HALF A CENTURY AGO AMERICAN PHYSICISTS created two of our era’s most important inventions. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Manhattan Project built the atom bomb. At Bell Telephone Laboratories a much smaller group of scientists made the transistor. The director of the latter project, Mervin Kelly, parlayed his achievement by building Bell Labs into the nation’s greatest industrial research center. Until its offspring, Silicon Valley, came to the fore during the 1960s, the institution Kelly built stood alone at the top.

Form Vs. Function

GLENN PORTER, IN “TROUBLED MAR riage: Raymond Loewy and the Pennsylvania Railroad” (Spring 1996), very nicely explains the conflict between the design consultant and the engineer. One is truly interested only in aesthetics, the other in the measured performance of the machine. That dichotomy has probably not disappeared from the scene, but it has evolved into more beneficial relationships in some industries.

BUILDING ANY TUNNEL CAN PRESENT A HOST OF difficulties, from getting soil out and construction materials in to performing precision alignment deep inside the earth. When the tunneling takes place underwater, a whole new set of obstacles arises.

“I BELIEVE THAT I HAVE solved the problem of cheap as well as simple automobile construction. … The general public is interested only in the knowledge that a serviceable machine can be constructed at a price within the reach of many.” With these words Henry Ford boasted to reporters about his new design triumph. It was January 4, 1906, and the car in question was not the legendary Model T but its predecessor, the Model N.

GLENN PORTER, IN “TROUBLED MAR riage: Raymond Loewy and the Pennsylvania Railroad” (Spring 1996), very nicely explains the conflict between the design consultant and the engineer. One is truly interested only in aesthetics, the other in the measured performance of the machine. That dichotomy has probably not disappeared from the scene, but it has evolved into more beneficial relationships in some industries. For example, the aerodynamic shapes of modern automobiles not only look pleasing but also cut drag to improve engine efficiency.

John Carlsen, the fireman for P.S. 73 in Brooklyn, New York, stands on a sloping mountain of anthracite in the coal bunker in the school’s basement and shovels 650 pounds of coal into a bucket suspended from an overhead rail. “I do this at least ten times a day,” he says. He pulls a link chain to raise the filled bucket and pushes it out through the bunker doorway and across to an area in front of one of four big boilers, where he tips the bucket to dump the coal onto the floor.

LT. ROBERT HARDAWAY III PEERED INTO HIS BOXES OF NEWLY procured medical equipment and sighed with disappointment. It was April 1941, and he had just reported for duty as a surgeon in the 8th Field Artillery Regiment of the Hawaiian Division. Standing in the Schofield Barracks, the Texan doctor uncrated his supplies, neatly wrapped in yellowed newspapers that bore dates from 1918. The rolls and squares of cotton bandages had crumbled in their packages due to terminal dry rot.

What a great article by Daniel J. McConville (“Seaway to Nowhere,” Fall 1995). My husband and I marveled through the entire story, wondering why all that work hadn’t reached the consciousness of our family in the 1950s. Both of us thought the Seaway had been completed several decades earlier. We could scarcely believe that America had so shortchanged its cooperation with Canada. And the part on the problems encountered with the glacial till was dumbfounding.

ON MONDAY, OC tober 29, 1945, at nine-thirty in the morning, 5,000 shoppers stormed into Manhattan’s Gimbel Bros, department store in pursuit of technology’s latest marvel. An advertisement in the previous day’s paper had called it “the miracle pen that will revolutionize writing.” The ball-point pen was a wonder that would write in the Aleutian Islands, underwater, or at 20,000 feet, without smudging or leaking, for two whole years. By the end of the day, Gimbels had sold 8,000 pens at $12.50 apiece (with desk stand). They were no good.

JOHN ERICSSON SPENT MUCH OF HIS LIFE in high dudgeon. His temper could be ignited even by a subordinate’s most minor incompetence, but the stubborn Swedish-American engineer reserved a special wrath for officialdom, which repeatedly failed to value his astonishingly prescient inventive designs. So resentful was he of past slights by his particular nemesis the U.S.

It looks ungainly from the outside: a burnt loaf of bread two hundred feet high. But then you enter, by way of doors large enough to drive trucks through. Those doors are tiny afterthoughts cut into the bottom corners of the real doors. The real doors, two on each end of the building, are 214 feet wide at the bottom, 202 feet high, and curved like a quarter-hemisphere of orange peel, each coming to a point at the top where it pivots on a single pin. Each of these big sliding doors is pulled open by standard-gauge railroad cars that run alongside its bottom edge.

THE EARLIEST KNOWN JET AIRPLANE flew—briefly—almost twenty-nine years before the Luftwaffe’s famous Heinkel He 178. One December morning in 1910 a young inventorpilot named Henri-Marie Coanda was testing a crude turbojet attached to a plywood aircraft, both of his own design, at Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. When he throttled up his engine, a ball of flame ignited the plane as soon as it became airborne. It climbed steeply for a few seconds, barely clearing a stone wall, then turned on its side and slid earthward.

LIKE SO MANY GREAT AMERICANS, ICE CREAM WAS BORN somewhere else. Nevertheless, it has come to be universally thought of as ours. Americans transformed ice cream from a luxury into a staple available—and demanded—every day, all year around, and from a delicacy made in small batches with dishpans and rock salt to the product of computerized, automated production lines turning out hundreds of flavors.

NOT CONTENT TO SOLVE THE world’s housing problems, in 1911 Thomas Edison took on the furniture industry, to the enthusiastic delight (as usual) of the press. Boasting that concrete furniture could be made just as attractive as wood and far more lasting and durable, he began molding some common household pieces.

“ I AM GOING TO LIVE TO SEE THE DAY WHEN A WORKING MAN’S HOUSE can be built of concrete in a week. … If I succeed, it will take from the city slums everybody who is worth taking.” When Thomas Edison announced in 1906 that he planned to recast the world and mold it according to his own vision, people took him at his word.

AKRON, OHIO : (The following report was filed by the editor of this magazine, Frederick Alien.) The National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded in 1973, finally got a permanent home last summer in Akron. I went to see its official unveiling.

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN SHIPPING HISTORY IS dominated by three images: the Western riverboat, all gingerbread and flying sparks, churning down the Mississippi; the classic square-rigger, taut canvas everywhere, on a reach somewhere beyond Cape Horn; and the rakish luxury liner, with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop, surrounded by fire-boats saluting the capture of the Blue Riband of the Atlantic—the mythic reward for the fastest crossing, usually between the Scilly Isles or Cherbourg and Ambrose Lightship off the coast of New Jersey.

MODERN TEXTBOOKS ON anesthesiology run to the thousands of pages, yet for all the minute understanding that has accumulated, no one really knows why anesthetics work. The first serious theory was postulated in 1847, just months after ether had been introduced for use in surgery. A pair of scientists named von Bibra and Harless noticed that anesthetic gases were strongly drawn to fat-like molecules (lipoids) in the human body but required some water to be present as well.

The letter began: “Having recently completed reading Daniel Sweeney’s excellent article ‘When America Was Last in the Arms Race’ (Spring 1995), I had to chuckle when I turned to the … picture of two workers operating a propellant cutter at a Du Pont factory during World War I. Immediately I wondered if this picture should have been featured in your ‘They’re Still There’ section!”