News/Blogs

WHO BUILT THE FIRST COMPUTER ? As I. Bernard Cohen explains elsewhere in this issue, answering the question is difficult and ultimately arbitrary. Under a loose definition of what constitutes a computer, Charles Babbage’s 1820s Difference Engine can claim the title. For today’s teenagers, to whom a computer with no mouse might as well be a typewriter, Apple’s Lisa model (predecessor of the more successful Macintosh) makes a much better candidate.

Imagine one of today’s management gurus becoming so absorbed with golf that he gives up his lucrative consulting contracts to devote full time to the total quality management of the PGA Tour. Perhaps it is not a completely far-fetched idea, given the game’s irresistible appeal and the global reach and multibillion-dollar size of the modern golf industry. But think back to the beginning of the century, when it took teams of horse-pulled pans and scrapers—and a phalanx of manpower—to clear land of rocks and boulders and build a playable golf course.

THE SPECIAL EDITION OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH THAT MADE ITS debut on December 7, 1938, should have been a colossal failure. The Pulitzer-owned paper carried no advertising and earned no money at the newsstand; in fact only 15 copies were printed. It contained no memorable scoops, just stories like a front-page article reporting the arrest of one Albert Button “after Mrs.

ONE GREAT EVENT OF EVERY MODERN AMERI can’s youth was watching the family car’s odometer turn over. When the mileage approached a multiple of 1,000—or even 10,000, on a particularly lucky day—all conversation would cease as riders tracked the dial’s hypnotic crawl: 999.1, 999.2, 999.3. … When the longed-for moment finally arrived, the 9’s turned into O’s with the flawless synchronization of a Rockettes kick line, and everyone spent a few moments in silent contemplation.

FOR SOMETHING LIKE A CENTURY AMERICANS USU ally loved engineers, those individualistic heroes who rose above the mundane to put their stamp on recalcitrant nature. Politics could only get in the way of those master creators. To a degree, a negative version of that view may still be with us.

Stagnant water plus mosquitoes equals yellow fever. A century after this connection was established, the equation is common knowledge. But 200 years ago in the new United States, long before the concept of germs became widespread, the immigrant engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe struggled to bring fresh water to American cities largely because he and others believed it would combat epidemic disease.

For more than 50 years following Banting’s breakthrough discovery in 1922, the primary source for insulin remained the pancreases of slaughtered cows and pigs. In the mid-1970s, however, a worrisome rumor arose that because consumers were generally eating less meat while the number of diabetics continued to increase, a shortage of insulin was absolutely inevitable. In actuality the concern was unfounded, but the strength of the rumor proved invaluable to a new and very troubled field of science.

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.

Who was Howard Hughes? There are many answers. But through all his shifting activities he remained a riverboat gambler with a bottomless pot of money and a habit of doing as he liked. We remember him as a Hollywood playboy whose exploits made the papers almost daily—and as a recluse who hid from his closest associates. During a decades-long involvement with aviation he built a record-breaking racing plane that the Army Air Corps declined to purchase and an enormous flying boat that flew only once. Yet his life also held many solid achievements.

Take a boat down the Potomac, thirty miles south of Washington, D.C., round the bend at Sandy Point, and enter Mallows Bay. Press forward through the shallow waters of the little bay, surrounded by tall, forested ; bluffs; thick algae, smelling of age and rot, will swirl about the prow of your boat as it pushes slowly ahead. The silence may be interrupted only by a great heron I fleeing before you. You are entering an eerie, little-known region populated only by great and hoary relics of generations past.

JOSEPHINE GARIS COCHRANE seemed to have reached the low point of her life one Sunday in about 1880, when she went to church in the midst of an illness and heard the pastor deliver her eulogy. Jasper Douthit, the minister, was undoubtedly rushing things a bit, but then, he had been a reformer on so many fronts for so long that impatience was probably his idea of a positive contribution to any effort. Whatever the intent of his wistful farewell, entitled “Hoping, Waiting and Resting,” Mrs. Cochrane eventually rallied.

STEPHEN FOX’S ARTICLE “THE STRANGE Triumph of Abner Doble,” in the Summer 1998 issue, mentions only briefly the McCulloch Corporation’s steamautomobile endeavor with Abner Doble in the 1950s. I thought readers might like a more complete story.

As curators of industrial history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), we get offered lots of old stuff. “I’m cleaning out my mother’s house, and I found. … ” Or: “We’re closing down our factory and thought you might like. … ” Or even: “How do we get our invention into the Smithsonian hall of fame?”

People think it might be worth saving, they can’t bear to throw it away, they think it might get good publicity being at the Smithsonian. That’s fine. We have almost no budget to acquire artifacts, so we depend on donations.

HOWARD H. AIKEN HOLDS AN AMBIGUOUS POSI tion in the history of the computer. Although a number of historians have declared that his first machine—the IBM ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), known today mainly by the simpler name Mark I—inaugurated the computer age, many accounts of the birth of the computer either ignore his role altogether or consider him to have belonged to a pre-computer age.

AS LONG AS THERE HAS BEEN TECHNOLOGY, IT HAS BEEN APPLIED TO AGRI culture. Every major advance throughout history, from metallurgy to steam power to computers, has been used to make the natural processes of growth more productive and efficient. Just as hunting and gathering have given way to neat rows of crops and pens filled with cattle, another area of food production—vital but easily overlooked—has been systematized in much the same fashion: apiculture, or the raising of bees.

THIRTY FEET BELOW AN OPEN HATCH IN THE grain carrier Kinsman Independent , at anchor in Buffalo, New York, men are in constant motion on a sea of wheat. Four of them stand in a corner of the 50-by-100-foot-long bin, alternately pulling and releasing ropes hanging down from overhead. Others catch and position 4-foot-wide metal shovels strung to ropes running overhead; the ropes pull the shovels the length of the hold, carrying wheat along with them.

IN 1946 THE NORDBERG MANUFAC turing Company, of Milwaukee, contracted with Mr. Doble to design and manufacture at Nordberg a steam engine to replace the diesel engine in the rear of a bus. It would have the same fuel consumption as a diesel, and the operation would be fully automatic. The design had two vertical high-pressure cylinders and two horizontal lowpressure cylinders. The exhaust would pass through a high-speed 50,000-rpm single-stage reaction steam turbine, driving a fan through the double reduction gearbox.

Henry Mitchell has lived in the house next door to mine all of his 85 years. He keeps an eye on my renovations, and I often pause, hammer in hand, to listen to him describe the way his father built his own house those many years ago. When I return to my previous task—pulling a rusty square spike or dismantling a joint in the heavy timbers—I am more conscious of the building of my house a century and a half ago. I can imagine all the effort, the heading of spike from nail rod, the chiseling of mortise and tenon, the erecting of heavy timbers.

THE JET ENGINES ROAR. THE PILOT AND copilot push the hurtling test vehicle to its limit. Technicians measure the stress on metal parts, the rising temperatures, and the vibrations created by mounting velocity, all the while clocking the speed of the machine. Then the run is over; observers announce that it has set a speed record.

“DOING WHAT COMES ARTIFICIALLY” (by Miles R. McCarry, Summer 1999) brought back old memories and reinforced for me the fact that inventions often find uses far removed from their original purposes. In 1959 the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) sought to develop an easy-open can end to salvage a container development using a composite foil-and-card-board laminated body stock. Conventional can openers would not be useful for the container, which was for frozen orange juice.