WASHINGTON, D.C., WAS A GREAT PLACE to be a photographer in the 19605. Stories like the civil rights marches and antiwar protests lured the top photographers to town. The Time/Life bureau was the center of the action, and I had the good fortune to be a young stringer there.

I HAD JUST BEEN TO THE POLLS TO VOTE IN A LOCAL election on a brilliantly clear and placid end-of-summer morning this year when I saw a crowd of people gathered at the corner looking up with such shock I thought someone must be threatening to jump from a nearby building. That would be, it occurred to me, as alarming a sight as I had seen in my life. But it was much worse. The crowd was looking at two of the biggest, tallest, solidest buildings on earth ripped open and pouring out flame and smoke.

In our Spring 2001 issue, this column made reference to an archaic technology: the coal furnaces that were prevalent in New York City’s schools. The reference had been inspired by our 1996 “They’re Still There” column. When that column was written, 322 of the city’s schools were heated with coal. Five years after that figure had been collected, it did not seem necessary to check whether the coal-burning furnaces were still in operation.

THE STRUCTURE IN THIS PICTURE MAY NOT LOOK LIKE the pinnacle of architectural beauty to you, but in 1920 the French architect Le Corbusier declared it and its brethren “the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age.” By that year he and his fellow modernists would have had a field day in the American Midwest, where the innovative new buildings, concrete grain elevators—clusters of tall grain-storage cylinders ringed by complicated conveyor mechanisms that moved enormous to

“It will never get off the ground.” “it’s ridiculous.” “With that large a fuselage and the present tail, it will be unstable.” So the detractors said, and unlike the detractors in most aviation stories, they were right. It was the world’s largest airplane and in many ways the most unlikely, and to one degree or another it fulfilled all these comments and predictions.

In 1970 two small start-up companies—Optel, near Princeton, New Jersey, and James Fergason’s Ilixco, in Kent, Ohio—decided to gamble on making liquidcrystal displays a reality. Two years later both were ready for something completely new: the digital wristwatch. False starts and missteps had bedeviled them, but they had paved the way not just for watch displays but for LCDs of all sorts.

IN THE 1960S LIQUID CRYSTALS HIT THE MEDIA AS THE STUFF OF sci-fi futuristic fantasy, a magical type of chemical that would oon be able to see through the human body and bring to life Dick Tracy’s TV wristwatch or a television set you could roll up like a magazine and stuff into your back pocket. Then in the 1970s came the Mood Ring, color-changing jewelry that could supposedly reveal your true emotions and help guide your love life.

YOU WILL HAVE NOTICED A NEW LINE ON THE cover of the magazine: IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE NATIONAL INVENTORS HALL OF FAME . This marks the beginning of a partnership with an institution uniquely allied with what we do. It’s an alliance that we believe promises great benefit to both sides.

MY MOTHER ALWAYS SAID I MARCHED TO A DIFFERENT tune and majored in nonsense,” says Thomas Fogarty. He was fresh out of medical school in 1961 when he IWI announced that surgeons were subjecting patients to unnecessary pain and he could prevent it. Doctors typically cut a knee-to-pelvis incision to remove vascular blood clots in the leg; Fogarty said they should instead cut only a tiny incision and insert a long, slender catheter up the vessel and through to the clot to its far side.

UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH century, most Americans had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward paint. Wood was plentiful and cheap, especially on the frontier; in fact, most settlers had to chop down trees to clear their land. Eager to start farming, they used the wood to build their cabins and outbuildings as quickly and cheaply as possible. Painting the buildings might beautify them and extend their lifespans, but pioneers had more urgent concerns, like survival.

THE FALL 1990 ISSUE of Invention & Technology contained an article called “The First U.S. Patent.” It told the story of Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont, and how his innovative method of extracting potash from wood ashes (which were plentiful in a young nation whose settlers spent much time clearing trees from their land) earned the first patent ever granted by the United States government. The author was Henry Paynter, a retired MIT professor who lived, and still lives, in Pittsford.

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.

Oil From Under Water

TOM ZOELLNER’S ARTICLE ON THE DE velopment of offshore drilling (“Oil and Water,” Fall 2000) brought back some exciting memories. In 1950 I was one of a small team of geologists working for Magnolia Petroleum out of Morgan City, Louisiana, and it was my good fortune to be present the day we discovered oil on our drill site 25 miles offshore. We ran a routine Schlumberger electric log, and it showed a thick sand unit that looked hydrocarbon-saturated.

A LIQUID-CRYSTAL DISPLAY (LCD) is a sandwich containing two plates of glass with polarizing filters that are perpendicular to each other. Under normal circumstances, no light could pass through. In an LCD, however, the area between the glass plates is filled with liquid crystals, and the inner I side of each plate is grooved uanot in the direction of polarization. Under these conditions, the liquid-crystal molecules form spirals that rotate the polarization of the light, allowing it to be transmitted.

WHEN THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS WON THE WORLD SERIES LAST fall, team officials rushed to thank everyone who had contributed, from the players to the owner to government officials and fans. No one mentioned the name of Thomas Midgley, yet without him, there might well be no Diamondbacks, for his two great discoveries made today’s Southwest possible. Only the hardiest souls braved Arizona’s desert heat until Midgley’s development of Freon made air conditioning commonplace.

NO LESS THAN RAIL roads, bridges, or cities, dams embody the American ideal of progress. In New England, as early as the seventeenth century, they converted falling water into industrial power. In the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s hydroelectric dams lifted the region out of poverty. In the Southeast, dams made swampland habitable. And in the West they tamed one of the wildest and most mountainous regions on earth. The nation currently has more than 75,000 dams more than six feet tall, nearly one for every day since independence.

TO PEOPLE WHO WORK ON THK WATERFRONT, ONE OF THE most pleasing sights is an old railroad tug foaming down the harbor, casting a wall of water before her. The froth churns white along her bows; as the saying goes, “she has a bone in her teeth.” When she is a few yards from a dock or ship, the skipper, high in the pilothouse, gives a few turns on the wheel and throttles down. The boat slows, lurches, and then wallows in the trough she has created.

WAR IS A DIRTY BUSINESS, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT comes to clothing. Combatants can go for days without removing their uniforms, while dried blood, caked mud, and all the other stains of campaigning accumulate. This was the situation in which U.S. Marines found themselves after the battles of Saipan and the neighboring island of Tinian (from which the nuclear strikes on Japan would be launched), as well as elsewhere in the Pacific, in 1944. But these Marines were inventive.

GROWING UP IN SILICON Valley in the 1950s and ‘60s, Steve Wozniak loved building things from parts scavenged from old TVs and radios. He couldn’t afford new components, so he had to come up with his own inexpensive solutions to problems. His first Apple computer, completed in 1976, when he was 25, was a masterpiece of low-cost elegance. It was probably the first computer to use a simple keyboard, as opposed to a Teletype console, for input and a television set for output.

WHEN JIM WYNNE WAS A BOY, HE SAYS, “I WAS PAR ticularly interested in Flash Gordon on television.” Most kids who watched those old movie serials probably wanted to be Flash Gordon, who was portrayed by the dashing former Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe. Wynne, however, wanted to emulate a different character. “There was Flash Gordon, and his assistant, Dr. Zarkov, was a physicist. They had adventures in outer space. They had death rays. A light beam would come out of a machine and blow things up.”