AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED WORLD WAR II, PROFESSOR Grace Hopper joined the Navy. She was too light to get in, missing the minimum weight for her height by 16 pounds, but she received a dispensation. She could have received another dispensation to relieve her from basic training, because the Navy was interested only in using her mind, not in making her into a sailor.

IN THE ANNALS OF GOOD TIMING, THE ELECTRICAL Exhibition of 1898 must surely rank near the top of the list. Predictions of war had been brewing even before February of that year, when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Then, in late April, Commo. George Dewey steamed into the Philippines and routed the Spanish fleet at Manila for the first victory of the Spanish-American War.

FRANCIS ROGALLO WANTED TO FLY, AND LIFE’S FATEFUL twists prevented him from flying in the ordinary way, so he discovered a new manner of flight, one so revolutionary and simple that today more than a million people have tried it. And they have done so without runways, airframes, or big, powerful engines, flying instead by actually attaching wings to their bodies, as Daedalus did in mythology and as Leonardo, da Vinci only dreamed of doing.

KEYPORT, WASH.: In preparing this issue’s article on World War II torpedoes, we received invaluable help from the Naval Undersea Museum, which documents and preserves the history of submarines, torpedoes, mines, and related technologies. Among its holdings the museum has copies of wartime correspondence between Albert Einstein and the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) on ways to improve torpedo design and performance.

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, men walked on the moon. It was the biggest anticlimax of my life. To someone raised on “Star Trek” and “Lost in Space,” it was a huge disappointment to learn that we had just gotten around to something that seemed so basic. I was reminded of this recently when a computer beat Carry Kasparov at chess. Grownups professed shock, but I’ll bet a lot of eightyear-old Webheads were surprised that such an elementary task had taken so long.

A DUMMY IS A STEAM LOCOMOTIVE BOXED UP TO LOOK LIKE A PASSENGER car. This sort of deception seems unnatural for such a direct and upfront machine; most locomotives bristle with bolts, rivets, pipes, and rods. Was it the Victorian preoccupation with decorum that prompted the movement to cover up all those nasty working parts with a pretty wooden enclosure? Were naked locomotives considered indecent? If not indecent, they were viewed as being too raw and brutish for service on city streets.

AT 10:37 ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 9, 1943, LT. COMDR. John A. Scott of the USS Tunny saw a sight that other submarine commanders only dream of. After tracking a radar contact and carefully maneuvering into position, the Tunny was prowling the surface just in front of a major Japanese Navy convoy off the Caroline Islands.

NEXT, LOAD SOME 66-INCH HANDEES AND get them spotted and bored and rolled,” Ken VanTol says to his shop foreman, who replies with a couple of businesslike questions about the job. “Then we need 300 teeth.” VanTol turns to his other workers. “You guys are going to count teeth. And when you’re done, you’ll take your break.”

The Apollo lunar-landing program was the greatest triumph of America’s post-World War II can-do technological spirit. In a series of increasingly ambitious missions, NASA’s engineers and astronauts made the monumental achievement of landing men on the moon seem almost routine. Even when disaster struck Apollo 13 , Mission Control managed to bring its astronauts home safely. The only fatalities in the entire program occurred in its very first mission.

Winter Strikes Back

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.

WHEN THE NUCLEAR-POWERED SUB marine Thresher was launched into New Hampshire’s Piscataqua River on July 9, 1960, she represented the latest in naval technology. The Thresher was the ultimate attack submarine, designed to hunt and destroy enemy vessels. She had a high-speed hull, the most powerful sonar in existence, special silencing features, and advanced weapons.

When Readers Bite Back

HAVING RECENTLY READ WHY THINGS Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , and having assigned the book in my undergraduate course “Society and Technology,” I was delighted to see an interview with its author, Edward Tenner, in the Spring 1997 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology . Because the book leaves the reader with some key ambiguities, I looked to the interview for clarification.

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.

“RIDE THE LOG FLUME!” CRIES THE AMUSEMENT- park advertisement. Climbing into long, narrow boats molded and colored to resemble hollowed-out logs, Americans by the thousand ride these liquid roller coasters every summer, letting the splashing water soak them as they fly downward.

ZOARVILLE, OHIO: The news that America’s last surviving Fink through-truss bridge is in danger has failed, thus far, to electrify the preservationist community.

EVERY AIR TRAVELER HAS SEEN LIGHT WANDS—THOSE glowing Plexiglas rods at the ends of flashlights that guide taxiing airliners—but few realize that they were an important weapon in the Cold War. Fifty years ago an Air Force enlisted man, his name lost to history, developed the wands to communicate through the thick German fog with the planes of the Berlin airlift—that monumental effort to save West Berliners from slipping behind the Iron Curtain.

“WATCH THIS,” SAYS RlCK HANSON. HE STANDS up, holds his laptop in front of him at shoulder level, and lets go. It drops and bangs on the floor of his office, a tidy room in his California home crammed with computers, scanners, printers, fax machines, model-car kits, hot-rod posters, videos, and a small, orderly electronics workbench. The computer bounces and clatters to a rest. Hanson picks it up and switches it on. It is ready to go instantly, without warming up.

IT WAS FITTING THAT Abraham Lincoln, the Illinois rail-splitter, was the President who signed the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered adult white male citizens 160 acres of land west of the Mississippi. Under its terms homesteaders would become owners of their land if they lived on it for five years and made annual improvements, one of the simplest of which was fencing. Following the Civil War thousands of impoverished veterans from both sides rushed to the territories to stake their claims.

WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU WILL HEAR IT—IN MALLS , airports, supermarkets, even over the telephone. Muzak, with 100 million listeners daily and revenues approaching $200 million a year, is the largest radio station in the world.

HARLEY J. EARL WAS NOT THE FIRST CAR STYLIST; HE WAS JUST THE MOST IM portant. Today, 40 years after his retirement from General Motors and thirty years after his death, he remains the pre-eminent figure in the history of automotive design: a legend, a super ego among towering egos, the man who gave structure and order to an industrial art form that didn’t even have a name before he started.