell that electromagnetic waves could move through space. To do this, Hertz attached copper plates to two separate metal spheres. When he generated an alternating current between them, sparks jumped from one sphere to the other. As crude as it was, this device served as the first transmitter. For a receiver Hertz held a loop of copper wire a few feet away.

As a teen-ager, in the 1920s and 1930s, Charles H. Townes was a tireless reader of Popular Mechanics . “It was one of my favorite magazines, and I built a lot of things I saw in its pages,” he recalls. “It gave me a view of what was going on in science and technology that I might not have had growing up in South Carolina.” By the time he was twenty-four, he was on the staff of Bell Labs; today he is known as the inventor of the laser.

No tale in all the chronicles of American invention would seem to be better known than the story of Thomas Edison’s incandescent electric light. The electric light, after all, quickly became the epitome of the bright idea, and its creator was for more than fifty years the living symbol of America’s inventive genius. But in truth it is only in recent years that we have begun to piece together the complete story of history’s most famous invention.

When Halley’s comet returns to our quarter of the universe this year, the great 200-inch Hale Telescope, perched high on Palomar Mountain in California, will follow it across the sky. In fact, the 200-inch, the world’s largest telescope for a full three decades after its dedication in 1948, was the first telescope to detect the comet during its current return, back in 1982. We can always expect the phenomenal from the 200-inch.

Elting E. Morison, Killian professor of humanities emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the nation’s preeminent interpreters of technology. Though a great fan and chronicler of America’s industrial growth, he takes a clear, unawed view of his favorite subject. “The technological universe,” he says, “should be designed to fit and serve the human dimension.”