Petroleum, a natural mineral oil, was well known in western Pennsylvania long before its “discovery” near the small town of Titusville in 1859. After all, Titusville was located along Oil Creek, which got its name from the petroleum that local residents skimmed from the creek’s surface. In many other parts of the world, geologists, mineralogists, and naturalists had studied and recorded the locations of petroleum deposits.

In certain small villages of western New York, the story is told that the origin of that most Japanese of vehicles, the rickshaw, lies in the Yankee ingenuity of a Baptist missionary.

Today’s interstate highways are built according to a well-established procedure. Typically, a gravel subbase is first covered with concrete. Then an asphalt mixture is applied and compacted; or, for concrete highways, a steel mesh is laid on to help absorb stresses from expansion and contraction, and a layer of concrete is poured on top. These basic materials and methods have been in widespread use for decades.

Congress could not have stated its July 15, 1870, law more clearly: The superintendent of the Naval Observatory was “to contract for the construction of a refracting telescope of the largest size, of American manufacture, at a cost not exceeding fifty thousand dollars.”

I am both a historian of art and a collector of scientific and technological devices. I have had a dual fascination with art and machines for as long as I can remember. My collecting probably began when I was nine or ten, when a neighbor asked me to give her a hand cleaning her basement. Offered a dollar or two for my efforts, I diffidently asked if I might instead have a broken clock I had seen in the laundry room.

BETHLEHEM, PA.: Approximately 150 historians, art scholars, and engineers assembled at Lehigh University in Bethlehem last April. The reason? They were there to see a man about a horse. The horse was the Sforza Monument, a twenty-four-foot bronze equestrian statue that was designed by Leonardo da Vinci but never constructed. The man was Charles C. Dent, a retired airline pilot in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, who hopes to remedy that omission five centuries later by building a full-size replica.

Your history of the Sidewinder was especially interesting to me because I developed the first IR (infrared)-guided missile for the Air Corps, the GB6 Glide Bomb during World War II. The Sidewinder’s IR seeker was based on one I independently developed during the war for an IR-guided bomb that MIT was trying to develop. The Sidewinder’s IR element is far more sensitive than those available during the war, greatly simplifying the problem, but the basic design of the seeker is the same, and it is covered by the same U.S. patent, number 2,517,702.

Your Fall 1989 issue was the best I have seen. I was particularly pleased with Henry Petroski’s article about Thoreau, since I have been an admirer of both Thoreau and Petroski. I also liked the piece about clipper ships, since I am a native of Baltimore and take an interest in them. The piece about the Sidewinder I liked largely because my job is chief of an Army laboratory, and finally I liked the piece about the Waring blender because I have one that I bought around 1941 and it’s still going good. Congratulations.

Airplane Vs. Bird

The use of nature as a pattern (“An Airplane Is Not a Bird,” by John S. Harris, Fall 1989) has been common in many fields of design. Early plastics were often used to mimic other materials. Researchers now are working on computers structured like the human brain. I often wonder whether the result will be a machine capable of jumping to conclusions at blinding speed.

Gary Welch
St. Joseph, Mich.

Ever since the invention of fire-arms sometime around the thirteenth century, ammunition makers have confronted the problem of making spherical lead shot. One obvious early way was to pour molten lead into molds, but this was a laborious process that too often left an unaerodynamic seam on the shot. Another way was to pour molten lead through a sieve suspended several inches above a barrel of water; this often produced egg-shaped shot with a tail.

I was particularly interested in your article on the Sidewinder missile (“Sidewinder,” by Ron Westrum and Howard A. Wilcox, Fall 1989) as I had the recent pleasure of contributing to its continued success.

On the morning of March 9, 1862, the Confederate ironclad Merrimack steamed out to finish the job of destroying the Federal fleet at Hampton Roads, which she had begun with devastating efficiency the evening before. This time, though, the Rebels found something new added to the equation. During the night, the little Monitor had joined her all-but-helpless sisters.

Looking at the heroic 1857 group portrait "Men of Progress", by the nineteenth-century artist Christian Schussele, a technology enthusiast might wonder who was the man sitting at the center of the picture, surrounded by such well-known giants of invention and science as Samuel F. B. Morse, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, and Joseph Henry. Only a loyal alumnus of Union College, in Schenectady, New York, would ask, “Who are all those guys standing around Eliphalet Nott?”

I have yet to meet a genuine vintage-auto enthusiast who does not also wax eloquent over a steam locomotive. In their day they were, in a sense, adversaries; but now that the steam engine has vanished and the great old marques have been replaced by less glamorous descendants, many automotive enthusiasts can’t forget that Walter Owen Bentley, Walter Percy Chrysler, Henry Royce, and other . motoring giants began as apprentices in locomotive shops.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: In May the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will open its largest, most ambitious exhibit ever, a $9.5 million, fourteen-thousand-square-foot permanent installation called “The Information Age: People, Information and Technology.”

In the mid-1950s, before high fidelity became a household term, a story circulated in the press about a man spending his first night in his new home in Pound Ridge, New York. The man was startled by the sounds of a nearby railroad he hadn’t been told existed.

It is the fourth-largest-selling plastic in America. Last year nearly seven billion pounds of polypropylene were stretched, blown, extruded, or molded into thousands of different products. Chances are the wrapper on your candy bar, the food-storage container in your refrigerator, the lining in your baby’s diaper, and the webbing in your lawn furniture were all made of it.

Where is the oldest Otis elevator? As archivist for the Otis Elevator Company, I am asked that question more often than any other. I thought 1 finally had the answer in the summer of 1986 when this magazine came out with an article titled “The Oldest Otis.” It sounded too good to be true. It was.

The use of nature as a pattern (“An Airplane Is Not a Bird,” by John S. Harris, Fall 1989) has been common in many fields of design. Early plastics were often used to mimic other materials. Researchers now are working on computers structured like the human brain. I often wonder whether the result will be a machine capable of jumping to conclusions at blinding speed.

Gary Welch
St. Joseph, Mich.

At first this picture might look like a photograph of something under construction. But a closer look reveals that quite the opposite is going on. The most prominent implements in evidence are sledgehammers and pry bars, ordinarily used in demolition. The question then: What is being demolished, and why?