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I WAS ASTOUNDED BY THE PHOTO graph of the Buffalo pumping engines (“They’re Still There: Hidden Treasure,” by Frederick Allen, Summer 1999). I have never before seen a photo of any engine so large. I sure hope the Industrial Heritage Committee can get these things on display, and I also hope they are interviewing anyone who still knows anything about the operation of the engines. I haven’t run across many stationary engineers lately.

MOST PEOPLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA —or eighteenth-century anywhere, for that matter—never saw pictures of themselves, not even once in their lives. Photography lay decades ahead, and only the wealthy could have their portraits painted. Even they usually had no more than one in a lifetime. So when a portrait was made, it was never a simple likeness but rather a lone chance to convey how you wanted to be seen and remembered, and your pose and attire and attitude and surroundings were all very carefully chosen.

YOUR ARTICLE REFERS TO THE COM pany’s “floating power” engine-mounting arrangement. It had one flaw that I, and I’m sure many others, liked to spring on unsuspecting drivers. The gearshift ball on the Chrysler I owned for many years resembled the top half of a billiard ball on a floor-mounted lever. In low gear it almost touched the driver’s right kneecap. I’d invite a friend at the wheel to “check the full-throttle pickup on her”; after that, under power, the gearshift lever would be torqued way to the right.

AS A LIFELONG STEAM-MACHINERY BUFF and engineer, I was delighted to read about the Col. Francis G. Ward Pumping Station, on the Buffalo waterfront. In the early 1960s I visited Buffalo, and it was my luck to learn that early the evening I was there one of the steam engines was going to be put in service. Standing on the balcony next to the enormous machine in the dim light, I was almost hypnotized by those flashing rods and whirling flywheels.

IN THE LATE 1950S JACK KlLBY, AT TEXAS INSTRUMENTS in Dallas, and Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, at Fairchild Semiconductor near San Jose, California, independently came up with ways to cram many tiny transistors and resistors onto a small sliver of silicon. By adding microscopic wires to interconnect groups of adjacent components, they made the first integrated circuits, which are now known informally as chips.

IT MAY BE HARD FOR TODAY’S GENERATION TO BELIEVE , but America’s space program was once the very emblem of high technology. Nowadays the era is rarely invoked except in smirky phrases like “spaceage bachelor-pad music,” and with spacecraft having come to resemble sport-utility vehicles, 23-year-old graphic designers use clip-art images of rockets to convey retro campiness. Even the space suit has an antique air, as science fiction characters now mostly dress as if they belonged in a Shakespeare play.

I HAVEN’T EVEN FINISHED READING LARRY C. Hoffman’s excellent piece on the evolution of rock drilling (“The Rock Drill and Civilization,” Summer 1999), but I’m already thinking of his work as being in the same vein as the wonderful PBS series Out of the Fiery Furnace .

IN 1939 THE LONGEST BATTLE OF WORLD War II, the Battle of the Atlantic, got under way as German U-boats began prowling the seas between the United States and Europe. The battle would last until 1945, and during its early part German U-boats would send Allied ships, and therefore Allied supplies and troops, to the bottom in alarming numbers. The submarines were quick, easy to maneuver, and difficult to detect. The standard convoy proved an easy target, and the Allies realized they would need a new weapon if they were to survive.

“WE’RE ONE OF THE FEW COMPANIES STILL making fabric ribbons,” says Victor Barouh, 72, a wavy-haired man with a pencil-thin mustache. “We must have three or four hundred different spools, so when someone needs a ribbon for an old Addressograph or an Underwood typewriter, we’re the people who can supply it.” We are walking through his cavernous factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

MR. MCCARRY WRITES, “THERE WERE 23,215,000 [cows in America] in 1938. They produced a total of 105,807 million pounds of milk that year. Parallel figures for 1997 are 9,258,000 cows producing 156,602 pounds of milk.” Maybe we should revert to the good old days after all—or insert the word million between “156,602” and “pounds.”

A 62-YEAR-OLD MAN IS WALKING THROUGH a shopping mall, searching for a birthday present for his wife. Suddenly a lightness, a dizziness, fills his head. He quickly sits down, but the sensation doesn’t go away. He feels himself shrinking, like a balloon with the air rapidly escaping. Sounds reach him down an echoing corridor. He slumps to the floor. Before passers-by can react, he is clinically dead: His pulse and breathing have stopped. His brain, starved of oxygen, slips into unconsciousness.

T. A. HEPPENHEIMER’S “How THE Soviets Didn’t Beat Us to the Moon” (Summer 1999) was most informative. You may be interested to know that a remnant of the Soviet Union’s N-1 rocket is still around, and there are plans to use its engines once again.

AS AN ENGINEER AND A LONG-TIME student of industrial history, I found the article about Walter Chrysler (“‘I Like to Build Things,’” by Stephen Fox, Summer 1999) both interesting and informative. However, it failed to mention the importance of Charles W. Nash in his career. Chrysler credited Nash with giving him his start in the automotive industry.

“How do you make paper clips? People wonder about that,” says Charles Frohman. “Most people guess that you pour molten metal into a mold or die. Here’s how we really do it.” Frohman is executive vice president of Labelon/Noesting Company, in Mount Vernon, New York, one of three manufacturers of paper clips in the United States. We’re standing amid a bank of six 50- or 60-year-old machines, each of which is taking galvanized steel wire from a spool, straightening it, folding it, and cutting it into a paper clip.

AT FIRST GLANCE THE KITCHEN AT NATICK Labs looks like that of any cafeteria: oversized ovens, cavernous caldrons, long tables of shiny stainless steel. But a closer look reveals a peculiar—some would say sinister—edge. At 9:00 A.M. most of the monstrous machines stand silent, except for one that rhythmically shoots streams of beige paste into metal tubes, then crimps and caps them and sends them down the conveyer belt.

I peer into the chugging machinery.

“Toothpaste?”

Even after the death of the Model E, a handful of inventors kept pursuing steam-car research, seeking the same advantages that attracted Abner Doble: silence, power, simplicity, fuel efficiency, and low emissions. Their efforts all foundered, not only because of auto-industry indifference but also because of the weight of steam engines and the water they require and drivers’ unwillingness to wait half a minute to get up a head of steam.

SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 12, 1928, a carpenter named Ace Hopewell rode his sputtering motorcycle through the darkness of San Francisquito Canyon, north of Los Angeles. With his headlight sweeping over the rough road, he drove cautiously alongside San Francisquito Creek, past a sleeping settlement around a hydroelectric station, and ascended a grade up the canyon wall. In the darkness ahead a monolith loomed 200 feet above the canyon floor.

I READ WITH MUCH INTEREST KELEY A. Giblin’s article “‘Fire in the Cockpit!’” in the Spring 1998 issue. Generally I believe it rather accurately reflects the consensus and posture at NASA as it has been distilled and is recorded in NASA files and publications. I have been trying for many years to get some modifying and corrective information incorporated into the record, but with only minor success so far.

ARCHEOLOGISTS DISCOVERED SEV eral pairs of modern-looking dice in an ancient Egyptian tomb. The sandstone cubes, which now reside in a Chicago museum, are “loaded” —weighted to favor twos and fives. Larceny, it seems, is as old as the Great Pyramids.

DURING THE PERSIAN GULF WAR, IN 1991, TELEVISION VIEWERS AROUND the world witnessed the new effectiveness of night military operations. Laser-guided missiles methodically destroyed Iraqi targets with near-pinpoint precision as tanks stormed the Kuwaiti desert, overwhelming Saddam Hussein’s Republican Army forces. Although the combat took place in the dead of night, we saw the footage as if it were noon, for the coalition forces and television crews covering the war were equipped with an assortment of devices for seeing in the dark. Gen.