A Turning Point

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY , and of the millennium with it, is an invention as surely as is anything we cover in this magazine. Its main inventors include the ancients who devised decimal numbering systems, working from the number of fingers on their hands; the Roman official in 153 B.C. who fixed January 1 as the first day of the year; and Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth-century monk who came up with a calendar naming years by starting with A.D. 1 as the time of Christ’s birth (and getting Christ’s birth wrong by about four years, as it turned out). Mix in with those inventions the common compulsion to pay special attention to anniversaries where big round numbers occur—which leads most of us to find the grand odometer change at 2000 far more significant than the strictly logical millennium of 2001—and you have the invention of a major moment for looking back and taking stock.

Invention & Technology marks that moment with this issue. In it we start by offering some general reflections on the sweep of technology over the past century, drawing what broad lessons we can from all the blessings and curses of humanity’s vast inventiveness in that time. After that the artist Edward Sorel presents a witty and affectionate group portrait of 20 of the most innovative Americans of the century, and the historian Robert Friedel takes a revealing look at the technological embarrassment of the millennial moment, the Y2K Problem, finding that it contains some very surprising lessons about the present speed and nature of technical change. We complete our lineup of feature articles with surveys of three crucial technologies of our time: the fiber optics that have become the essential material of the information superhighway, the medical-imaging techniques with which engineers have provided the eyes of the ongoing medical revolution, and DDT, the preeminent case of a miracle that became a disaster, with all that its tortuous career tells us about the difficulties of finding clear paths to the future.

Any turning point is of course an ending as well as a beginning, and with this issue we also say farewell to “They’re Still There.” Our final installment pays a visit to what must be the oldest industrial survivor of all in this country, the Avedis Zildjian Company, a family-run business that continues to make cymbals using a secret alloy developed by an ancestor in 1623. “They’re Still There” has run in Invention & Technology since the first issue almost 15 years ago and has visited more than 50 remarkable technological holdouts. Where it leaves off we will pick up with a new department titled “Object Lessons,” which will tell the extraordinary stories behind some of the ordinary objects we surround ourselves with every day, from answering machines and computer mice to toothbrushes and running shoes. It will give us a new way to keep exploring the endless making and remaking of our world, the explosion of technological energy that has defined so much of the past century and promises to stay just as central to everybody’s life in the next. There’s one thing we at Invention & Technology are pleased to have no doubt about as we peer toward the great unknown of the next hundred years: that our beat, the technological past in America right up to the present moment, will continue to be as exciting and vital as any there is.