Fall 1985

Just a few years after his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, the aviator developed an ingenious predecessor to today’s man-made hearts

There are identifiable patterns in the way great inventors like Edison, Sperry, Tesla, and De Forest attacked the critical problems

Bern Dibner has built one of the world’s great archives documenting the history of science and technology

Two nights of darkness, in 1965 and 1977, showed how fragile the nation’s power system could be

Edwin Armstrong’s innovations, culminating in the introduction of FM, made modern broadcasting possible, but his life ended in tragedy

It took a quarter of a century, nearly two hundred lives, and a wealth of innovative ideas to dig the four-and-a-half-mile Hoosac Tunnel through a Massachusetts mountain

Until 1880 a model had to accompany every U.S. patent application, and each had to be evaluated for “novelty, originality, and utility.” To see how this was done, our author put himself in the place of the patent examiners who were responsible.