Father Knew Best

THE SPRING 2005 ARTI cle on the history of the microwave oven (“‘The Greatest Discovery Since Fire,’” by William Hammack) reminds me of how my father saved the day for Raytheon. In 1958 a newfangled gadget called a Radarange was brought to Minnesota Power and Light in Duluth for a demonstration. Appliances were a big thing for power companies in those days, and this was one big appliance. The day before the demonstration, the unit was set up and tested, and it failed to operate. Nobody knew how to fix it.

DEWITT CLINTON PARK, IN HELL’S KITCHEN, IS PRETTY TYPI cal for New York City. It’s open to anyone with a ball to kick I or a Frisbee to toss, which means that it has been beaten nearly to death by overuse. The park has natural-grass baseball fields, though there is little grass to be seen on them. It’s more like a sea of dirt, pocked with holes and a few struggling patches of green.

ONLY 29 JAPANESE AIRCRAFT WERE SHOT DOWN DURING THE MASSIVE attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but enough bodies were recovered from the wrecks to reveal something very surprising. Many of the men had been wrapped almost mummy-style in tight, constrictive bindings, from the abdomen down to the ankles.

WILEY POST WAS AN EIGHTH-GRADE DROPOUT who had served a year in prison for stealing a car. But after he lost an eye in an accident while working in an oil field, he used part of the $1,698 settlement to buy and restore an airplane, and by 1931, when he was 32, he was a world-famous record-breaking aviator. Three years later he was flying higher than anyone had before, with the help of the world’s first pressurized flight suit, which he had conceived himself.

PRESERVING FOOD WITH RADIATION sounds very space-age, but in fact it was discovered before the first airplane flew. In 1898 Samuel Prescott, a professor of biology at MIT, subjected various foodstuffs to gamma rays and found that spoilage was greatly retarded. In another early triumph, he used bacteriology to extend the shelf life of canned goods. Prescott went on to become MIT’s dean of science, and in that role he continued his career-long goal of applying scientific methods to the improvement of everyday life.

CAN YOU GIVE US SOME insight into how Tyson V. Rininger got that stunning photo on the cover of the Winter 2005 issue?

CHARLES STRITE HAD seen enough burnt toast in the company cafeteria at his factory in Stillwater, Minnesota. Rather than complain (though he probably did that as well), Strite, a master mechanic, took things into his own hands.

SOME ORGANIZATIONS, MOST NOTABLY NASA DURING ITS APOLLO PROGRAM, have always favored stand-up meetings, in which the lack of seats encourages brief, to-the-point exchanges of important information, after which everyone can get back to work. Publishing tends to attract less driven types, with most sit-down meetings divided equally between yarn-spinning and desultory discussion of work. A former editor in chief of this magazine was more businesslike than most, but even he had a weakness.

BELGIUM’S EBEN EMAEL WAS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE strongest forts in Europe before it fell to 78 German troops in May 1940.

IT LOOMS OVER FLORIDA’S BANANA RIVER LIKE A MANHATTAN skyscraper over the Hudson. As you approach it, you realize that there is nothing nearby remotely similar in size. One writer declared that as he came closer, it seemed to grow “in great spurts, as though it were being shoved up out of the ground.” It is NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, and it amounts to a box nearly as tall as the Washington Monument. For a time it was the world’s most voluminous building.

1954: THE SOVIETS HAD JUST EXPLODED their first I l-bomb; the McCarthy hearings had come to an ignominious end in Washington; Stalin had died and Khrushchev had risen to power in Moscow. And in Damascus, Syria, Harris Peel had a problem.

A FEW DECADES AGO ALMOST EVERY CHILD RECEIVING A diagnosis of leukemia died within six months. Such a diagnosis is still frightening today, but parents now have hope. Because of Gertrude Elion, the inventor of 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), nearly 8 out of 10 children are cured.

HOW MUCH CAN A SIN gle inventor change your life? Utterly, according to the experience of at least one person at the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s induction ceremonies this year, on May 13 and 14. The 2005 inductees included C. Donald Bateman, for his groundproximity warning system, which has made aircraft landings far easier than before and saved countless lives; Robert Gundlach, for being the lead inventor who took xerography from an almost completely impracticable idea to an everyday necessity; Dr. Leo Henry K.

I Faked A Nuke

I READ WITH GREAT INTER est “The Atomic Cannon” (by James Lament, Summer 2005). My first active-duty assignment after I’d been commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers was to carry out simulated nuclear explosions. This was in the summer of 1958 at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The purpose was to show groups of VIP military personnel and congressmen how tactical nuclear weapons could be used with an armored division on the battlefield.

AN ARTICLE IN THIS A issue tells how the microwave oven faced many difficulties on its way to becoming accepted. One problem the article doesn’t mention is that both the technology’s name and its original trademark (Radarange) refer to radiation. There’s nothing unusual about a household device producing radiation, of course; a light bulb does that. But by the early 1970s anything associated in the public mind, however imprecisely, with “the atom” had come to seem sinister and dangerous.

BY THE 1860S A LOT OF PEOPLE ERRONEOUSLY thought the submarine was an idea whose time had come. The historian (and owner of a two-man sub) Mark Ragan describes some two dozen Civil War-era projects in his book Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War . But in most cases nothing survives beyond tantalizing glimpses—the names of people involved, ledger entries at an ironworks, a few cryptic messages in military archives.

I ENJOYED THE ARTICLE “Pinball,” by Linda Barth, in your Spring 2004 issue. It mentioned that in 1942 “a delighted [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia posed for photographs while smashing the machines with sledgehammers and watching their remains get dumped into the East River.” Fortunately, not all the remains ended up in the river. Some of the smashed machines were given to New York’s science high schools for parts. I was a student at Stuyvesant High School at the time, and we welcomed the donation.

BEGINNING IN LATE 1943, THOUSANDS OF MEN IN LOCA tions scattered throughout Britain were busy building huge, strangely shaped objects so shrouded in secrecy that their purpose was a mystery even to the workers assembling them. The most striking of these objects were dozens of vast gray blocks, each 60 by 60 by 200 feet, which looked from the outside like concrete bricks the size of apartment buildings. Inside, however, they had a hollow, cellular structure, which allowed them to float.

TO SOME FIRST-RATE ANALYTICAL MINDS, HAVING INTELLEC tual elbow room in which to carry out advanced research can be a greater lure than money, power, or position. Academic institutions understand this, as do certain sectors of the corporate world. But military organizations, with their emphasis on hierarchy, discipline, and protocol, have traditionally been the least likely to provide the necessary freedom.

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK YOU ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGICAL marvels of Coney Island, the roller coaster might first come to mind (it was born there in 1884) and then, perhaps, the blazing amusement parks that dazzled turn-of-the-century crowds with their prodigal use of electricity. As it turns out, though, the wide sandy shore itself is perhaps Coney’s greatest engineering innovation.