BEFORE DAWN ON JANUARY 5, 1943, FOLLOWING A bombing raid in the Solomon Islands, an Allied naval task force rendezvoused off Guadalcanal. It was thirteen months after Pearl Harbor, and the United States was struggling in every theater against past neglect of its military forces as well as against powerful and battle-wise enemies. The Americans had gained the upper hand on the strategic island of Guadalcanal and Allied forces were pushing northward into New Guinea, but victory in the Pacific was far from assured.

ANDY BUSH DROVE A MERCEDES, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL in the United States in the early 1960s. More unusual still, the tires on his car never seemed to wear out, even though they always looked flabby and underinflated. He loved the durability of his peculiar French-built “radial” tires.

IT IS HARD NOW, SURROUNDED BY EASY WAYS TO PRINT and copy documents, to imagine the difficulties faced by anyone who wanted to do so 200 years ago. Originals had to be written out in longhand; there was no other way. Those who wanted copies could either have the documents printed, repeat the longhand exercise on another piece of paper, or enlist someone else to do the work.

WHEN A LONG ISLAND typewriter-repair shop closed its doors a few years ago, its owner had to decide what to do with all the Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, and Coronas, most of them manual, that had accumulated over several decades. The resale market was nonexistent, for there are few things more obsolete than a manual typewriter (though, to be fair, this column is being typed on a 286 computer, which seems even quainter somehow—like the gray area in between a new car and a classic, when you’re driving a rusty heap of junk).

ON OCTOBER 11, 2000, THE SPACE SHUTTLE DISCOVERY took off from Kennedy Spaceflight Center at Cape Canaveral. Two days later, it docked with the International Space Station, setting the stage for eight clays of construction work. At the moment of docking, the shuttle/station complex, including the three modules that made up the station at that time—Zvezda, Zarya, and Unity—weighed more than 160 tons and spanned a length of more than 150 feet.

IF YOU LOOK IN ANY ANTIQUES STORE IN AMERICA, ODDS are that you will find an old camera. Maybe it’s a boxy Brownie or a metal contraption with leather bellows. It probably doesn’t work any more, but it’s a lovely old item. Pick it up, look through the viewfmder, and imagine the people who held it long ago. You’ll probably walk away feeling there’s something magical about that little box.

Dr. Jacob Zabara , a neurophysiologist at Temple University, was attending a childbirth class with his wife in 1971 when he had an idea that led to an implantable electronic device for preventing epileptic seizures. He realized that if the controlled breathing his wife was learning really decreased pain during birth, the common understanding of the vagus nerve must be wrong.

HENRY F. PHILLIPS, of Portland, Oregon, patented a new kind of screw and screwdriver in 1936. Within a decade his screws were holding things together all over the world. Why? Wasn’t one kind enough? For the average person tackling a minor do-it-yourself project, the advantages of the Phillips can seem elusive. Perhaps it was a scheme by the tool industry to make people buy twice as many screwdrivers.

But for the cabins and smokestacks on their sterns, you might almost think the vessels shown on these pages were advanced underwater craft. Like submarines, they have hulls streamlined to minimize the resistance of the water they plow through. That hull design was conceived in the 1870s and 1880s by the Scottish-born Great Lakes captain Alexander McDougall, who had begun his career at 16 as a deck hand and porter and worked his way up to the command of ships by the time he was 25.

ENJOYED “FROM BLACK and White to Technicolor,” by Tom Huntington, in the Summer 2.001 issue. It mentioned James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary 1861 demonstration of photographic color reproduction, in which he photographed an object three times through red, green, and blue filters and projected positive transparencies together through the same filters. This experiment should have failed, since sensitizing dyes were not yet invented and thus his film could have been sensitive only to the blue light that silver halide could record.

DURING THE 1950s, IN THE GLORY DAYS OF THE NEW YORK Yankees, Gil McDougald was the 1951 Rookie of the Year and a five-time All-Star infielder. One day in 1955, during batting practice, he reached beyond a protective fence to pick up a ball. Right at that moment, his teammate Bob Cerv sent a line drive in his direction, striking him just above the left ear. McDougald was not severely injured, missing only a few games before returning to the lineup. But the accident had fractured his skull and damaged his inner ear.

The exotic contraptions and magical processes that fill our dreams may seem an unlikely source for useful technology. But practical devices, from the first armored warship to a computer with laser circuits, have originated in dreams.

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.

INSPIRATION IS AN ELUSIVE THING . Sometimes it comes in a dream, as when Friedrich August Kekulé’s vision of a ring of dancing atoms, like a snake biting its tail, revealed the structure of benzene. Sometimes it is a simple mechanical analogy, as when the motion of a ship’s wheel led Samuel Colt to design his famous revolver. Much more often, innovators don’t know where their crucial insights come from.

Customers who bought Firestone’s “500” steel-belted radial tires began having problems with tread separation shortly after the tires were introduced in the early 1970s. But when they brought the tires in, the company couldn’t understand why its new flagship product was failing. Executives stonewalled. They blamed consumers for poor maintenance or bad driving habits, and the company resisted outside inquiries. Finally, in 1978, the U.S.

Long Before Technicolor

ENJOYED “FROM BLACK and White to Technicolor,” by Tom Huntington, in the Summer 2.001 issue. It mentioned James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary 1861 demonstration of photographic color reproduction, in which he photographed an object three times through red, green, and blue filters and projected positive transparencies together through the same filters.

Like it or not, we tend to think of the American West as relatively new and raw and of the East as more refined and finished. It can be startling and sometimes amusing to have these stereotypes upset. Let me compare two tourist railroads that seem to exhibit all the wrong qualities, considering their Down East and Far Western locations. They are the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire and the Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado.

One of the most versatile and familiar products of American chemical engineering, Teflon, was discovered by accident. There are many such tales to be found in the history of industrial chemistry, from vulcanized rubber to saccharin to Post-Its, all of which were stumbled upon by researchers looking for other things. So common, in fact, are unplanned discoveries of this sort that one might expect would-be inventors to simply mix random chemicals all day long until they come up with something valuable.

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE WE’RE THE BRANNOCK Device Company, they just look at me,” Tim Follett says. “When I say we make the metal thing that measures your foot in the shoe store, they grin and say, ‘Oh, yeah!’” Follett is vice president of the Liverpool, New York, firm that makes that thing. “We may be the only company in the world whose sole product is a foot-measuring device,” he observes.

Next to the atomic bomb, they were probably America’s most closely guarded secret of the entire war. Even the submachine-gun-toting Marines who patrolled the compound in northwest Washington, D.C., were forbidden to set foot in the building that housed the machines. Of the 4,000 Navy officers, enlisted men, WAVES, and specially cleared civilian workers who every day passed through the double fence of barbed wire surrounding the Naval Communications Annex, only a handful were even permitted to know of the machines’ existence.