The Great Tube Debate

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.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? I DO. THIS MAY SEEM A strange thing to say in a magazine like Invention & Technology , but I suspect that after you read this, you’ll find you believe in it too. The occasion of my conversion to faith in magic is the 200th anniversary of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the greatest repository of intellectual property in history.

IN 1991 HARRY BARRY FOUND THE NOISEMAKER OF HIS DREAMS: a huge air-raid siren from the 195Os. It weighed more than .S1OOO pounds and was powered by a .33 I-cubic-inch V-8 Chrysler industrial gasoline engine. Barry, who has been collecting sirens, horns, and whistles since he was 15, had his latest treasure hauled from Detroit to his home in northeastern Pennsylvania. Might years later, in 1999, he invited Mric Larson, a professional pipeorgan restorer and fellow siren collector, to hear it in full song.

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 5, 2002, A CRANE ON a barge 16 miles off Cape Hatteras pulled up a rusting 160-ton prize from the ocean floor. It was the fabled turret of the Civil War ironclad Monitor , seeing daylight for the first time since the ship had sunk in December 1862. During her 10-month career, indeed in the first days of that career, the Monitor had changed warfare more than any other ship in history.

A Bridge Too Few

DAVID PLOWDEN WROTE an engaging and beautifully illustrated article on American bridges (“The Bridges I Love,” Winter 2003), saying a lot in a small space, but in common with other surveys of bridge design where the text emphasizes the tallest, fastest, and longest, no mention was made of the very long railroad bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, in Louisiana. It is the ultimate stepchild of bridge history. I suppose this is because it is so very low and thus not photogenic.

AS THOMAS HUNT ington details elsewhere in this issue, three-dimensional movies experienced their first brief boom in the 1920s. Last fall the Museum of Modern Art’s film division showed a test reel made with that era’s Plastigram process, giving modern viewers a chance to experience 3-D just as those in 1921 did. Sure enough, the initial images of baseballs being thrown at the audience, a long line of marchers parting around the camera, and a whip uncoiling toward viewers’ eyes elicited moans, self-conscious shrieks, and nervous laughter.

DAVID PLOWDEN WROTE an engaging and beautifully illustrated article on American bridges (“The Bridges I Love,” Winter 2003), saying a lot in a small space, but in common with other surveys of bridge design where the text emphasizes the tallest, fastest, and longest, no mention was made of the very long railroad bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, in Louisiana. It is the ultimate stepchild of bridge history. I suppose this is because it is so very low and thus not photogenic.

AT 8:15 A.M. EASTERN TIME ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, THE space shuttle Columbia , 175 miles above the Indian Ocean, fired its engines to begin its hour-long descent to Cape Canaveral. With its onboard computers closely monitored by the Mission Control Center in Houston and directing its maneuvers perfectly, the seven men and women aboard had little to do but watch their instrument panels.

AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE METRIC system in our Fall 2002 issue mentioned the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed to work properly because of a misunderstanding over whether metric or Anglo-American units were being used. Now archeological research has uncovered a much earlier failure caused by the lack of a standard measuring system, one that may have changed the course of history in a very important way.

SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, LABORATORIES ALL OVER THE United States have been growing, feeding, and studying extremely dangerous anthrax germs. Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, have grown batches of anthrax to sequence the entire genome of the germ that killed the photo editor Robert Stevens, the first person to die in the bioterrorism attacks. The Justice Department has subpoenaed a dozen laboratories to submit their Ames strains of anthrax to the U.S.

EVEN AS A CHILD I WAS FASCINATED BY ORIGINS AND conclusions. Such a line of thinking naturally led to a career in history, during which I became curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. One of the first historic facts I learned was that John Cleves Symmes developed the land in and around my hometown of Cincinnati, some one million acres, starting in 1788. Symmes was from New Jersey. Then, as I read and studied, New Jersey began to appear large in all matters of national consequence.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT INVENTION LIES a great crime. Or so it can appear from reading today’s technological historians, who sometimes make it seem that no important idea has ever enriched its actual originator. Morse, Bell, and Edison are just a few of the famous inventors who have been accused of stealing or duplicating others’ work or trampling on the rights of earlier discoverers. The pattern continues in this century with disputes over the invention of television, computers, and the laser.

AROUND OUR COM pany’s offices, people like to revisit a 1994 article from our sister publication, American Heritage . It shows a set of trading cards from the late nineteenth century that depict not baseball players or actresses but prominent newspaper editors.

LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH ON PAGES 34 AND 35 OF this issue. An airplane sits on an empty expanse with just two shacks and a man nearby. The airplane has never flown. No airplane has ever flown. The photograph shows the end of a period in human history, the final twilight before the dawn of aviation. It is November 1903, and the man is Wilbur Wright. In a few weeks his brother Orville will pilot the plane into the air, and the world will change.

THEY HAVE GONE DOWN IN POPULAR history as just another silly fad from the 1950s. The most lasting images they left behind are photographs of people crowded in theaters wearing cardboard spectacles. Yet there was a time when three-dimensional movies were seen as the savior of America’s film industry.

THE EARLIEST-KNOWN USE OF SCENTS TO accompany motion pictures came around 1908, when S. L. (“Roxy”) Rothafel, the famous theater owner who later founded Radio City Music Hall, spread rose perfume with a fan while showing film of the Tournament of Roses at a theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania. A few other exhibitors tried similar stunts through the years, usually with floral fragrances. Typically just a single scent was used, and it had to be sprayed by hand.

I AM LEANING BACK AGAINST MY CAR, which I have parked on the shoulder of the bustling divided highway that connects the city of Lancaster to the distant Pennsylvania Turnpike. Gusts from passing cars shake me as I look across a sagging fence at the sight that caused me to stop: a decrepit windmill, its blades turning slowly in a breeze that I can scarcely feel, standing tall beside a broken barn on a farm that nobody has farmed for a couple of decades.

THERE ARE A LOT OF false popular accounts of the history of the bra. The story of the New York socialite Caresse Crosby, also known as Mary Phelps Jacob, is closer than most to the truth. Around 1913 Jacob purchased a sheer, tight-fitting evening gown, but the rigid stays and embroidered eyelets of her corset ruined its smooth contours. Instead of wearing the corset, Jacob sewed together a makeshift brassiere out of a pair of silk handkerchiefs and some ribbon.

DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER (1610-90), THE painter of Alchemist in His Workshop (1650), a portion of which is reproduced at right, made about 350 canvases of alchemical subjects during his long and rather specialized career. He was part of a flourishing tradition of such paintings, whose creators included such masters as Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

JAMES BUCHANAN EADS IS KNOWN AS THE GREAT ENGI neer of the Mississippi. Born in Indiana in 1820, he was just 22 when he persuaded a St. Louis shipbuilding firm to build a new kind of “submarine” vessel to recover cargo from sunken Mississippi steamboats and with it launched a salvage business so successful that he contemplated retiring at 37. During the Civil War he built ironclad gunboats to defend the river. After that he crossed it with America’s first major bridge with steel arches, the Eads Bridge, at St. Louis.