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The idea of implementing large infrastructure projects has begun to replace the quick fix as a means of revitalizing an economy under duress.

It was a sad day when publication of American Heritage’s Invention & Technology magazine ceased last year. I am pleased to report that we completed an agreement this April to acquire and resurrect I&T —the only popular magazine dedicated to the history of technology. I pledge to you that all subscriptions will be honored—and that we will continue to give you the wonderful magazine that you’ve come to know and love.

On a spring day two decades ago, I joined Nat C. Wyeth for lunch in the posh Brandywine Room of Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. A soft-spoken man in his mid-70s, Wyeth was a giant in the chemical industry for inventing the first recyclable plastic bottle for liquids under pressure out of PET, a polymer resin. As we sat down, I noticed that the white-haired DuPont chemist seemed to bask in the artwork that adorned the room’s oak-paneled walls—and I soon understood why.

On my commute home from St. Paul to the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, a little before 6 p.m. on August 1 last year, I neared the 40-year-old I-35W bridge. Construction work had blocked half the lanes and choked it with traffic, so I passed by and took a different bridge over the Mississippi. Fifteen minutes later a truss-supported section near the southern end of I-35W failed, causing a chain reaction that brought down 1,200 linear feet of bridge and sent 100 vehicles crashing into the river. Thirteen people died.

It was a sad day when publication of American Heritage’s Invention & Technology magazine ceased last year. I am pleased to report that we completed an agreement this April to acquire and resurrect I&T —the only popular magazine dedicated to the history of technology. I pledge to you that all subscriptions will be honored—and that we will continue to give you the wonderful magazine that you’ve come to know and love.

When John Wesley Powell and his nine men pushed their four boats out into the roaring Colorado in 1869, they had no idea what lay downriver. They set out with the knowledge that they might not return—and several did not. As I reflect on the last decade's adventure of designing, building, testing, launching, and operating two complex and hardy robotic space vehicles on Mars, I cannot help but wonder if we were just as naive when we started out.

In the first part of the 18th century, a wave of Lutheran and Reformed German immigrants started arriving in Pennsylvania, a good many of them bringing Old World gunsmithing skills with them. When they adapted their expertise to meet the necessities demanded of the New World, they invented a new kind of firearm, the Kentucky rifle, which would soon exert a major impact on the development of colonial North America.

To many people, the artificial Christmas tree is emblematic of tradition gone awry, a plastic symbol of what has become a plastic holiday. Yet here’s how Moravian settlers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, celebrated Christmas in 1747: “Several small pyramids and one large pyramid of green brushwood had been prepared, all decorated with candles and the large one with apples and pretty verses.” Therefore, what some historians consider America’s first Christmas tree was artificial.

In 1958 a Popular Mechanics article called “miracles Ahead on Your Telephone” envisioned speakerphones, call forwarding, voice mail, and burglar alarms that would automatically notify the police. Two years later Changing Times predicted worldwide direct dialing, fax machines, and hand-held portable phones. Both these articles, and many others of the era, capped their clairvoyance with the most fantastic prophecy of all: a phone that would let you see the person you were talking to.

New york is a city of contrasts, not least in technology. Grade-school students carry the latest hand-held gadgets, and hedge-fund traders manipulate world markets from a table at Starbucks. Yet on sweltering summer days a very common question, often answered in the negative, is: “Do you have air conditioning?” As recently as the late 1980s, sinks with garbage disposals were banned in most of the city; large swaths of Queens had no cable television; and New York State driver’s licenses had no photographs.