I WAS FASCINATED BY Deirdre Barrett’s article about dreams begetting inventive insights (“In Dreams Begin Technologies,” Fall 2001). In my 40-plus-year career as a physicist in IBM’s development laboratories, I’ve had the experience numerous times. In fact, I’ve learned to count on it. Not that I go to sleep on any given night expecting solutions to my problems; they just seem to appear on their own.
SOLAR CELLS POWER EVERY SATELLITE, AND SATELLITES ARE indispensable. In the military arena they direct battle operations for America; they collect and send GPS (Global Positioning System) data and other intelligence used to plan precision bombing and Special Forces missions; they carry high-speed communications between troops in the field and those in command. In the words of Gen.
DURING THE 1960s PROFESSOR BILLIE Wolfe at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, taught a course called “Housing Design for Family Living.” She took photographs of ranches and farms for use in her class, and she noticed that many of them in- eluded derelict or unused windmills. Seeing those pictures, she realized that the machines were disappearing from the Western landscape.
I’VE BEEN AN AVID reader of the magazine for more than 10 years, but no article has captured my attention like Mark Bernstein’s “Thomas Midgley and the Law of Unintended Consequences” in the Spring 2002 issue. I would not likely have obtained a degree in mechanical engineering and become a professional engineer if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be one of 17 undergraduates Mr. Midgley financed.
AS SOON AS THE PEARL HARBOR RAID BROUGHT America into World War II, one of our chief concerns was protecting and reinforcing Alaska. In December of 1941, the territory contained few American troops, but Alaska looked strategically important for two reasons: It could help secure control of the northern reaches of the Pacific and it offered a promising route for getting Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union.
I WAS FASCINATED BY Deirdre Barrett’s article about dreams begetting inventive insights (“In Dreams Begin Technologies,” Fall 2001). In my 40-plus-year career as a physicist in IBM’s development laboratories, I’ve had the experience numerous times. In fact, I’ve learned to count on it. Not that I go to sleep on any given night expecting solutions to my problems; they just seem to appear on their own. Picking up on the concept of the incubus and succubus in classical literature, I call my nocturnal tutor my “techcubus.”
WHEN JOHN F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the moon and bring him back, he made no mention of what the man might do while he was up there. Early planners envisioned activities appropriate for a beach vacation: Go for a walk, snap some pictures, pick up a few rocks. It took persistent nagging from a group of NASA geologists, physicists, engineers, and others to make sure that the Apollo program would be more than a cruise to nowhere.
THE STORY OF THE BIRTH OF THE COMPUTER MOUSE is often told, and it is often told like this: Douglas Engelbart and his associates at the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in the 19605; innovators at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center refined it in the 19705; and Steve Jobs saw it there in 1979, and his Apple Computer company then took it and brought it to market in the 19805.
ROBERT FULTON MAY NOT HAVE literally invented the steamboat, but he surely introduced it into everyday commercial service. His premier boat of 1807 ran steady and full, and its public acceptance opened a new era. For the first time, mechanical power was used to carry passengers and cargo over long distances. The Hudson River became a highway for long and sleek side-wheelers racing along at 20 and 25 miles an hour. Travel time to Albany fell to just seven hours. Fortunes were made by business leaders like Daniel Drew and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
I’VE BEEN AN AVID reader of the magazine for more than 10 years, but no article has captured my attention like Mark Bernstein’s “Thomas Midgley and the Law of Unintended Consequences” in the Spring 2002 issue. I would not likely have obtained a degree in mechanical engineering and become a professional engineer if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be one of 17 undergraduates Mr. Midgley financed.
“COME TO KINDLY TERMS WITH YOUR ASS for it bears you.” Those words introduced How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot , first published in 1969. Its title might imply that it was the precursor to the current spate of “For Dummies” books, but it was something altogether different. The Idiot Book, as it was called, was more than just a repair manual. It was a manual for a way of life.
UNTIL ABOUT 70 YEARS ago human beings had to go through life without a quick, easy way to fasten two or more pieces of paper firmly. People sewed papers together, skewered them with pins, used glue, or punched holes and secured them with ribbon. They tried clamps, brads, and other cumbersome fasteners. The first stapling devices were not a startling improvement.
ASTRONAUTICS IS UNIQUE AMONG THE sciences in that it is the only study to have begun its existence as pure fantasy. For centuries it lived only in the works of fiction writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and of scientists, swayed by them, who believed in as patently unlikely a proposition as flying into space.
IN THE EARLY 1940S A DIAGNOSIS OF CANCER WAS USUALLY a death sentence, with a small chance of a reprieve and the certainty of great suffering beforehand. Some doctors would not even tell cancer patients that they had the disease.
EVER SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, WHEN CENTRAL AMER ica first appeared on European maps, visionaries have put forth schemes to build canals there. The first came in 1529 when a Spanish explorer named Alvaro de Saavedra suggested that a waterway might be dug by hand; by far the strangest was proposed more than 400 years later, when the United States considered blowing a trench through the isthmus using atomic bombs.
WE LIVE IN A BAT tery-operated world, yet only a minuscule portion of the power we use actually comes from batteries. That’s a good thing, because it would take about eight AA cells to boil a cup of water. But inefficient as they are, batteries have the key advantage of supplying power wherever and whenever we need it.
THEY’RE EVERYWHERE, so common that we scarcely notice them. They’re ignored, uncelebrated, the butt of jokes about peripatetic dogs, yet they play a vital role in public safety. In their 200-year history, fire hydrants have saved countless lives and billions of dollars.
THANK YOU, TIM Palucka, for “Making the Invisible Visible” (Winter 2002), with its stunning illustrations and its previously unpublished reminiscences from James Hillier and others. I have two observations.
A LOW BUZZ EMANATES FROM A DINGY stall on a street in New York City’s infamous Bowery district. Inside, under a bare bulb, one man is hunched over the naked back of another, engraving something into his skin and pausing occasionally to wipe away the blood. The walls are decorated with brightly colored cartoonlike drawings: battleships, impaled valentine hearts, scantily clad women, skulls. The year is 1900. Here is the ancient art of tattooing, practiced in some form in almost all regions of the world for millennia.
IN 1948 JAMES HILLIER, THE RCA PHYSICIST LARGELY responsible for developing the first commercial electron microscope in America, summarized the progress that had keen made and the challenges that lay ahead in mapping the microscopic world using electrons. In a speech to the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he asked his listeners to perform a thought experiment. Suppose, he said, a scientist wanted to examine an entire plant or animal under an electron microscope.
