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ON DECEMBER 19, 1937, THE HARTFORD Courier described a demonstration that Harold Edgerton had just given at the local Bushnell Motion Pictures and Lecture Course: “About 2000 persons sat for about two hours in Bushnell Memorial last night and saw things happen that happened a long time before they reached the hall, but which really happened at the time they saw them happen. S’elp us, that’s what happened!

I WAS AMAZED TO SEE THE MlRAFLORES Bridge in the Panama Canal cover picture of the Fall 1996 issue. It is plainly visible at the entrance of the lock, on either side, a drawbridge in its open position. The Bridge of the Americas replaced it; I would have thought it had been dismantled. When I lived in Panama, between 1951 and 1959, the Miraflores Bridge and the nearby Thatcher Ferry were the routes across the canal.

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.

THIRTY-FOUR CANOES IN ALMOST AS MANY COL ors glide down a forty-foot-wide channel of smooth water and gather by a weathered wood-plank wall under the blue Oregon sky. Their paddlers grab on to long cables tossed down from a walkway a dozen feet above, and all tie up together. They have entered the Willamette Falls Locks, cut into the rocky basaltic riverbank in the early 187Os. The scene looks utterly placid.

IN AUGUST 1940, AS AN INDUSTRY COM mittee wrestled with transmission standards for television, a young, accented voice momentarily disrupted the rush toward commercial broadcasting. The voice belonged to Peter Goldmark, CBS’s Hungarian-born Wunderkind , who had emigrated to the United States only seven years before.

HARTFORD, CONN.: In the late 1880s, when Mark Twain began his tale of a time traveler who brings modern technology to the Middle Ages, he had to decide what sort of character would work best in the central role. He did not choose a steamboat pilot, despite his own experience in that capacity. Nor did he choose a railroad man or a telegrapher or an electrician. Instead Twain used the chief of a firearms factory as his agent of transformation.

To ALFRED ELY BEACH, THE BEST WAY TO MOVE PEOPLE from one place to another underground was to put them in capsules and shoot them through tubes by means of air pressure from huge fans. The year was 1870, New York City’s need for a subway was becoming desperate, and many rapid-transit proposals were being put forward. Beach insisted that his was the best. “A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he cried. “Little more is required.

THE FIRST HURDLE IN DEVELOPING THE MODERN GASOLINE PUMP WAS RECOG nizing that such a thing was needed. Early in the century, when cars were still rare, gasoline was essentially a nuisance for petroleum refiners, a byproduct of kerosene distillation that had to be disposed of somehow. It had a variety of minor uses: as a solvent and as a fuel for lamps, stoves, and engines. Automobiles were somewhere near the bottom of the list.

IS OUR TECHNOLOGY LEADING US TOWARD AN ideally frictionless and disembodied information society and a world where hunger and disease have been finally vanquished? Or, on the other hand, is it dragging us down in a calamitous decline that will end only in a global environmental apocalypse? Neither, of course, argues Edward Tenner, the author of a bracing new book titled Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.00).

UNTIL THE AGE OF SEVENTY -six Frank Henefelt of Buffalo, New York, had led an active life. He had been a parts inspector for an optical firm and before that the chief tester for the old Fierce-Arrow automobile company. In retirement he could still mow his lawn or climb a ladder to install screens. “I was one hundred percent,” he said—until the day in 1959 when he began having blackouts. “I had one while I was in the bank, another down in the cellar,” he later told an interviewer.

NEW YORK, N.Y. : “While the artistic genius of Leonardo da Vinci has been almost legendary since his lifetime (1452-1519), his equally extraordinary genius as a scientist has remained little known.” So ran the caption at an exhibit of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (from which it has since departed). The assertion is debatable, to say the least.

Tours of the West Baden Springs Hotel will be held between May and October of 1997 on Saturdays and Sundays, hourly between 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. , beginning at the site’s main entrance on state route 56. The tour is ten dollars for adults, five dollars for youths aged thirteen to eighteen, two dollars for children aged six to twelve, and free for children younger than six.

FOR THE FIRST QUARTER OF THIS CENTURY, ALMOST all automobile bodies were painted by hand, with brushes. Nothing held back car production like painting. It was the manacle, the iron boot of the industry. Paint technology had not kept up with advances in other areas of mass production. Major automakers could assemble a car in four to five hours, but it took three to eight weeks to paint it.

“PATCHWORK CLEAR-CUTTING IS THE BEST THING for those owls,” Wayne Giesy tells me. “In the wild there’s less food for them. Lewis and Clark nearly starved to death in that damn forest before they got out to hunt and fish. The ecology people are missing the boat.” Wayne Giesy works for the Hull-Oakes Lumber Company, in Monroe, Oregon, twenty-five miles outside Eugene. Hull-Oakes is a sawmill that, as Giesy’s words may suggest, specializes in cutting extremely big old-growth logs.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Josiah White pioneered a striking number of technological fields. He made major advances in iron and steel manufacture, he built the earliest example of an important type of bridge, he taught Americans how to burn a new kind of coal, and he invented the country’s first railroad of any importance. Like most inventors, White is little remembered today. Few biographical directories contain his name, and even histories of technology tend to ignore him.

The Switch Back Gravity Railroad was scrapped in 1937, but the Switch Back Gravity Railroad Foundation, a nonprofit group in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is dedicated to bringing it back to life. The group has arranged the construction of a twenty-eight-foot working scale model of the railroad (which is on display at the Mauch Chunk Museum), produced a video using original photos, drawings, and 1920s motion-picture footage of the line, and commissioned feasibility studies on the prospects of resurrecting it.

ONE OF THE most visible innovations in late-twentieth-century architecture has been the huge unsupported dome. In the familiar form of the domed stadium it has popped up across the continent. The era of domed stadiums began in 1965, with the opening of the Houston Astrodome. Yet an unsupported steel-framed dome of breathtaking size has been standing since the very beginning of the century in southern Indiana, far from any metropolitan center. It was built not to protect sports fans from the elements but to fulfill a businessman’s whim.

QUITE A FEW PROMINENT HISTORI ans of technology have been trained in engineering, and some of them have had careers as practicing engineers before turning to the study of the past. But not many have attained such eminence in both realms as Walter G. Vincenti, who in 1997 marks his fortieth anniversary on the faculty of Stanford University.

ON A COLD NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1871, the New York Central Railroad’s Pacific Express rounded a bend seven miles south of Poughkeepsie, New York. All of a sudden the engineer, Doc Simmons, saw with horror the wreckage of a freight train sprawled across a drawbridge dead ahead. He blew the “down brakes” whistle, and trainmen between the cars jumped to turn their brake wheels. But it was already far too late.