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.

“T HESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS . …” S O WROTE T HOMAS P AINE IN T HE C RISIS IN D ECEMBER 1776 .

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

ALMOST 60 PERCENT OF ALL CALVES BORN ON AMERICAN dairy farms are offspring of parents that have never met. Artificial insemination (AI), once something that would “never work,” is close to being standard practice, selectively or across herds, wherever cows are milked. AI is the biggest reason why today’s dairy farms are producing at a rate that was unthinkable 50 years ago. Acceptance by owners of beef cows, while not yet as impressive, is slowly on the upswing as well.

Americans began building automobiles commercially in 1896, and in 1898 the Winton Motor Carriage Company produced the first American truck, a gasoline-powered delivery wagon. Winton was soon followed by a number of other companies, including that of the Mack brothers of Brooklyn. Over the next decade, as the number of cars on the nation’s roads mushroomed, more gasoline, steam, and electric trucks came along, but by 1910 there were still fewer than 11,000 of them alongside the more than 450,000 cars on the road. Why?

The Walls Around Us

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

Cheating has been a nuisance for slot operators from the earliest days. Players fed the machines slugs; manufacturers fought back, incorporating slug detectors in the form of windows that let the operator see the last coin played. “Escalators,” introduced in 1925, paraded the last four or more coins in full view. Thieves drilled holes into the sides of machines and used wires to manipulate the reels; designers added steel plating to the inside of the cabinet.

THERE IS AN OLD COWBOY SAYING, “Never squat with your spurs on.” It appears that the lady in the picture on page 56 half-heard the saying; she has removed her right spur but not the left one for the photo. Aside from that amusing observation (for the easily amused such as myself), another great issue. Thank you.

In 1920 scientists all around the world were searching for a treatment for diabetes, a heart-rending disease that had been growing steadily in incidence. Dr. Frederick G. Banting was not one of them. He was a lonely surgeon stranded in London, Ontario, where he spent his days waiting in vain for patients and his nights scheming to get out of London, Ontario, as soon as possible. At one point he applied to be a doctor in the Arctic. At another he tried to join the British Army in India.

MICHAEL HARRIS TAKES OUT WHAT APPEARS TO be an opera hat made of ebony, pearl, and nickel, inserts a three-by-five-inch paper card under its hinged lid, and places it on my head. The vertical bars around the hat’s sides push out to exactly fit my skull. Then he snaps the lid shut. He takes the hat off my head, opens the lid, and removes the card and shows it to me. It now has holes punched in it that represent the exact dimensions of my head. My head is shaped, to my mild dismay, like a foot.

The Erector Makes The Man

HENRY PETROSKI’S “THE TOYS THAT Built America” (Spring 1998), struck a deep chord. I enclose a photo of myself taken at Christmas 1931. Note the Erector set to my right, my chief present that year. It was a favorite for many years, and although I did not become an engineer, I think it may well have been influential in my lasting interest in the sciences.

YOUR ARTICLE “THE GHOST FLEET of Mallows Bay” (by Donald G. Shomette, Winter 1999) brought back memories. When my family lived in the Washington, D.C., area many moons ago, one favorite family pastime was the Sunday afternoon auto ride. Sometimes we would drive down the bank of the Potomac. This was before National Airport was dredged up out of that river and before the Pentagon was erected on Roosevelt Field. Farther down, in one of the inlets of the river, we could see rows of wooden ships tied up and apparently abandoned.

THE PROGRESS OF MANKIND CAN BE MEASURED BY THE progress of mining and metallurgy. The successive historical epochs of stone, copper, bronze, iron, steel, and silicon are the steps our species has taken in the quest to control the world rather than simply survive it. Besides adding to humanity’s health and material well-being, each of these stages has created the need for an everincreasing web of laws, rules, and etiquette. The whole complex synergy that we call civilization ultimately depends on mining, and mining depends on rock drills.

One September day in 1989 about 2,700 Apple Lisa computers were unceremoniously buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah. In an industry where rapid obsolescence is not only the norm but a goal, the mass burial elicited few tears from anyone except insiders. Yet this prosaic event put an end to perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary failure in the history of computing.

THE N-1 MOON ROCKET, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL, LIFTED FROM ITS launch pad in Kazakhstan with the thrust of 30 engines. A cacophonous roar rolled across the steppes, a roar that carried hope. It was July 1969; at Cape Kennedy, half a world away, NASA was preparing to launch Apollo 11, which would carry the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to man’s first lunar landing. The N-1 was unmanned, but if its flight proved successful, the Soviets might be in a position to match the Americans’ achievement.

YOU WALK UP TO AN ORDINARY-LOOKING CLUSTER of old brick waterfront industrial buildings and into a plain gray lobby. You open an unmarked black door in the rear corner of the lobby and pass through it to find yourself in a hallway lined with aging white ceramic tile. The hallway is undistinguished except by an ornate embossed enamel sign from early in the century: DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR.

THE VERY FIRST BLAST CAME EARLY ONE APRIL night in 1840. Federal troops were in the midst of a skirmish with the Seminole Indians, who had been fighting for 23 years to keep their lands in Florida. A 36-year-old Army officer from New Bern, North Carolina, had fashioned a primer that would explode when touched and attached it to an ordinary artillery shell. A couple of days earlier he had hidden shell and primer under a bundle of clothing near a pond often used by the Seminoles.

IN LATE 1923 A SERIES OF CURIOUS FULL-PAGE ADVERTISEMENTS APPEARED IN The Saturday Evening Post . The first, in the issue of December 8, presented just four sentences surrounded by wide margins. It began, “By reason of his past and pending accomplishments, the figure of Walter P.

ANYONE WHO COMPARES OLD AND NEW BUILD ings in a city of any antiquity will usually end up thinking: They don’t build them like that anymore. Appearances can be deceptive, of course; plenty of boring architecture from the old days has since been knocked down. Still, very few pre-World War II buildings could pass for background illustrations in a video game.

THE LAND MINE IS ONE OF THE most capable weapons systems available today. It is cheap, easily massproduced, and deadly. It is also controversial: It maims and kills soldiers and civilians alike. For much of this century, mine and countermine technology have gone round for round in innovation and counterinnovation. Here are some of the salient events of that fight.