RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTI tute (RPI), in Troy, New York, has a longer history than any other American engineering school. It was founded in 1824, when electricity was a parlor trick and canals were the latest thing in transportation. Little surprise, then, that RPI’s Web site has perhaps the most extensive history section of any engineering school’s, one that has just been augmented with page-bypage scans of five rare books on the institute’s history.

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. A large grandstand held the dignitaries in front of an open field that extended for miles.

IN THE MID-1950S CHARLES MORTIMER, PRESIDENT OF General Foods Corporation, urged the company’s Post division to think outside the cereal box. Mortimer’s push to diversify Post’s breakfast-food offerings led to a number of culinary milestones: Brim, a breakfast-in-milk product that is now remembered mostly as the inspiration for Carnation Instant Breakfast; Tang, the powdered orange drink that the astronauts drank; and, most important, the world’s first toaster pastries.

WHEN DROUGHT THREATENED NEW YORK City in early 1950, and official pleas for conservation failed to stem the drop in reservoir levels, the city’s water commissioner, Stephen Carney, decided to take a risk. On February 15 he traveled to one of America’s foremost industrial R&D centers, the General Electric Research Laboratory, in Schenectady, New York, to investigate a controversial new technological fix. He conferred with the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, inventor, and former associate director of the laboratory, Irving Langmuir.

WHO NEEDS THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY? WE ALL DO, historians in the field believe; it’s a central part of the story of the making of our world. But getting the word out hasn’t been easy. A major step forward came recently in the form of a new college textbook, Inventing America , published, in two volumes, by W. W. Norton.

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.

DURING WORLD WAR II ADOLF HITLER CALLED Andrew Jackson Higgins “the new Noah.” After the war Dwight Eisenhower called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.”

IN THE DEEP SOUTH, LATE SUMMER WAS THE SEASON FOR PICKING COT ton. The day’s work started at sunrise and continued, with a midday break, until dusk. Children worked with their parents, with everyone making their way down the long rows, kneeling or bending at the waist, taking a firm grip on each fluffy puff, and giving it a pull. Thorny sheaths at the base of every boll, or tuft, of cotton, as rough as splintered wood, turned the workers’ fingers red and sore and sometimes bloody.

RECALLING THE MOST HISTORIC PART OF HIS CAREER , when he led the team that first identified the HIV virus and determined that it caused AIDS, Luc Montagnier says, “It was frustrating to us at the time.” French health officials were withholding badly needed research funds because they didn’t recognize the need to find a fast solution to the puzzling deaths caused by the new disease. After speaking in the past tense for several minutes, Montagnier stops and explains that the work he started in 1983 is not yet finished.

BEFORE THE 1930S , shopping carts didn’t exist because nobody needed them. With virtually no home refrigeration except iceboxes, shoppers purchased a day’s worth of groceries at a time, usually at a number of different stores : the fish monger, the greengrocer, the butcher, the baker, and so forth. If you bought more than you could carry, you had it delivered.

VALLEY CITY, NORTH Dakota, takes its bridges seriously. And well it might, for the municipality of 7,000, covering a bit more than three square miles, has no fewer than 14 of them, dating back as far as 1901. Crisscrossing the Sheyenne River as it wiggles through town, they amount to a working museum of bridge technology. And for nearly eight decades, one of the most cherished was the Rainbow Bridge, which served as a gateway at the city’s eastern entrance.

SOME THINGS WERE INVENTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. With others, the motivation is less clear. Consider, for example, the electric guitar. When guitarists first crudely electrified their instruments in the 1920s, what were they trying to do? Why change something that had been successful for hundreds of years? Could they have envisioned that the instrument that inspired some of Vivaldi’s and Boccherini’s most beautiful compositions would one day be used by Motörhead and blink-182?

AS EDITH FLANIGEN EXPLAINS IT, THE STORY OF ZEOLITES dates back to 1756, when a Swedish mineralogist, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, discovered that a certain type of natural crystal possessed a remarkable quality. When Cronstedt held the stone in a flame, it began to sizzle and froth as water inside the stone came to a boil. He combined two Greek words to name the crystal: zein , meaning “to boil,” and lithos , meaning “stone.”

The Wrights’ Stuff

PERHAPS ONE OF THE most amazing statements in the chronicle of aviation development (and for that matter modern technology in general) is a quote made in the summer of 1901 from the discouraged Wilbur Wright (“The Wright Brothers: How They Flew,” by Richard P. Hallion, Fall 2003) to his brother that man wouldn’t fly “for fifty years.” We marvel at such quotes as they reveal the frail humanness of the very pioneers of modern technology. Inventors are real people too. Inventors fear.

HOWARD HEAD IS KNOWN TODAY FOR REVOLUTIONIZING TWO SPORTS. He didn’t set out to do this; it grew out of his enthusiasm for skiing and tennis as recreation, which led him to use his natural inventive talent to try to make them better. When a reporter asked Head how he invented, he said: “I invent when it’s something I really want. The need has to grow in your gut. People who go around trying to invent something generally fall on their tails. The best inventions come from people who are deeply involved in trying to solve a problem.”

HERE IN OHIO WE’VE BEEN IN A CELEBRATORY MOOD since the start of 2003. This is the bicentennial year of Ohio statehood as well as the centennial of the invention of powered flight. Two Dayton residents invented flight, and they did almost all their research and development right here in Ohio, leading some folks to feel a bit grumpy over the claims that come from a certain state that shall only be identified as encompassing a small community known as Kitty Hawk.

PERHAPS ONE OF THE most amazing statements in the chronicle of aviation development (and for that matter modern technology in general) is a quote made in the summer of 1901 from the discouraged Wilbur Wright (“The Wright Brothers: How They Flew,” by Richard P. Hallion, Fall 2003) to his brother that man wouldn’t fly “for fifty years.” We marvel at such quotes as they reveal the frail humanness of the very pioneers of modern technology. Inventors are real people too. Inventors fear. Inventors struggle with depression.

WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE CLEAN AIR Act of 1970, Congress threw down a gauntlet similar in spirit to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Both were bold strokes that placed a burden squarely on the shoulders of the nation’s scientists and engineers. And both looked impossible.

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1956, MORE THAN A YEAR before the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, a four-stage Jupiter-C rocket stood on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. It had three stages—sections that fire in turn and then are jettisoned. The rocket was almost identical to the one that would lift America’s first satellite into orbit 16 months later, and Wernher von Braun, director of development for the U.S.

IN OUR WINTER 2003 issue the historian and photographer David Plowden called the Kinzua Viaduct a “truly heroic nineteenth-century railroad bridge.” He went on to say, “It has stood rusting in a remote part of northwestern Pennsylvania ever since the Erie Railroad abandoned it in 1959, but its future is far happier than that of most unused bridges.” So indeed it seemed, for the majestic viaduct, towering 300 feet above Kinzua Creek, formed the centerpiece of a popular park, and the W. M.