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In February 2006 Britney Spears earned worldwide opprobrium after photographs surfaced of her driving a car while holding her infant son in her lap. Spears’s failure to strap the tot into a child car seat provoked consternation reminiscent of that which had greeted Michael Jackson three years earlier when he dangled his baby over a balcony railing. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s office consulted with local child-welfare officials before deciding not to press charges.

Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis is designed to measure the length of specific segments of DNA that contain repeated patterns of base pairs. The cells containing DNA may be from a crime scene or obtained from white blood cells or a mouth swab from inside the cheek of a suspect.

Readers of this column have been known to complain that it relies too heavily on bridges. But there are some things you just can’t get too much of, and bridges are one of them. Environmentalists often speak of “charismatic megafauna”—large, cute animals like pandas and dolphins that are indispensable in raising funds. When it comes to historic technology, bridges are charismatic megafauna, and the species with the greatest “Aaawwww!” factor is covered bridges.

In the 1970s researchers discovered enzymes in bacteria that attach to any DNA molecule when they find specific sequences of base pairs. They reliably slice the molecule between two of those pairs. For example, the restriction enzyme EcoR1 (obtained from Escherichia coli bacteria) attaches to DNA when it detects the sequence GAATTC and cuts between the G and the A.

A couple of years back I was wandering around at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, held in early September in Bardstown, Kentucky, when I spotted a man fashioning a barrel from what appeared to be some untidy scraps of wood. I felt a little sorry for him. Most festivalgoers had come to sample bourbon. The barrel man had no bourbon to offer, so few people were stopping to chat.

(1906-2005) Physicist, Nobel laureate, head of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos. His solar research led to speculations on the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb.

(1901-1985) Professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Communist, and close friend of Oppenheimer. In 1942 Chevalier asked Oppenheimer to help transfer information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer refused, but the incident caused him much trouble later.

THE PICTURE AT RIGHT WAS TAKEN ON THE MORN ing of May 25, 1953, at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Proving Ground (now the Nevada Test Site). It shows the scene less than a minute after the Army’s gigantic “atomic cannon” made its first and only firing of a nuclear-tipped artillery round. The gun itself was a conventional cannon, but it had to be extraordinarily big and built with unique features to accommodate its special projectile.

THE U.S. TREASURY DEPARTMENT, WHICH HAD NOT RE designed our paper money since 1929, has done so twice in the past decade. The reason: worries that counterfeiters were about to get the upper hand in the neverending technological duel between currency makers and currency fakers. Ever since money was invented, people have been trying to pass off imitations as the real thing, and America’s rich history of counterfeiting goes back as far as the first European settlers.

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO CONVERT ONE’S THOUGHTS INTO data? For millennia, the answer was writing and drawing by hand. But when computers came along, this time-honored method was supplanted by keyboards, punch cards, and other intermediaries. Today handwritten input to computers, while still far from perfect, is becoming increasingly common—for handheld devices, Asian languages with thousands of characters, design software that combines words and images, and signature verification, among other uses.

THE GRASSY EXPANSE WHERE THE WRIGHTS did their 1904 and 1905 experiments survives today as a historic enclave on the property of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. The only structures are replicas of the 1905 hangar and launching catapult. The site also includes Ohio’s largest remaining tallgrass prairie, so it’s a nature as well as a history preserve. It is overlooked by a 17-foot obelisk that was dedicated on Orville Wright’s birthday in 1940 (he was present).

ON OCTOBER 31, 1952, HALLOWEEN WAS JUST GETTING ROLL ing in California when, half a world away on the South Pacific island of Elugelab, the firing circuits closed on Ivy-Mike, the first practical test of the prototype hydrogen bomb. Ghosts and goblins roamed the Berkeley streets as Dr. Edward Teller, the driving force behind the new weapon, sat quietly in a darkened basement, patiently scanning for subtle, indirect evidence that he had irrevocably altered the world yet again.

John Hall, a mechanic working with Thomas Paine, wrote after the Revolution of the “saints”— inventors, innovators, and artisans—who were doing their best to make the new nation endure. Some of their best work involved building bridges across the land’s rivers and streams and valleys, a key to opening wilderness and connecting farflung communities. In fact, Paine, with Hall’s help, devoted much of his later career to designing and trying to sell an iron bridge.

WE FIRST PUBLISHED INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 20 years ago this issue, and we announced that we were doing so because “for both good and bad, the modern is the technological in almost every arena of life.” We also observed that “although interest in the history of technology has grown in the last few decades, the field itself is relatively new…. A gap exists between the findings of the scholars and the educated public.”

KITTY HAWK, NORTH CAROLINA, IS A place justly famed, for there on December 17,1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was possible. Huffman Prairie, Ohio, is a place unjustly ignored, for in that 85-acre pasture in 1904 and 1905 the Wrights converted flight from the barely possible to the truly practical. At Kitty Hawk the Wrights made four flights, their best being WiIbur’s wavering voyage of 852 feet in a machine he struggled to keep airborne.

AN UNFRAMED PHOTOCOPY OF THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB EVER built has been pinned to my workshop wall for at least five years now. It’s from a modern edition of The Los Alamos Primer , a book of the lectures given in 1943 by a physicist named Robert Serber to introduce new Los Alamos laboratory personnel to the task at hand. That first bomb was set off in the American desert in the summer of 1945, after two years of intense work by thousands of people.

ALONE IN HIS ONE-HORSE BUGGY, SLOGGING DOWN A RUTTED road in 1803 to yet another courthouse in the heat of a Georgia summer, Eli Whitney must have felt like a man taunted by the allure of a beautiful woman who was everyone’s lover but his. Wherever he looked oceans of upland cotton undulated in all directions, just out of reach. The crop offered unparalleled wealth to thousands of Southern plantation owners and their families but not to Whitney, a cruel taunt indeed, since his mechanical genius was solely responsible for that wealth.

MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO AN UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL medical crisis began. Mysterious, deadly, and unexpected, an epidemic with an unknown cause started to claim victims in odd, seemingly unrelated groups. Gay men. Intravenous drug abusers. Africans. Haitians. Hemophiliacs. As the list grew, physicians worldwide slowly realized they were facing a truly new and powerful enemy.

AS THIS ISSUE’S STORY on catalytic cracking shows, the triumph of America’s oilrefining industry in the twentieth century was based on two things: discovering clever new processes and then scaling them up to produce Yuige quantities. Yet alongside the mammoth refineries that pumped out high-octane gasoline to defeat the Axis, there were hundreds of small units distilling kerosene and heating oil for local communities, just as in the industry’s pioneer days.