THE PHOTOGRAPH AT RIGHT DEPICTS A SCENE THAT AT FIRST glance may not seem remarkable. A woman is sitting in front of a computer terminal; another computer is in the background. Scanning the walls, we see a Boston Red Sox pennant behind her and some drawings next to the terminal. Along with the small, high window, these suggest that she is in a basement rec room. In any case, she is not in an office.

HE COULD HAVE BEEN A CONTENDER. AS A teenager growing up in Cincinnati, Thomas Fogarty was a Golden Gloves champion who yearned to turn pro. That dream died after his first professional match. “They told me I won,” he says, but the losing fighter had hit him harder than anything he’d experienced as an amateur. A single punch knocked the desire to box right out of Fogarty. To this day his professional record remains at 1-0.

YOU PROBABLY FIRST ENCOUNTERED PINBALL AT A LOCAL drugstore or a boardwalk arcade, drawn by the lights, the bells, the balls, the colors. How could you resist a game where a skillful bat of a flipper could send a metal ball hurtling 90 miles an hour toward a dazzling array of targets? For a very long time many people couldn’t.

ASK ANYONE I KNEW PROEESSIONALLY DURING my 18 years as a public relations man for U.S. Steel, and I’m sure they’ll tell you they’d consider the exploits of movie Stuntmen to be spectacular and lucrative, but no more impressive than what high-steel workers do every day. A case in point: the construction of what has been called the world’s longest single-span freight tramway, which covered much of the majestic width of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona.

FLYING AT 300 KNOTS, CAPT. ALTON (“BOOTS”) McCORMICK FEELS A SLIGHT bump in his F-15C Eagle as he passes through the bow wave behind a KC-135 tanker. He stabilizes his fighter jet about 500 feet back and then accelerates toward the boom, a rigid, telescoping 50-foot pipe coming off the rear of the tanker.

FORREST BIRD WAS A TEENAGER WHEN HE ENCOUNTERED THE mystery that would engage him for his whole life. The son of a World War I flying ace, he began getting flying lessons years before learning to drive. As he contemplated the motion of air over an airplane’s wing, he marveled at the physics that governed all those invisible molecules, keeping the aircraft aloft. It led him to get degrees in engineering and then to go on to medical school when his interest in airflow turned his attention to the physics of breathing.

IS THE LIE DETECTOR CONTROVERSIAL? ITS MAIN INVENTOR denied that he had invented anything. Its early developers admitted that it could not detect lies. The United States government has published many studies critical of its performance, yet key elements of our national security rest on its reliability. Lie-detector advocates say the device is virtually infallible; detractors say it is grossly inaccurate. Police embrace the technology; scientists scorn it. It’s widely used in the United States and almost unknown in Europe.

ANYONE WHO HAS TAKEN FRESHMAN CHEMISTRY KNOWS THE CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics . Its origins go back to 1907, the year Arthur Friedman graduated from the Case School of Applied Science (now part of Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. While an undergraduate, Friedman had a part-time business making rubber aprons for laboratory use.

THE STORY OF THE computer modem begins in the late 1940s, when Cold War concerns caused the United States military to reconsider its defense against longrange bombers. A key component of this system was an automated collection of hundreds of radar earlywarning stations, which would detect possible intruders and send information about them to commandand-control centers. The plan was to transmit these radar images using microwave relays, but building such a network would take many years and vast amounts of money.

POLITICAL WRITERS OF A CERTAIN stripe like to assert that the institution of marriage creates many benefits for society. That’s true, and one of the most important of them has nothing to do with morals, economics, or stable family relationships. Instead it lies in marriage’s main byproduct—waiting time—and its beneficial effect on creativity.

AS CAN BE SEEN ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE, GUANO HAS THE power to stir men’s souls. There are virtually no lengths—or heights—to which adventurous types have not gone in pursuit of the dried excrement of bats and birds. Centuries before Columbus, Peru’s Inca rulers divided the Chincha Islands among the empire’s provinces and assigned certain times when guano could be harvested from them. They also prohibited killing the islands’ birds or disturbing them while nesting. The penalty was death.

DRIVE THE MAIN ROAD THROUGH THE FLORIDA KEYS, AND you will come to a stretch where you are out of sight of land. You can see nothing but water, sky, the highway you’re on—and, alongside, the Seven Mile Bridge, formed from hundreds of sections of railroad viaduct set atop concrete supports that rise directly from the ocean. Constructed nearly a century ago, the bridge continues to stand as a memorial to the even vaster work of which it was a part: the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway.

LAST YEAR A NEWS PHOTOGRAPH showed Jacques Chirac, the president of France, greeting George W. Bush on his arrival in Evian with the same degree of enthusiasm that usually accompanies “Welcome to Burger King.” While recent events have exacerbated tensions, such coolness has a long history between two proud countries that have always insisted on going their own way—and not just in world affairs.

ONE OFT-CITED EX ample of technology imposing social control involves the seemingly prosaic subject of highway overpasses on Long Island. As Langdon Winner pointed out in a famous 1986 study, during the 1950s Robert Moses, New York State’s planning czar, deliberately built them too low for buses to fit underneath. This decision, while cloaked in the language of engineering necessity, reflected Moses’s hope that poorer residents who did not own cars would be unable to visit Jones Beach, which he envisioned as a middle-class resort.

I ENJOYED JIM QUINN’S “Hall of Fame Report” titled “A State of Inventiveness” (Winter 2004). It is amazing how much technology came out of the Buckeye State. While all the technology of rubber and glass bottles was going on, the National Cash Register Company in Dayton was developing the mechanical wonder it is named for. Soon Delco, under Charles (“Boss”) Kettering, was developing the self-starter at its plant in Dayton.

ON JUNE 22, 1918, JUST A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE END of World War I, a provocative article appeared in the British Medical Journal . The author was Capt. Oswald H. Robertson, a physician in the U.S. Army who had been treating battlefield casualties on the front lines. In his paper Robertson described his successful performance of transfusions using blood collected in advance and stored, rather than immediate transfusions from donor to recipient.

MY FAVORITE STORY ABOUT ALBERT EINSTEIN INVOLVES something that happened while he was riding a bicycle. I think it reveals as much about the nature of creativity as it does about the mind of the great man. It was the summer of 1895, and it happened while the 16-year-old was pedaling down dirt roads in Tuscany during a glorious family vacation. He was in the midst of some very common adolescent anxieties. His teachers said he would never amount to anything, and he dropped out of high school.

IT IS A “CIPHER”—ORGAN BUILDER’S LINGO FOR A STUCK note—that has brought us up to a cramped chamber hidden behind a side wall 40 feet over the stage of Yale University’s Woolsey Hall.

More Buckeye Brilliance

I ENJOYED JIM QUINN’S “Hall of Fame Report” titled “A State of Inventiveness” (Winter 2004). It is amazing how much technology came out of the Buckeye State. While all the technology of rubber and glass bottles was going on, the National Cash Register Company in Dayton was developing the mechanical wonder it is named for. Soon Delco, under Charles (“Boss”) Kettering, was developing the self-starter at its plant in Dayton.

In 1851 Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, arranged for a Great Exhibition in London to show off the technical accomplishments of the British Empire. Millions of visitors thronged the fantastic Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park to house the event. In the American section crowds craned their necks to watch a loud, charismatic man expound on a revolutionary new product, a pistol that could fire not once, not twice, but fully six times in rapid succession without reloading.