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HALF A CENTURY AGO THIS AUTUMN TWO SMALL COMPANIES, working together, unveiled the world’s first transistor radio. It was called the Regency TR1. It introduced the revolutionary technology of the transistor to the general public, and it began the spread of all the miniaturized, battery-operated electronic devices that surround us today.

THE EARLIEST-KNOWN description of a pencil appears in a 1565 book on fossils by the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner, who noted a new type of writing instrument that employed “a sort of lead (which I have heard some call English antimony) shaved to a point and inserted in a wooden handle.” “English antimony” had been discovered earlier in the sixteenth century in or around the valley of Borrowdale in Cumberland, England.

The history of technology, once the province of buffs and collectors, has become academicized to the point where its practitioners may bear as many labels as a steamer trunk: externalist, social constructivist, feminist, Marxist, and so on. The best historians combine many approaches, and two of the most revered workers in the field have demonstrated their talents in new books: Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture , by Thomas P.

RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN IS ONE OF A VERY FEW SPECIALISTS in the history of technology whose work is widely known among teachers and students of general American history.

THE ARTICLE ON THE BRA , by Curt Wohleber (“Object Lessons,” Spring 2003), brought to mind a little engineering book originally published in the 1963. Written and edited by Robert Baker, it was titled A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown and contained engineering stress analyses written in lay terms, with each chapter a different illustration of stressanalysis investigation. The title essay was by Charles E. Seim.

HELMETS, MORE THAN ANY OTHER TECHNOLOGY , defy conventional chronology. They seem to evolve like metallic and polymeric crustaceans, but not conventionally. A form may disappear for a thousand years and then reappear on a new branch. Another may keep its shape but change materials and habitats. Medievalists have advised the commanders of industrial armies, and armorers from dynasties of European craftsmen have helped tool up for new designs with classic jigs and hammers.

AFTER DECADES OF EXPERIMENTATION IN MANY COUNTRIES, THE FIRST PRACTICAL and fairly reliable typewriters arrived on the market in the early 1870s. Over the next 15 to 20 years, they became established in American offices, and soon they were considered indispensable. Yet they were ungainly beasts. The first widely popular model—the Remington No.

IMAGES OF THE EARLIEST AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION were recorded in many forms: engravings, oil paintings, even dainty watercolors. A less obvious medium was the black-on-white silhouette, once a cheap and easy way to create a portrait. This scissors-and-paper method produced an extraordinary image of the first passenger train to operate in New York State, on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad on August 9, 1831.

FRANK CEPOLLINA TALKS ENTHUSIASTICALLY ABOUT HIS favorite subject. “Someday we’ll be doing this in orbit around Mars,” he says. This is the technology of satellite servicing, which is his specialty. You probably haven’t heard his name, but you certainly have heard of some of his projects; they include the historic mission to correct defects in the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1993.

I ENJOYED DAVID PLOW den’s article “The Bridges I Love” (Winter 2003), especially the comments on the High Bridge here in central Kentucky. I’ve always wanted to walk across it but have been afraid an oncoming train would catch me in the middle. The article says it last saw traffic in 1985, but I know I was on the tracks in 1988 or 1989 when a train came along. Can you confirm that it no longer sees traffic?

CHEMICAL WEAPONS, THE BANE OF MOD ern warfare, saw their first battlefield use in World War I. And as the historian Kathryn Steen writes in a recent issue of Chemical Heritage , when that war was over, chemistry played a role in the peace as well.

THE “POSTFIX” FOR SPRING 2003 describes a neverbuilt concept for a railroad that would have hauled ships across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Mexico, as an alternative to a Panama Canal (“The Most Gigantic Railroad,” by Joseph E. Vollmar, Jr.). Some ideas never die. The Mexican government is now floating a scheme, at the urging of President Vicente Fox, to create a sort of railroad of heavy trucks that would haul yachts across Baja California between the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific Ocean.

THE PICTURES BEGIN AS STREAMS OF DIGI tal data beamed from space down to receiving stations on the ground. Computers transI late the data into images on high-resolution screens for analysis by highly trained CIA and military photo interpreters. It’s a synergy of satellites, computers, and human eyes and minds that has been honed to a keen edge since the relatively primitive early days of photoreconnaissance. Now this technology is confronting a new enemy that kills about 46,000 Americans every year: breast cancer.

I ESPECIALLY ENJOYED “Holography: The Whole Picture,” by Tim Palucka, in the Winter 2003 issue. I knew most of the people involved, and I can relate a tale about Dennis Gabor’s naiveté concerning social issues. In the early 1970s he told me that money would someday be replaced by electronic transactions. Almost the case. He also said this would mean an end to crime. No comment.

ONE MORNING IN MAY 1994, A PAIR OF LETTERS ROLLED OFF a fax machine in the offices of Calgene, a start-up company located in Davis, California, amid the lush agricultural country of the Central Valley. The letters came from the federal Food and Drug Administration(FDA), and they granted regulatory approval for Calegene’s first product, a genetically modefied tomato. Anticipating this decision, company officials had already laid in a supply of their new Flavr Savr variety, which combined vine-ripped taste with firmness for ease in transport.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, THE WINDOW OF MY BEDROOM looked out on New York’s East River, and my view was framed by three of America’s great bridges. Downriver to my right was the awesome Queensboro Bridge; to my left were the Triborough and the Hell Gate. On winter afternoons, the light was cold and clear, as in Charles Sheeler’s paintings. I learned from what I saw through my window of the effect of light and shadow on objects, of architecture and magnificent structures. I contemplated the bridges. They made sense to me.

NATURE CANTILEVERED those boulders out over the fall,” said Frank Lloyd Wright about the site of his most famous house, Fallingwater. “I can cantilever the house over the boulders.” As it turned out, however, Wright did not entirely meet the challenge set by nature. From the very beginning, Fallingwater has been falling down.

At the Spring 1964 meeting OF THE OPTICAL SOCIETY OF America, in Washington, D.C., Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks, from the University of Michigan, gave a presentation about their work in holography. When Upatnieks concluded his address, he announced that one of these images, a hologram of a toy train, was on display in a suite in the conference hotel.

I LOOK FORWARD TO READ ing Invention & Technology , but when I openec the most recent issue, I knew I’d be in trouble. I agree with guitarists that tube-sound distortion is what they’re after (“The Tube Is Dead. Long Live the Tube,” by Mark Wolverton, Fall 2002), but I wince when people say they prefer tube sound over solid state when it concerns the reproduction, not production, of music.

WHEN STEPHANIE LOUISE KWOLEK RECEIVED HER B.S., WITH a major in chemistry, from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1946, she didn’t have enough money to pursue her dream of going on to medical school. So she accepted a research job with DuPont, hoping to eventually get a medical degree. But she discovered that she liked the work so much, with its constant challenges and the university-like atmosphere, that she decided to stay.