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Spring/Summer 1989


Volume 5, Issue 1

FEATURES

This historian believes the nation’s technological flowering from 1870 to 1970 will be compared someday to the Renaissance in Italy

Any large technological undertaking raises deep philosophical questions. But disputes about the Tennessee Valley Authority endangered the whole project.

The turbulent career of a brilliant and driven inventor-entrepreneur
When early steamboats began blowing up, who was supposed to stop the deadly horror? The answer affects Americans to this day.
Henry Mercer’s monument to the implements that made America
Is this hot field really a key to technologies of the future? A physicist looks at its history and finds some clues.
His job was indispensable in an earlier electric age

DEPARTMENTS

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