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SAUL GRIFFITH REMEMBERS THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN he was inspired. He was in Africa, participating in a Lions Club program to recycle used eyeglasses by giving them to impoverished rural Africans. “It’s not a very good way to correct vision problems, but it’s a lot better than nothing,” he says. He wanted especially to help a four-year-old boy with such poor vision he had never been able to read or play ball with his friends. So Griffith and his colleagues took the thick lenses from a pair of adult glasses and fitted them into child-size frames.

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE ARMISTICE THAT ENDED THE FIRST WORED WAR, ONE last major naval engagement took place, at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea. The Durazzo raid, on October 2, 1918, had little effect on the course of the conflict, for by that time the Central Powers’ position was eroding rapidly on sea and land. One historian has compared the raid to “using a hammer to swat a fly.” Nonetheless, it gave the U.S.

RAYMOND KURZWEIL IS ONE OF THE VERY FEW CONTEMPO rary inventors who come close to the Thomas Edison loneinventor stereotype. A child prodigy who made numerous television appearances demonstrating his creations, he won first prize in electronics and communications at the International Science Fair as a teenager and paid for his college education by selling computer programs he wrote. The most amazing of his inventions so far may be the Kurzweil Reading Machine, introduced in 1976.

BEFORE THE CANAL ERA, THE PLACE THAT WOULD BECOME known as Chicago barely merited a dot on the map. It was a trading post and fort on the way to St. Louis, the leading city of the West, and the Great Plains beyond. But just twelve miles west of Lake Michigan there existed an ancient geological feature that, with some new technology and an immense amount of labor, would make Chicago into the city of the century. It was a subcontinental drainage divide, a five- to six-foothigh ridge running north-south along what is today Harlem Avenue.

SAM WILLIAMS STOOD AT THE PODIUM AND EXPLAINED why he enjoyed his occupation. “One of the great things about invention is that your wife can’t tell whether you’re asleep or inventing,” he told the audience. “You can be sitting by the TV, having a couple of beers, and she never knows the difference.”

WHEN OTTO LILIENTHAL, THE GERMAN WOULD-BE inventor of the airplane, died in a glider crash in 1896, the 24-year-old Orville Wright was incubating typhoid fever and about to enter a six-week delirium that would bring him near death. While Orville lay sick, his older brother, Wilbur, thought about the fatal accident. The brothers had followed Lilienthal’s work at a distance through newspaper accounts. When Orville at last began a slow recovery, he and Wilbur discussed the problem of flight.

BEFORE GUGEIELMO MARCONI SENT A RADIO SIGNAL ACROSS the Atlantic in 1901, and even before Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves in 1888, there was Dr. Mahlon Loomis. In 1866 he successfully transmitted a signal through the air between two mountaintops in Virginia. Who was Mahlon Loomis? And how did he become the first person to demonstrate wireless telegraphy?

YOU MAY AT SOME TIME, WHEN CLEARING A JAM IN A PHOTO copier or a laser printer, have gotten some of the toner powder on your hands or, even worse, your shirt. It’s natural at this point to expect a major cleanup, but the anticipated dire result is avoided when you find that the black smudge simply brushes off. This property of toners is more than just a boon to clumsy office workers; in fact it lies at the very heart of the process by which copiers and printers produce documents.

(1939- ) Far ultraviolet camera and spectragraph. Deployed on the moon by Apollo 16 astronauts, it delivered breakthroughs in astronomy.

(1936- ) Satellite servicing techniques. As manager of NASA’s maintenance program for the Hubble Space Telescope, Cepollina uses his pioneering techniques to continually upgrade and renew the system.

RICHARD WHITCOMB IS OFTEN ASKED WHAT MAKES HIM unique, how he has repeatedly managed to come up with conceptual breakthroughs that have cluded other talented aeronautics engineers. The answer, he believes, lies in his power of visualization. For some reason he can digest equations and wind tunnel data and turn them into a mental image, of air molecules flowing over airfoils for instance.

HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT methods exist for making microcapsules of varying sizes and compositions. The choice is governed by the substance being encapsulated, the coating material, the intended use, and economic and quality-control factors, among others. To illustrate some general principles of the technology, here is a description of one process that is used to microencapsulate ibuprofen. It was developed by Sambasiva Rao Ghanta and Robert Edmon Guisinger of Eurand America, Inc., in Vandalia, Ohio, and is set forth in full in U.S.

THE LEVELS OF EXPERTISE THAT our Invention & Technology authors achieve within the confines of a few thousand words often make us wonder what they could do on a larger canvas. As the works listed below prove, good magazine writers lose none of their effectiveness in the transition to book form.

IN 1905 THE WRIGHT BROTHERS enjoyed a complete monopoly on heavier-than-air aviation. They had the world’s only working airplane, were the only two pilots able to fly it, and had applied for a formidable patent that would cover any plane with three-axis control. Yet within five years they would regularly be surpassed by competitors at home and abroad, and before what was remembered as the Golden Age of Aviation arrived in the 1920s, they would be out of the aircraft business entirely. What happened?

THAT WAS AN EXCELLENT article on the substance that fixes anything and everything, duct tape (“Object Lessons,” by Curt Wohleber, Summer 2003). A student in my heat-transfer class last spring semester made a book bag entirely out of the tape, complete with pockets for a calculator and pencils. I found it a classic example of the innovative spirit. Here is a picture.

Tom Lawrence
LAFAYETTE, IND.

LAST NOVEMBER 24, AT A FORTRESS IN THE NORTH OF AFGHAN istan, a group of Taliban prisoners rose in revolt against their captors. They had pretended to surrender but had not been searched, and when brought to the fort in trucks, they proved to be well armed. Overpowering their guards, they seized additional weapons and freed several hundred other Taliban prisoners who were Bbeing held in cells. They took control of much of the fort, forcing troops of the pro-American Northern Alliance to retreat to a corner.

IT WAS A EUREKA! MOMENT. THE DAY HADN’T STARTED well for Logan O’Keefe, age six. It was the summer between first and second grades, and on this particular day Logan looked perplexed. She was participating in a daycamp program called Camp Invention. Her teacher showed the students a pile of old appliances—radios, toasters, mixers, blenders—and told them to take them apart to learn how they worked, then see if they could use the pieces to invent something new.

SCHOLARS LOVE GRAND IDEAS that neatly tie together everything in history. One of the more intriguing theories of this type comes from Jonathan Coopersmith of Texas A&M, who has written that much of the history of communications, from printing to VCRs to the Internet, was determined by the need to distribute pornography more efficiently.

GAME-SHOW AFICIONADOS FONDLY REMEMBER THE CONSU merist orgasm that closed every episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.” As a lovely hostess seductively stroked the merchandise, prize after prize was paraded before the lucky winner, starting with “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat,” and invariably climaxing with “ your … new … CAR!!!! ”

IN 1995 JOHN H. WHITE , Jr., whose article on Robert Fulton appears in this issue, wrote in our pages: “The fate of most abandoned railroads is a speedy dismemberment. … The weeds and trees move in, and soon even those who worked on the line can no longer point out just where it ran.” This description was not meant to apply to urban railroads, of course, especially not to elevated lines, whose dismemberment can be as complicated an engineering and logistical problem as their construction.

ROBERT FULTON INVENTED THE STEAMBOAT. In a way, the veracity of this claim matters not. Truth is what the public believes, and a widely held myth can outlast any collection of mere facts. Fulton has come down to us as the father of the steamboat, the American Leonardo, and a national hero. He surely had the right ingredients for a national hero, for he was poor, undereducated, bright, tall, handsome, and hardworking.