OBERLIN, OHIO: Anyone who writes about women inventors must eventually face a stubborn truth: Most of the important things in history were invented by men. Most does not mean all, of course, and several large books have recently been published to catalogue the technological contributions of women. Yet if you listed the 100 most important inventions of all time and the key figures usually associated with each, no more than a small handful would be female.

ON NOVEMBER 7,1940, LEONARD COATSWORTH, A REPORTER FOR the Tacoma News Tribune , earned a small place in history as one of the last people on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. In the four months since its opening, the bouncy bridge had become a bit of a tourist attraction. People came from miles around for the thrill of driving across the galloping span. But Coatsworth was no tourist, just a local toting a earful of beach gear and his daughter’s cocker spaniel.

I ENJOYED “DELIVERING THE FAX,” in the Spring 1999 issue (by George Mannes). If anyone wants to see what fax was like just before World War II, they should watch the 1937 movie Charlie Chan at the Opera , starring Warner Oland and Boris Karloff. In it the suspect’s photograph is transmitted across the country over the telephone lines, and how this is done is shown. The picture is attached to a cylinder that starts rotating.

The Apollo 1 Disaster

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.

IF THINGS GO AS PLANNED , in 1999 the unmanned Lockheed-Martin X-33 rocket, the forerunner of America’s next generation of spaceships, will blast off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and soar up more than fifty miles before gliding unpowered to a soft runway landing.

STANFORD, CALIF. : In connection with this issue’s article on railroads and winter, John H.

JOSHUA HUMPHREYS’S IDEA OF A SUPER -frigate (“Six Ships That Shook the World,” by Roger Archibald, Fall 1997) was indeed a technological breakthrough that shook the naval establishments of Europe. It can also be viewed in terms of another European naval concept.

Six Ships That Shook the World

JOSHUA HUMPHREYS’S IDEA OF A SUPER -frigate (“Six Ships That Shook the World,” by Roger Archibald, Fall 1997) was indeed a technological breakthrough that shook the naval establishments of Europe. It can also be viewed in terms of another European naval concept.

SHORTLY AFTER HIS ELECTION TO THE U.S. SENATE, WARREN G. HARDING boarded a train in Washington, D.C., bound for New York. As Harding relaxed in a first-class club car, a well-dressed stranger approached.

“It’s good to see you again,” the stranger said warmly. The senator feigned familiarity and struck up a conversation. Eventually, joined by two other passengers, they began a game of auction bridge.

War Fare

I WAS SURPRISED THAT IN HER OTHER wise comprehensive history of rations (“Dinner Goes to War,” Summer 1998), Barbara Moran made no mention of the Long Range Patrol (LRP) ration, introduced during the Vietnam War and known to almost every field soldier of the time as “the Lurp.” Packaged in a dark-green foil-lined pouch, it provided a lightweight dehydrated main meal in a plastic bag. Adding hot or cold water resulted in a surprisingly tasty entrée, and it came with a chocolate bar.

THE DOBLE MODEL E RAN LIKE NO other car of the 1920s. It even sounded different. When the driver flipped the starting switch, a distinct whump came from under the hood, followed by a steady, throaty, subdued rumble that suggested great power barely contained. After a short time, two minutes or less, the roar subsided. Then, as it drove away, this huge, powerful automobile made virtually no sound at all beyond the muted, liquid hum of tires on pavement.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I took great pleasure in playing with tin cans from my mother’s kitchen shelves, sometimes gathering a variety of them in the middle of the floor to build ever-taller walls and towers. My earliest constructions may have been inspired by those display stacks in the corner grocery store, where seemingly countless numbers of identical cans of soup or vegetables were arranged like bricks, in staggered rows because the tin cans didn’t nestle bottom into top the way today’s aluminum ones do.

I READ “HOW THE RAILROADS DEFEATED Winter” (by Patrick Allitt, Winter 1998) with much interest but was surprised that the author did not mention the City of San Francisco , which was snowbound at Donner Pass from January 13 to 16, 1952. I was on that train as a young Navy officer headed for San Francisco during the Korean conflict. There were 196 passengers and a crew of 30 aboard while a huge blizzard piled snow higher and higher for about two days of subfreezing temperatures after we stalled.

THE DU PONT GUNPOWDER MILLS WERE ALREADY GRINDING away at six in the morning on April 14, 1847. To fill the rush of orders brought on by the Mexican War, in fact, the works along Delaware’s Brandywine Creek had been busy around the clock. Then, “in an instant, without the slightest warning,” wrote a family member, “there came a shock that seemed so terrific in its nature that I could only compare it to the meeting of heaven and earth.

“NOT A LOT OF THESE PEOPLE EVEN KNOW it’s a steamship,” says Thom Hawley, director of public relations for the 410-foot-long SS Badger , as we walk through her main passenger deck. Around us families are eating dinner from a shipboard cafeteria while somewhere far below them two coal-fired four-cylinder steam engines each twenty feet high and twenty-four feet long propel them and their automobiles through the night.

WINTER WAS AN ANNUAL ORDEAL to Americans in the colonial era and early Republic, especially in the North. Food from the fall harvest had to be husbanded carefully and a large supply of firewood laid in to carry families through the cold months. Heavy snow cut communities off for weeks at a time and forced settlers to rely on their own resources. Isolated farms and villages could do little to help those who fell sick from pneumonia, grippe, scurvy, and other winter illnesses. Work, diet, dress, lighting, and social life all were restricted.

ALTHOUGH IT’S NEVER GOTTEN NEARLY AS much glory, the humble Quonset hut was the architectural equivalent of the jeep in World War II. Like the jeep, it was simple, rugged, versatile, and easy to manufacture; and like the jeep, it was a ubiquitous part of the scenery for American servicemen both during the war and after they got home.

IT’S A WARM, SOFT MAY afternoon in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and on a plank laid across two sawhorses outside his workshop in Chocorua, Geoff Burke, master boatbuilder and connoisseur of edge tools, is lining up his collection of axes for me the way a proud parent might line up his kids for a family portrait. On the far left is the smallest, though not necessarily the youngest, of the crew: a trail ax, really a 1¼-pound hatchet head on a twenty-four-mch handle.

HIS WORK IS PART OF YOUR HOME, FOR he reinvented the light bulb in the form we use to this day. But that was just a start. His light-bulb work led him to vacuum tubes, and he improved the crude ones of his time, allowing colleagues to build the tubes that launched commercial radio broadcasting. Similar tubes produced X rays and brought important advances in medicine. Then, with his research taking wing, Langmuir developed the first techniques for measuring the sizes and shapes of atoms and molecules. He founded a new science, plasma physics.

AFTER CHARLES LINDBERGH FLEW across the Atlantic Ocean alone in 1927, he became such a celebrity that when he developed an interest in the possibility of organ replacement three years later, he was invited to the Rockefeller Institute to work with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate eminent in the field of cell culture. Forty years later Colonel Lindbergh told Dr.