BALTIMORE, MD. : When Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” in 1954, he inspired today’s pastoral school of baseball writing, in which every pop fly is an evocation of our country’s bucolic heritage. While it’s doubtful that the bleacher bums at Wrigley Field have any such thing in mind when they turn out to cheer the Cubs, Mr. Barzun does have a point: In its journey from a middle-class weekend pastime played in country fields to a multibillion-dollar business played in concrete-and-AstroTurf stadiums, baseball encapsulates our country’s development and says something fundamental about the American character.

Of course, the same could be said for any sport—football, basketball, even badminton or water polo if you try hard enough. Yet some objects of study are more informative than others. While baseball does recall our nation’s rustic past, that era is remote to most modern Americans. The best way to get a handle on our automobile-centered suburban post-World War II culture may be by examining an equally rich but newer sport, drag racing. No wonder, then, that Robert C. Post of the Smithsonian Institution has written High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing 1950-1990 (Johns Hopkins, $34.95), the first complete scholarly analysis of America’s compulsion to travel a quarter-mile in eversmaller bits of time.

Post, a hot rodder himself in his youth, explains how the spirit of 1940s teen-agers matching hopped-up Ford Model A’s manages to live on in the days of television and corporate sponsorship. Since it was first organized and regulated, drag racing has been shaped by conflicts between different factions with different goals. In the early days Californians and “Easterners” (meaning anyone between Arizona and the Atlantic) struggled for control. Schisms developed between rich playboy types and back-yard tinkerers, leading to complaints that “big money” was corrupting the amateur nature of the sport—even though no more than half a dozen drag racers made more than they spent at any time during the 1950s and 1960s. Other conflicts included drivers contending with promoters over gate receipts and, later, women struggling with the male power structure—first simply to be allowed to compete, then to be accepted as equals.

Post shows how the technology of the cars developed alongside the organization of the sport and how these two halves of the story influenced each other. For example, the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) banned the use of “fuel”—nitromethane—in dragsters from 1957 to 1963, ostensibly because it was unsafe. The real reason, Post suggests, was that fuel was much more expensive than gasoline, and Wally Parks, the NHRA’s president, feared its superior power would tilt the balance away from those with mechanical ingenuity and toward those with deep pockets. The policy ultimately failed because non-NHRA events with fuel-powered dragsters proved too lucrative to ignore.

Three decades later a dispute over computer-controlled transmissions ended in a ban on virtually all use of artificial intelligence. Here again, the idea was to keep drag racing in the hands of car builders and drivers, instead of chip designers. Today’s software engineers could automate race driving as much as they have aviation, but since the main goal of drag racing is excitement, not safety, such a seemingly obvious extension would in fact be counter-productive.

With his past articles in Invention & Technology (“In Praise of Top Fuelers,” Spring 1986; “The Machines of Nowhere,” Spring 1992) and elsewhere, and now his book, Post has become to drag racing what Roger Angell is to baseball, Norman Maclean is to fishing, or Joyce Carol Oates is to boxing. Only occasionally does the narrative slip into automotive lyricism, and the few list-every-name paragraphs, like the Bible’s sequences of “begats,” can easily be skipped by the less devout.

In his thirteen years as editor of Technology & Culture , the Society for the History of Technology’s journal, Post gained a reputation for being at home in any area of the discipline, no matter how abstruse. In High Performance he delves into one topic intensely, skillfully elucidating its connections with other areas of study. The resulting performance is high indeed, and it shows how much struggle and refinement—technical, social, economic, and many other kinds—goes into four seconds of noise and smoke and speed.

EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF: Several other Invention & Technology contributors have recently published books:

Michael Brian Schiffer, author of “Postfix” columns on portable radios (Summer 1992) and electric motors (Winter 1994 and Summer 1994), has written Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America (Smithsonian Institution Press, $24.00). Schiffer details the vicissitudes of electric cars between the mid-1890s and the early 1920s, finding that at the turn of the century they were on an even footing with cars powered by steam and gasoline. Sales dropped as the new century wore on but enjoyed a brief revival starting around 1907, when improvements in cars and batteries made electrics briefly competitive. What Schiffer calls the Classic Age ended in the early teens, however, when the self-starter (an electrical device, ironically enough) eliminated cranking on gasoline cars and made them irresistibly superior for most buyers.

Early electric cars had important advantages over internal combustion: they were quieter, cleaner, and easier to start and operate, did not smell, and required no transmission. Balanced against these virtues were equally major flaws: the batteries were heavy and needed constant maintenance and recharging, and the cars were slow, expensive, and limited to ranges of a hundred miles or less. Recreational touring and rural use were out of the question, but Schiffer suggests that electrics could have established a niche market in urban areas for uses requiring frequent short trips—as taxis and delivery trucks, and by doctors and other professionals, salesmen, and socialites making their rounds.

Near the end he optimistically asserts that “if middle-class women had enjoyed greater economic independence, the electric car in the teens might have found a market of millions,” instead of seeing its sales peak at an annual figure of 6,500 units—about three days’ production for Ford in 1916. Whether you buy that conclusion or not, the book is a valuable reminder of how divergent technologies struggled for supremacy in the automobile’s early days and of the obstacles that electric vehicles continue to face today.

James E. Tomayko (“The Airplane as Computer Peripheral,” Winter 1992) has written Computers in Space: Journeys With NASA (Alpha Books, $20.00 paperback), a history of the use of computers to guide space flight. The author, a pilot and professor of software engineering, manages to transcend the inherently stultifying nature of computer writing, with its acronyms and flow charts; he discusses such antique computers as the IBM 704, RCA 110A, and Univac 1230 with the same love that drag-racing enthusiasts like Bob Post apply to a ’32 Ford coupe.

Tomayko tells of the late-1950s post- Sputnik rush to develop spacecraft, when computers were so slow that displays at Mission Control might lag two seconds behind real life (during which a rocket could travel ten miles). The first on-board computer, in the 1962 Gemini capsule, had to fit in a slot nineteen by fifteen by thirteen inches—this in an age when a typical research computer installation might take up all of a large room. The backup system for this computer consisted of a second astronaut checking calculations with a pencil and paper.

Working conditions for programmers were quite primitive by today’s standards. Into the 1970s some software designers had to test their work by sending a batch of punch cards by courier to a building a mile away. They generally managed one run a day. Not until 1976 was a direct link installed. Apollo saw the first use of integrated circuits, leading to the modern space shuttle, which puts such great faith in its computer guidance system that no manual override is possible. Tomayko gives the whole story clearly and smoothly, with enough detail to satisfy chipheads and enough explanation to enlighten the clueless.

And finally, readers who enjoyed Robert Friedel’s story on zippers in our last issue will welcome his book-length treatment of the subject, The Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (W. W. Norton, $23.00). Friedel takes the zipper story up to the present day, poignantly describing how foreign competition caused Talon, Inc. (successor to the Hookless Fastener Company), to pull out of its long-time home in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He analyzes the literary, artistic, and symbolic aspects of zippers and even gives the lyrics to a company song (“Zipper Boots, Oh Zipper Boots,” sung to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland”) that was regrettably omitted from his Invention & Technology article. Friedel’s book is a must for anyone interested in seeing what’s behind the zipper.