Premier Plastic

After reading “A Most Invented Invention,” about the discovery of polypropylene (by David B. Sicilia, Spring/Summer 1990), I will always recall the brilliance of Karl Ziegler as I sit down to enjoy a Dannon yogurt from its plastic container. The article states that polypropylene is America’s fourth-largestselling plastic. What are the top three?

William Harvie
La Jolla, Calif.

David Sicilia replies: The three largestselling plastics are high-pressure polyethylene, low-pressure polyethylene, and polyvinylchloride. (The lay person might consider the first two as one, but to the industry the distinction is quite important.) The two varieties of PE are used in scores of applications; PVC is predominantly fashioned into piping.

The Big Ship

Your article on the SS United States (“The Big Ship,” by Edward R. Crews, Spring/Summer 1990) refers to her as the “ultimate ocean liner.” Such an appellation is only valid if one cares to regard such ships merely as exercises in speed, power, and fireproofing. The great transatlantic liners were most cherished for their luxury, ambiance, and taste, and by those standards the outstanding liner was, with little doubt, the French Line’s Normandie . The United States , by comparison, amounted to little more than a troopship doing temporary duty in passenger service while awaiting the next war.

T. A. Heppenheimer
Fountain Valley, Calif.

The Big Ship

I crossed the Atlantic on the United States in 1959 and was told this story by the purser: He had been aboard on her maiden voyage, during which she had broken the Queen Mary ’s speed record. Returning to New York, the United States had passed the Queen Mary , and Commodore Harry Manning had sent a wireless message to the Queen Mary ’s captain announcing the new record. The captain wired back, “Congratulations! This is good news, for the Queen is a lady and should not have a reputation for being so fast.”

K. Edward Lefren
Yorklyn, Del.

How Hi The Fi?

In his article “Technology Makes Music” (Spring/Summer 1990), David Lander might have pointed out that the study cited in Fortune in 1946 suggesting that the public and especially musicians preferred a limited frequency range was flawed by the fact that hi-fi was then in fact full of distortion. Limiting the frequency response of the system reduced some of the distortion to tolerable levels. In July 1947 a study showed that a majority of listeners preferred full-range, distortion-free high fidelity, the importance of minimizing harmonic and intermodulation distortion hadn’t been appreciated until then.

Peter Romans
Albany, Oreg.

How Hi The Fi?

I entered Bell Labs as a new Ph.D. in physics in 1930. The commonly accepted grapevine tale in the labs was that Leopold Stokowski objected to letting engineers have a powerful hand in the recording of his music. Those engineers had wonderful boards with controls that could alter the levels of sounds as they were transmitted or recorded, and this he insisted should be in his domain. A panel was built and installed at his podium, which delighted the conductor. He monitored and recorded a selection, listened to a playback, turned to his listeners, and said, “Fine. Now that is the way it ought to sound.” The story was that he never learned that the controls on the panels were absolute dummies.

George R. Stibitz
Professor of Physiology Emeritus
Dartmouth Medical School
Hanover, N.H.

An Older Dry Dock

During my career in the Navy 1 visited all the U.S. naval shipyards and served tours of duty in three of them, in Boston, Brooklyn, and Portsmouth, Virginia, becoming very familiar with the dry docks. Naturally I was delighted to see a picture of the old dock at Brooklyn in Invention & Technology (‘They’re Still There: The Most Beautiful Dry Dock,” by Richard F. Snow, Spring/Summer 1990). Mr. Snow states that “in 1841 the Navy decided to build a dry dock—its first, as well as New York’s.” In fact, in 1827 Congress authorized the construction of two dry docks, one in Boston and one in what is now Portsmouth. On June 17, 1833, the dock at Portsmouth was flooded and the USS Delaware entered it, becoming the first ship on the North American continent to be dry-docked. It seems fitting that the first docking was done at Portsmouth, for it is our oldest shipyard, founded in 1767, and is now our largest and finest naval shipyard.

James Andrew Brown
Portsmouth, Va.

An Older Dry Dock

The Japanese businessmen you describe looking at the Brooklyn dry dock were not remembering the warships Americans once built there. They were wondering why the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now used to make “little pink packages” of artificial sweetener. To paraphrase the article’s last sentence: This is how we beat ourselves.

Jeffrey H. Orleans
Princeton, N.J.