AS AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER I HAVE always enjoyed Invention & Technology and I share Walter Vincenti’s interest in history (“What Engineers Know: An Interview With Walter Vincenti,” by Robert C. Post, Winter 1997). But I differ with him on the relationship between technology and culture. While he sees our culture as the age of technology—as opposed to the Middle Ages, the age of religion—I see all cultures as driven by technology.

Archeologists label different stages of human cultural evolution by the driving technology—Stone Age, Bronze Age, and so forth. In each era the prevailing technology had a profound effect on human interrelations. Once urban culture evolved, advances in transportation—shipbuilding, wagon building, and road construction—made political empires possible and led the way to the modern state. The Phoenicians’ far-flung mercantile successes were founded on their shipbuilding and navigational technology. The Roman Empire stood on a foundation of civil engineering. But while technology made possible the concentration of a centralized political power, further technological evolution was putting power back in the hands of individuals.

Governments have always tried to monopolize power, which means monopolizing technology and education. In ancient times priests kept their technical knowledge secret so they could impress the public with their powers. During the Middle Ages, when church and state had a vise grip on power, high tech took the form of the construction of magnificent cathedrals. Fortunately, while the monopolists were preoccupied, some guy named Gutenberg, tinkering in his garage, put together one of the world’s most important technological advances—movable type—changing human culture forever.

We can view cultural evolution since urbanization as a technology-moderated battle between the individual and the state. First technology made the state possible; now it is making it obsolete, at least in the forms we know from the past. The story of the printing press, of which the Internet is the latest evolutionary incarnation, is the story of the fight. With each advance governments have attempted to control the means of communication, but the individual is winning, because evolution favors flexibility, a quality notably lacking in government.

To call our present age, as opposed to some other age, technological is hard for me to do. I think that perception is best explained by a cartoon I remember seeing in which one caveman says to another, “We never had weather like this before the invention of the bow and arrow.”

Robert A. de Forest
McMinnville, Ore.

Color War Stories

THE ARTICLE “THE COLOR WAR,” BY David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher (Winter 1997), caught my rapt attention because fresh out of college in the mid-sixties I worked one summer as a helper on color sets in a midsize TV-repair shop.

Rectangular picture tubes were just becoming popular. My major responsibility was to reassemble the chassis and picture-tube harness and do “setup”—that is, adjust gray scale, purity, and beam convergence. In truth, any brand of color set beholden to the RCA design lived or died based on how well these procedures were accomplished. The same time-consuming convergence procedures still plague most home-theater big-screen projectors today.

Peter Goldmark’s design as ventured by CBS was so simple as to be ingenious. No adjustments of purity or screen-grid temperature or elaborate convergence gear were needed. Goldmark’s design had one minus, however. The cabinet had to bulge mightily to house the filter wheel. For the typical twenty-one-inch screen size in homes today, his system would require the cabinet to be grossly disfigured. But considering the bulk of the rear-projection sets being welcomed into living rooms now, perhaps that wouldn’t have been a problem.

Ronald B. Wickman
Johnson City, Tenn.

Color War Stories

MY TWIN SISTER AND I GREW UP IN Haddonfield, New Jersey, in the thirties and forties, and many of the engineers from the Camden laboratories lived there at the time. It was once said there were more TV sets per capita there than anywhere else in the world.

Our best girlfriend was the daughter of John Dearing, one of those RCA engineers. Even before the war her family had a huge TV set in their living room. People nowadays would be astonished by it. It was in a large console, but the picture tube was so deep it needed to be mounted vertically. It had a backwards image on it that reflected into the mirror on the inside of the console’s raised lid. We never dreamed that one day front-facing TV’s would be commonplace. The only channel I can recall was WPTZ, in Philadelphia. About all we ever saw were old movies or once in a while a sports program.

One day our friend told us that her father had said RCA would be testing color TV. We all gathered expectantly around that old TV set, somehow expecting color to appear by magic on a black-and-white tube. It was years later that I finally realized how ignorant we had been.

Incidentally, I later married an RCA engineer.

Mildred K. Henderson
Lancaster, Pa.

Color War Stories

“THE COLOR WAR” FAILS TO FULLY stress the point that Peter Goldmark’s spinning disks were a really dumb idea. There are no physical laws that prohibit electronic color TV, and beamsplitting cameras for color photography were in use from the turn of the century, so Goldmark’s insistence on a mechanical system showed a real lack of, well, vision. It is true that RCA treated CBS maliciously, in much the same way as they harassed Edwin H. Armstrong into committing suicide, but the fact is that the RCA system was the better system. Its basic design —a wideband luminance signal combined with two narrowband colordifference signals—is used in all modern color TV systems, including highdefinition systems.

William Sommerwerck
Bellevue, Wash.

Launching the Turbine

I FOUND THE ARTICLE “‘ST. GEORGE’ Westinghouse,” by Curt Wohleber (Winter 1997), both interesting and enjoyable. However, I would like to clarify one statement, where reference is made to the vessel Turbinia, built by Sir Charles Parsons.

The Turbinia was hardly a “large oceangoing vessel.” Built to test the practical application of the steam turbine to marine use, it was a vessel of 44.5-ton displacement, with a length of 100 feet, a beam of 9 feet, and a draft of 7 feet.

Parsons first developed his turbine in 1884. He displayed the Turbinia in a rather audacious publicity stunt at Queen Victoria’s review of the fleet during her Diamond Jubilee Year of 1897. At this very ceremonial occasion, with representative units from the fleets of the major countries of the world present, the Turbinia zipped through the lines of warships at 34.5 knots.

Parsons made his point. The turbine soon became the next generation of ship propulsion.

Andrew U. McFarlin
San Jose, Calif.

Titanic Memories

THE ARTICLE “INSIDE THE PANAMA Canal,” by Frederick Allen (Fall 1996), was super. I never realized the hardships and difficulties involved in building it. What a tremendous undertaking for the time.

I was especially interested in the mention of the 1941 diesel-electric crane Titan, which I worked on in California as a rigger between 1950 and 1952. It had been built in Germany for the task of assembling at sea sectional submarines, which were carried in a mother ship.

I remember that its operator’s cab was ninety-five feet above the deck, and the control system from that lofty perch was bronze chains over sprockets that pushed and pulled stiff wires in tubes. The large hooks were rated at 350 tons, and in a controlled test we lifted a 400-ton load and slued it 360 degrees. The cantilevered counterweight was 400 tons, as I remember. Between it and the load of the structure was a large threaded shaft with a six-foot diameter brass “nut.” When it was rotated, the load went up and the counter down. The crane had sleeping quarters for twelve officers and thirty-two men.

After Titan arrived from Germany, the main concern in assembling it was the height of the lift that would be required to get the uppermost section into place. This problem was solved by putting the crane at the bottom of the dry dock, while a converted-battleship crane did the honors at extreme high tide.

Our most interesting task with this monster: The Ticonderoga was built in a dry dock while its entire bridge section was constructed on the quay. At the proper moment we placed the completed superstructure onto the hull. The entire operation took about six hours.

We could impress visitors by putting them in a personnel box, booming all the way out, then sluing in a gigantic circle. It was about an eight-minute ride and could blow your hat off.

Working on the Titan was the most enjoyable job I ever had.

Gene Packard
Orange City, Fla.

A Current Affair

I READ WITH GREAT INTEREST FREDERICK Allen’s “Inside the Panama Canal” in the Fall 1996 issue. I am astounded, however, at a statement at the top of page 12. I am aware of the innovative technology of the Japanese and of Mitsubishi especially, but cannot imagine how they were able to design and build engines for the canal’s mules that run on “sixty-cycle direct current.”

Frederick Steinway
Amherst, Mass.

The editors reply: Mr. Steinway and other sharp-eyed readers were right to be astounded. There can be no such thing as sixty-cycle direct current; the mules run on alternating current.

Beach’s Subway Lives On

READING “NEW YORK’S SECRET SUB way,” by Oliver E. Allen (Winter 1997), was like jumping into a pool of ice water. About fifteen years ago I got a tape of an album by a group called Klaatu, and one song on that album was “Sub Rosa Subway.” I took a liking to the song but never understood the words. They spoke of Alfred Beach working secretly, the New York Sun , digging underground, a wind machine, and even goldfish fountains. I think you can imagine my surprise when I realized after all these years that those words were not just the rantings of someone trying to write lyrics. Thanks. Dinner was a little overdone tonight because I had to finish that article, but the kids ate it anyway.

James F. Ormond
St. Cloud, Fla.