IN 1937 THE MATHEMATI cian Alan Turing laid the foundation for modern computer science by introducing the concept of a Turing machine. Such a device could do four things: make a mark on a strip of paper, erase a mark, and move the paper forward or backward. In theory, a digital computer program of any complexity can be broken down into equivalents of these four steps.

The Mount Washington line was built between 1866 and 1869 up the slope of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet the highest mountain in the Northeast. The rise from the base to the top station is approximately 3,600 feet, and the average grade is 24.4 percent. At its steepest section it reaches a fearsome 37.5 percent; most main-line railroads rarely climb much over 2 percent and prefer to keep grades at half that. To overcome the steep slope, a multiple-toothed rack is placed in the center of the track.

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile. The author is certainly correct in describing the difficulties of dealing with these players on the road.

Platters On Wheels

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile.

1. William Morton , 1819-1868. Co-discoverer of anesthesia.
2. James Bogardus , 1800-1874. Inventor whose varied output ranged from engraving machines to the cast-iron building.
3. Samuel Colt , 1814-1862. Gun inventor and manufacturer.

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY , and of the millennium with it, is an invention as surely as is anything we cover in this magazine. Its main inventors include the ancients who devised decimal numbering systems, working from the number of fingers on their hands; the Roman official in 153 B.C. who fixed January 1 as the first day of the year; and Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth-century monk who came up with a calendar naming years by starting with A.D.

Picking The People Of Progress

I ENJOYED EDWARD SOREL’S DEPICTION of the century’s “People of Progress” in the Winter 2000 issue, and I do not disagree with the selection. There is a trio, however, that I feel should have been included: Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley, the inventors of the transistor, which made possible the computer age.

Roger L. Gaefcke
Playa del Rey, Calif.

The Manitou & Pikes Peak Railway is the highest rack railway in the world. It ascends to 14,110 feet above sea level, more than twice as high as the Mount Washington line, and at 8.9 miles is nearly three times the length of its Eastern sister. Pikes Peak is located just west of Colorado Springs, about 60 miles south of Denver. It is named for Zebulon M.

In September 1996 AT&T spun off its research arm, Lucent Technologies, as a separate entity. The new company, which began business as one of the nation’s 50 largest, inherited the famous Bell Laboratories as well as AT&T’s operations in fiber-optic, wired, and wireless communications equipment.

The idea was to find a dead tree. Not just any dead tree, but one that had died more than 100 million years ago and fallen into a stream and been caught and sealed there in the muck, rotting and eventually petrified when mountains collapsed and sand dunes blew over and covered the forgotten river, until the tree was nothing more than a sponge for radioactive gases coming up from inside the earth.

In Manchester, Connecticut, near Hartford, two high-tech bandits set up a dummy ATM in the Buckland Hills Mall and used it to gather card codes and PINs from people trying to use the machine. The two men planned their caper with care, setting up a phony institution called Guarantee Trust Company and leasing a small stand-alone Fujitsu unit from an independent supplier. Then, on April 24,1993, dressed as workmen, they and another conspirator wheeled their machine into a heavily trafficked area of the mall and plugged it in.

DURING THE 1820S THE BRITISH EXPLORER WIL liam Parry led several Arctic expeditions across Baffin Bay and through miles of frozen waste toward the north magnetic pole. The explorers used a new technology to help them survive in the frigid north: canned food. Tin-coated, wrought-iron cans would allow them to carry palatable provisions almost indefinitely without spoilage. The trouble began when they actually wanted to eat the food. A can of roast veal came with these forbidding instructions: “Cut round on the top with a chisel and hammer.”

Before the advent of automated teller machines (ATMs), most people’s experience with devices that dispensed money involved pulling a handle and hoping three cherries would line up. For this reason, perhaps, many people did not trust ATMs at first. In the early days it was common for users to count their cash each time. After all, how could you rely on a machine to dispense the correct number of $20 bills when your photocopier regularly skipped pages and kicked out blank sheets?

WHAT IF WATSON HAD BEEN OUT TO LUNCH when Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call, in 1876? Bell’s invention let people converse across long distances instantaneously, but not with someone who wasn’t home. That would be the weak link in the communications revolution.

Whether one is fighting a war or maintaining a III peace, knowing what the other side is up to can be more valuable than any amount of personnel or weaponry. Few techniques are more effective for this than observation from above. What we now call aerial reconnaissance dates from the beginning of the Civil War, when three professional balloonists—John Wise, John LaMountain, and Thaddeus Lowe—offered their services to the Union.

IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE AN ESTABLISHMENT A CENTURY and a half older than the Republic, or one built around a technology devised by an alchemist. The Avedis Zildjian Company is in a big modern building, where it makes the world’s best cymbals for jazz, rock, and concert musicians. But each cymbal begins with the mixing of a bronze alloy by a secret technique that has been handed down for fourteen generations, since 1623.

IN THE MID-1930S LOS ANGELES, THE FASTEST -growing city in the United States, was desperately in need of two things: water and power. The Boulder (now Hoover) Dam was being built to provide both. Electric power lines would stretch 266 miles from the dam site, on the Colorado River, to Los Angeles. They would carry 275,000 volts of power and provide Angelenos with cheap electricity, but there was a problem.

EARLIER THIS YEAR A GROUP OF JOURNALISTS ASSEMBLED BY NEW York University voted Silent Spring (1962), by the ecologist Rachel Carson, the second most influential piece of American journalism of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of scientific studies, Carson demonstrated to the public that DDT, the miracle chemical of World War II and the keystone of the World Health Organization’s global antimalaria program in the 1950s, was less a benefit to humanity than a danger to the global ecosystem.

The Better Slide Rule

THE SPRING 2000 ARTICLE ABOUT calculators (“How the Computer Got Into Your Pocket,” by Mike May) shook loose a memory for me. In 1974 my high school precalculus teacher recommended that we buy slide rules to aid our calculations. Almost all of us ordered and awaited delivery of the mysterious devices. The big day arrived and I expected we’d spend the hour learning the rudiments of our enigmatic new tools.

DANIEL COLLADON DIDN’T SET OUT TO CREATE A telecommunications revolution in 1841. The Swiss physicist simply wanted to show an audience in Geneva how a horizontal jet of water broke up into droplets as gravity pulled the liquid in a downward arc. The water was hard to see with the meager illumination available at the time, but Colladon had a bright idea. He piped a beam of sunlight into the darkened lecture hall with a hollow tube poking through closed window shutters. He then aimed the beam along the water jet.