ALMOST EVERY WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY HAS inspired valuable innovations in military technology. The Civil War, for example, saw the first major use in the United States of rapid-fire weapons, land and naval mines, observation balloons, and ironclad ships, among other inventions. One of the most farsighted (if impractical) schemes of that conflict was devised in 1862 by an Indianapolis machine-shop owner named Albert E. Redstone. He proposed to build an armorclad, steam-operated “engine of war”—what today would be called a tank.

The Creation Of The Inkjet

REGARDING THE ARTICLE “Printing Enters the Jet Age,” in your Spring 2001 issue (by Thomas Kraemer), your readers should know that the business of designing and building inkjet print heads has always been a team effort from start to finish and remains so to this day.

REGARDING THE ARTICLE “Printing Enters the Jet Age,” in your Spring 2001 issue (by Thomas Kraemer), your readers should know that the business of designing and building inkjet print heads has always been a team effort from start to finish and remains so to this day.

YOU TAKE THE U.S. 380 EXIT EAST OFF I-25 AT TINY SAN Antonio, New Mexico, heading for the Rio Grande. Conrad Hilton was born in San Antonio, and his father ran the first Hilton hotel in an adobe building near the train station. Now the hottest place in San Antonio is the Owl Bar & Café, regionally famous for selling “the world’s best green chili cheeseburger.”

INCORPORATING SUCH UP-TO-THE- minute technologies as microprocessor control, solid-state electronics, data radio, and a tilting mechanism that banks them around curves, the new 150 mph Acela Express trains on Amtrak’s Washington-New York-Boston Northeast Corridor surely represent cutting-edge transportation for the twenty-first century. But these newest of trains travel over a civil engineer- ing infrastructure that owes much to the skills and foresight of engineers of the very early twentieth, and even the nineteenth, century.

YOUR ARTICLE “THE BIGGEST MINE ,” by Timothy J. LeCain (Winter 2001), reminds me of a personal story. In June 1967, as a young civilian engineer working for the Army, I had to travel to Tooele Army Depot in Utah to conduct some tests. One day when we had an errand to run in Salt Lake City, the locals in Tooele recommended that we stop at the Kennecott Copper Mine in the mountains and take a look at the big hole there. The claim at the time was that you could put the Empire State Building in the bottom and look down on it.

THE WORLD’S FIRST HYDROGEN BOMB, DESIGNATED MIKE , exploded on November 1, 1952. The test took place on a Pacific island named Elugelab, which ceased to exist within a second of detonation. Mike’s fireball spread fast enough to terrify people 30 miles away who had seen previous nuclear tests. One scientist later described it as “so huge, so brutal—as if things had gone too far.

SINCE ITS ESTABLISHMENT IN 1982, THE CHEMICAL Heritage Foundation (CHF) has been a focus for efforts in both industry and academia to preserve “the treasures of the chemical and molecular community.” In June CHF inaugurated its new, permanent home in Philadelphia. The complex includes the Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of Chemical History as well as the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, both named for couples long prominent in chemical research and history.

IN 1736, IN PHILADELPHIA , Benjamin Franklin founded the American colonies’ first volunteer fire company. Before then, in Philadelphia and most other cities, whoever happened to be nearby when a fire broke out would be drafted into a bucket brigade, sometimes under the direction of a local fire warden. These impromptu firefighters used whatever water was available to extinguish the flames.

The Overland Train Lives

I ENJOYED YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE Overland Train (“Big Wheels,” by Charles W. Ebeling) in the Winter 2001 issue, but I must make a correction to the statement that today it “exists only in memory.” The control car of the Overland Train has been reclaimed and is on display at the Yuma Proving Ground Heritage Center, in Yuma, Arizona. It was originally sold as government surplus, and all the cargo cars and wheels were cut up to be melted down for aluminum scrap.

“FLYING LOW TO MAKE OUT SIGNS ON RAILROAD stations or other buildings is dangerous, yet I sometimes has to be done,” wrote Amelia Earhart in 1932. Elsewhere she lamented: “And oh, for a country-wide campaign of sign painting! Coming down through a hole in the clouds, any flyer is thankful for definite information as to his location, even if it is only to check his navigation.”

IMAGINE GETTING STUCK BEHIND THIS ON A HIGH way. It is twice as wide as a semitrailer and 572 feet long. Its 54 giant rubber tires each stand 10 feet high, and their treads are 4 feet wide. Every wheel contains a DC electric traction motor in its hub; they’re powerful, but they still can’t propel the massive vehicle at more than 20 miles an hour. Fortunately, it was never intended for use on highways. It was designed for off-road transport operations over rough and hilly terrain, and only in very remote corners of the world.

BEFORE MARGARET Knight, most paper bags were simply tubes pinched together at one end and glued; they didn’t have flat folded bases, so they couldn’t stand up or open square. Knight invented a machine that gave them that shape.

THE TV REMOTE CONTROL WAS AN INVENTION BORN not of necessity or even convenience. It grew out of one man’s detestation of advertising. Eugene McDonald, the founder of the Zenith Corporation, declared in 1946 that advertiser-supported television could never succeed. Citing the high cost of producing programming, he insisted that television, unlike radio, could not possibly earn a profit on ad revenue alone. The solution: subscription television.

THEY CALLED GEORGE ARENS berg “The Boy” when the 19-year-old printing compositor arrived in New York in 1869. Within a year, though, his shopmates had renamed him “The Velocipede.” Arensberg had E. A. Donaldson, a composing-room foreman at The New York Times , to thank for his newfound fame.

ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE WE EXPLAIN HOW WlLLIAM Coolidge figured out how to make ductile tungsten after watching his dentist prepare a filling. Some years earlier, a similar epiphany had led to the establishment of America’s data-processing industry. One day in the early 188Os, the inventor Herman Hollerith noticed that his railroad ticket was perforated with a peculiar pattern of holes.

IN THE FIRST FEW DECADES OF DIGITAL COMPUTING, THE OUT put of printed information to the user was essentially an afterthought. Typewriter-style impact technology, in which a piece of metal in the shape of a letter was struck against a ribbon, remained virtually universal.

Tires began as a durable material circling a fragile wheel, such as a steel tire on a spoked wooden wagon wheel. I So when inventors first came up with better tires, they didn’t quickly think of the pneumatic rubber kind we know today Long after air-filled versions became common, they were seen more as an outer layer than as an independent structure.

IN THE LAST HALF-CENTURY, HISTORY HAS TAUGHT SOME POWERFUL LESSONS about the need to look before leaping into untested and potentially hazardous technologies. All too often we have addressed such issues only after the fact. With internal-combustion automobiles and coal-fired power plants, for example, we learned quite belatedly to address the pollution they had long been creating. And we made extensive use of pesticides such as DDT until the naturalist Rachel Carson warned of their harmful effects.